I recently asked my friend Angela Oh, defense attorney and Buddhist priest, what she thought about the karma of Jerry Brown. She paused for only a moment. “His karma,” she replied, “is to inherit the collapse of so many institutions his father built.” Infrastructure decay. Traffic congestion and pollution. Water shortages. More prison inmates than state university students.
Since Brown rebelled against his father’s legacy during his “small is beautiful” phase, it’s tempting to accept Oh’s analysis. But there are several differences this time.
First, the booming revenues of Pat Brown’s era aren’t likely to return anytime soon. The current deficit estimates for California run in the $20 billion to $28 billion range, our debt has doubled in seven years and our credit rating is the worst of the heavily populated states. Brown’s old prophecy of a coming “era of limits” has come true.
The second difference is that our productive industrial economy has been either outsourced or automated. Brown’s prophecies of globalization—in which he proposed a “North American Common Market”—have proven true as well. Brown’s central pledge to build a more energy-efficient economy with 500,000 green jobs will be incredibly difficult to fund.
Furthermore, some of the historic state crises are Brown’s own responsibility, not the legacy of his father. Brown’s implementation of Proposition 13 by spending the state’s surplus created an illusion that there was no revenue crisis. And his hard-line anti-crime philosophy, beginning with his support for mandatory minimum sentencing in 1975, eventually resulted in a prison gulag of 150,000 inmates costing more tax dollars than the state university system and five times the state’s budget for the environment and natural resources.
Finally, the state’s financial crisis has been inflamed by Democrats “fascinated by supply-side economics,” according to a leading analyst of the budget in Sacramento. Two-thirds of the structural shortfall is due to tax cuts enacted by the state Legislature during the past 15 years, according to the California Budget Project. Recent corporate tax breaks, the source says, were “largely backed by D’s.” In other words: Brown’s party.
To his credit, Brown has been holding televised teach-ins and town meetings on the budget quandary. At a UCLA forum on Dec. 14, his message that there will be deep cuts proposed in his January budget was consistent with his longtime frugality. But he also wants fairness. Remember, Brown has a Catholic sensibility that frowns on privilege and ostentatious strutting. “Those who are the most privileged have to lead” in cutting back budgets and perks, he said, noting that he was cutting his own office expenditures by 20 percent. A few minutes later, he upped that figure to 25 percent or more. “There are limits to inequality,” he added, because “it tears at the social fabric.”
The language about sacrifice from the top was vintage Brown. His new symbol will have to be something other than the Plymouth, which symbolized the frugality of his first term, and which stopped being assembled in 2001. His choices include the American Chevy Volt for $33,000 with rebates, or the Japanese Nissan Leaf at $25,000. My guess is he goes for Detroit instead of globalization.
In early December, I asked Brown spokesman Steve Glazer when we might hear more about his vague campaign promise to “not raise taxes without a vote of the people.” Glazer said only that Brown’s current plan is to educate the stakeholders on the true magnitude of the budget crisis, and to propose cuts in services in early January. Don’t get ahead of the story, he cautioned.
It was federal military and highway spending, and the government-funded invention of the computer, that spurred Pat Brown’s era of growth. But the prospects of new federal assistance these days are dim, to say the least. On the contrary, California pays far more to the federal government than it receives. In 2005, the most recent year for which there is data, Californians spent nearly $50 billion in “fiscal transfers” to bail out America. The state’s taxpayers pay $15 billion annually for Afghanistan alone, enough to employ 196,000 elementary-school teachers or equip 5 million households with photovoltaic electricity.
It’s possible that Brown will take to blaming Washington’s priorities for California’s ills, but not anytime soon. For now, he wants Californians to see themselves in the mirror.
At some point, Brown could launch a populist campaign against the institutionalized greed and avarice that have ripped open $19 billion in annual tax loopholes from a supplicant Legislature. He could hammer the point that these tax breaks take a majority to pass and two-thirds to ever close. He could point out that tax breaks have a way of becoming permanent, with no review of whether they create economic benefits. He could call for reinstatement of the top income tax bracket under Ronald Reagan, which might net $3 billion to $4 billion annually. He could remind Californians that Proposition 13 was meant for homeowners, not as a bonanza for bank-merger con men and acquisitions manipulators. He could fight to lower the voting requirement for passing school and infrastructure bonds to 55 percent. Such a populist agenda might pass the Legislature and win voter approval where needed.
Or he could get tough with the universities, demanding greater oversight and educating the public on the lavish six-figure administrative salaries and perks while students still struggle to find classes small enough in which to be seen and heard, frequently taught by underpaid and unengaged graduate students serving as cheap labor for the professors. He could appoint regents and trustees who see the world from an undergraduate point of view. Instead, he’s likely to agonize only briefly before he decides on more tuition increases, with no provision for their repeal when the economy improves.
Green jobs and renewable resources are the area where Brown might reappear as a visionary global leader if he begins to solve the budget problem. He will draw on past models of tougher auto emission standards and Silicon Valley’s high-tech industry as examples of “investing in the future.” Brown has been derided by Republicans and the media for 30 years for being ahead of the rest of the country on these issues. One hopes that he expands his current teach-in to examine the costs and benefits of an energy-efficient future as part of an alternative economics that stops treating the environment as a giant storehouse.
Assuming that the governor genuinely believes his call for “shared sacrifice,” he will have to re-examine his role in the mind-boggling prison buildup of the past three decades, which began with his ardent advocacy of mandatory minimum sentences and has led to an overcrowding crisis described by federal courts as “cruel and unusual punishment” in violation of the Eighth Amendment. The current prison budget is at least $10 billion and rapidly rising. The number of inmates has risen since the ’70s from 27,000 to as high as 160,000.
In the past two years alone, 112 inmates in California have died due to lack of medical care, according to the federal courts. That’s one preventable death every eight days. Then there’s an inmate suicide rate that’s twice the national average. How are such deaths tolerable to a governor who opposes the death penalty?
And yet it was Jerry Brown arguing in the U.S. Supreme Court last month against reducing overcrowding in state prisons that have been under a state of emergency since 2006. Well, not exactly Jerry Brown per se. Instead, the Attorney General Jerry Brown hired a $1,100-an-hour Washington lawyer named Carter Phillips to fight the case for him. And this week it was Jerry Brown, as governor-elect, complaining about those intrusive federal judges who “want us to spend more money.”
Perhaps the governor-elect is like many politicians who oppose the death penalty on principle, then compensate to appear “tough” by locking up everyone possible. Brown was also stung badly decades ago when three of his very progressive state Supreme Court appointees were thrown out by California voters. Brown’s karma may be to become the defender of a system where hundreds of inmates die from state negligence. The Supreme Court decision will come sometime in the next six months.
THE SHADOWS of the past hang heavy over Jerry Brown, but he is capable of reflecting and reinventing. He may mimic the Republicans and assuage the elites for a time, but they did not elect him. Quite the reverse: Californians elected Democratic state officeholders and legislators in a sweep this year, while the opposite was occurring everywhere to the east of this state. It would confirm the futility of politics to millions of voters if Brown and the Democrats abandoned their principles to follow a Republican approach in a state where Republicans were repudiated.
That’s not to say that Brown will revert to the Democratic past. He needs to escape the limited box where taxes and spending seem the only tools, but even so, he cannot truly measure the quality of our lives. Here is my suggestion: He should develop a California Quality of Life Index.
Choose 10 (or 20 or 30) quality-of-life measures that already exist. We know, for example, that California stands dead last in the ratio of librarians to students nationwide. We are 23rd in per-pupil spending on public schoolchildren. We are behind only Louisiana and Texas in rates or total numbers of incarcerated people. Add another few categories and include them in an annual address by the governor. Send the Quality of Life Report and recommendations to legislative committees for review and action. This would be a process pushing us toward our chosen ideals. (When I proposed such schemes while I was in the Senate, the proposals were pooh-poohed by the Legislative Analyst’s Office, who asserted that the comparative quality of life could not be measured.)
It’s time for Jerry Brown to begin making our institutions accountable for our quality of life more than our quantity of things. He might reflect on, and share, in some future speech to Californians these words of Robert Kennedy from 1968: “The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”
Tom Hayden is an anti-war activist and former member of the state Legislature. This article appears courtesy a shared effort of California alt-weeklies.
A Not-So-Modest Proposal
As Jerry Brown takes office, two veteran political observers suggest a radical way to undo the damage of Prop. 13: return decision-making to local communities
By Phil Trounstine and Jerry Roberts
THIRTY-TWO YEARS ago, over the strenuous objections from then-Gov. Jerry Brown and nearly every Democratic and Republican official in public life, California voters passed Prop. 13 by a 65 percent to 35 percent margin, slashing property taxes and requiring a two-thirds vote to increase local taxes of virtually any sort.
Brown and the Legislature swiftly rode to the rescue with A.B. 8 and S.B. 154, using the $5 billion state surplus to funnel money back to cities, counties and school districts, which meant voters did not absorb the impact of their decision through the immediate reduction of services.
So the dire consequences that the opponents of Prop. 13 had predicted didn’t happen—at least right away.
As a practical matter, a huge financial burden was shifted from local governments to Sacramento, and the state’s general fund instantly ballooned by 40 percent—from $11.7 billion in 1977–78 to $16.3 billion in 1978–79. As a political matter, Prop. 13 opponents were easily portrayed as Chicken Littles—and conservative advocates were free ever after to peddle the canard that the tax cut had no impact on local services.
While the numbers now seem quaint—in light of general-fund spending plans that soared as high as $103 billion under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger—that 40 percent one-year increase was a financial earthquake that fundamentally transformed the political landscape of California. And while many things have happened in the intervening years—notably the narrow 1988 passage of the Prop. 98 guarantee for funding public schools—the overall mechanism to pay for a huge chunk of the operating cost of California’s cities, counties and school districts has remained a state responsibility.
Cut the Cord
It’s time to cut the cord. Newly seated Gov. Jerry Brown is the guy who’s going to have to do it. If he doesn’t, he will never get California budget back in the black.
The general idea is neither new nor hard to understand. Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg last year proposed a partial plan to “devolve” some services and funds to local governments.
“The only alternative in this difficult fiscal environment is to rethink the roles of government at both the state and local levels and shift programs, along with the dollars to run them, closer to the people served,” Steinberg said at the time. And Gov.-elect Brown echoed the theme in his campaign commercials: “We’ve got to take power from the state capitol and move it down to the local level, closer to the people.”
Strategically, Brown during the campaign pointedly did not explain what that really meant. As we have noted many times, however, the underlying premise of Brown’s idea was that both power and responsibility must transfer to the local level for the idea to work. In Brown’s recent public hearings on the budget mess, it didn’t take long for the fullness of that implication to emerge. As reported from the budget session in Los Angeles:
One dilemma, [Brown] said, was that the state tries to make sense out of competing outlooks from regions that have little in common—an argument, he said, for shifting many of the state’s responsibilities to local governments.
“When we take so many local decisions and put them all at the state capitol, then we have all these different perceptions working on the problem,” he said. “That’s why we get a lot of breakdown and gridlock. Because people see the world differently.”
Based on recent conversations with Steinberg’s staff and Department of Finance types, it’s clear that the transfer of pre– Prop. 13 fiscal responsibilities of cities, counties and school districts back to the locals would account for about 40 percent to 50 percent of the state’s general fund.
What’s also clear is that divesting the responsibility for those programs would require the governor and Legislature, by some to-be-determined process, to also provide cities, counties and school districts the authority to find a way to pay for them, most logically through a majority or 55 percent vote of local voters.
It’s doubtful that Brown or any politician would try to alter the two-thirds requirement to raise residential property taxes, although there might be a move to create a “split roll” under which commercial and industrial properties, which change hands far less often than homes, would be assessed at their fair market value. But other general purposes taxes of all sorts (sales and hotel/motel taxes, or any fees that have been interpreted as taxes for example) might well be subject to a majority or 55 percent vote at the local level.
So if residents of Santa Clara County want a fully staffed sheriff’s department and health services, if San Jose wants cops, libraries and parks, if the San Jose Unified School District wants athletics and music, local residents will have to find the funds to pay for those services, by deciding to raise their own taxes.
No more pass-through state funds, no more hocus-pocus. The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors, the San Jose City Council, the SJUSD Trustees and all of their counterparts in every city and on every school board in the region will face the unenviable challenge of settling the bill left unpaid by the voters in 1978.
Power to the People
Precisely how California gets to this solution is a level of detail best left to Sacramento’s legions of hotly talented legislative architects. In this, we associate ourselves with the famous words of the Babylonian sage Hillel, who said, after declaring the Golden Rule the essence of Jewish law: “The rest is commentary.”
Whatever Gov. Brown lays out for the short-term—budget cuts coupled with an extension of existing tax hikes for two years seems most likely—it will only be a stopgap measure. What’s needed is a wholesale restructuring of the way local government is financed.
The general line for the political movement that would get us there is this: return power to the people. With its echoes of the 1960s, those words might not be exactly the preferred slogan, but the fundamental point is clear: transfer power away from Sacramento hacks and back to local communities.
Of course, the Prop. 13 fetishists will scream to the heavens that the idea of allowing local taxes to be raised with a 50 percent or 55 percent majority (even if such tax hikes are required to include sunset provisions, which help them pass) offends the laws of nature. They’ll call it an unholy attack on the Sacred Cult of Howard Jarvis and predictably go nuts.
Let them. Voters in California trust local decision-makers far more than they do the Legislature, and they deserve the right to choose—by majority vote—whether to hand the power to those local officials to actually govern. Local school board members, city councilmembers and supervisors are far more susceptible at election time to the decisions of grassroots voters than are state lawmakers representing huge far-flung districts.
Local officials with the power to determine levels of service—based on local support—will finally, and properly, have the tools to make some tough decisions about local programs and pensions—while also facing the up-close-and-personal political consequences of making them.
And when the drown-the-baby-in-the-bathtub anti-government types scream about all this, proponents can reply: We’re for democracy and for empowering local government. It’s the other guys who are for keeping all the power up in Sacramento and in smoke-filled back rooms where they have power. We want to return power to the people, to local communities, where you can keep an eye on how money is spent and for what.
A lot has happened in the 32 years since Prop. 13 that will have to be taken into account. The landmark Serrano vs. Priest decision, for example, will require that school districts aren’t wildly underfinanced in one community and lavishly funded in another. Prop. 98 will have to be handled. All kinds of state mandates that don’t include funding will have to be altered. See Hillel: on commentary.
California state government has plenty to do to fund and repair higher education, highways, state parks, state law enforcement, prisons, state courts, environmental protection, natural resources and the like, just as state government did before Prop. 13.
But three decades after the great transfer of power to Sacramento, it’s time to fight for power to local communities, for sanity in government finance and even, we dare say, for democracy.
Phil Trounstine and Jerry Roberts write regularly about California politics at www.calbuzz.com, from which this article was adapted. Trounstine is a former political editor of the San Jose Mercury News, a former communications director for Gov. Gray Davis and a former director of the Survey and Policy Research Institute at San Jose State University. Roberts is the former political editor, editorial page editor and managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and former student publications adviser at UC–Santa Barbara.
