Shredded Safety Nets and Sneaky Taxes

For anyone who still needs evidence that California’s government is not up to the Herculean task of fixing the state’s budgetary woes, consider what the Assembly did do on Thursday. It passed a resolution declaring the first week of March “Cuss Free Week.” The Senate will likely do the same. Why doesn’t this bold act instill confidence?

At another time, such silly legislating would be amusing at best, but with every indicator of social well being—health care, employment, education and housing—in a state of crisis, it’s hard to chuckle. While Sacramento’s denizens fiddle with meaningless resolutions, misery is spreading like wildfire to a wider and wider circle of Californians. Safety net programs intended for only the most destitute are fraying under the weight of the newly unemployed and uninsured. Poverty is now a relative term, and woe to the person who disdains “the poor” as undeserving.

A perfect example is a 17-year-old program run by counties to provide health care to the so-called medically indigent—people not eligible for MediCal, but with no means to buy their own health insurance. Called the County Medical Service Program, it is now bursting at the seams with Californians who’ve entered the ranks of the jobless and joined the army of uninsured (see: Indigent Health Care Program Battered by Recession) But counties’ budgets are being decimated and the revenue streams they count on to fund this health service—vehicle registration fees and sales tax—are shrinking. Nobody is buying cars or much of anything else in this economy. Unemployed people also don’t send income tax to the state. It is a vicious cycle that requires bold action and vision, two things that seem to be absent from our elected leaders.

While taxation has become a bludgeon for Republicans and conservatives to attack the idea of big government and Democratic proposals to fund services—like indigent health services--there are many ways that Californians are being taxed without their permission. And the burden isn’t evenly distributed. Oakland’s City Council, for example, has imposed a back-door tax on people who own cars and drive them in the city, although it isn’t called that. What the Council members did was expand parking meter hours in shopping areas, increase fines and rev up enforcement of parking rules in residential neighborhoods. The Chronicle reveals how enforcement of some of these new policies was purposefully lax in affluent neighborhoods and more stringent in lower-income neighborhoods. (see: Oakland parking ticket policy called 'not fair') In essence, East Oakland residents, who are disproportionately black and Latino, were being taxed to fill Oakland’s coffers while Montclair and Broadway Terrace residents were held harmless. There are plenty of other examples of such passive taxes with regressive impacts on those who can least afford.

Taxation has a toxic connotation, especially during an economic recession. But it is difficult to imagine how California will pull itself out of the deficit hole without taxing those individuals and businesses that can, yes, afford it. With public school funding cut to the bone, public colleges and universities cutting enrollments and eliminating classes, public health systems treading water—what is left to cut?