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From Director of Public Policy Elizabeth Sholes:
February 24, 2011
Dear Friends:
One of my favorite books is Robert Fulgham’s “All I
Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.”
The top six directives are so clear:
Share everything. Play fair. Don’t hit people. Put
things back where you found them. Clean up your own mess. Don’t take things
that aren’t yours. Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.
In this current budget crisis at the state and
federal levels, when did it become a “solution” to target people who did not make the mess? Across the nation
faith leaders are pointing out that budget “solutions” fall almost entirely
upon those hanging by a thread due to the economy and the public sector
employees who serve us all. That’s not “sharing everything” and not “cleaning
up your own mess.”
Here are the new villains: undocumented immigrants;
welfare “cheats and chiselers” (the mythic Welfare Queen is back); the
unemployed; public employees.
Suddenly we are blaming our neighbors? The poor? Our
elders? What happened to blaming rapacious Wall Street greed? Thoughtless
corporate tax breaks? Disinterest in hiring to the tune of over $1 trillion in
corporate reserves unspent on employment?
We are unaware how a person with disabilities or a
mother seeking to get off welfare has bankrupted our state or nation.
Faith in Public Life that publishes stories concerning religion and religious attitudes
today reprinted the response of many faith organizations to this new “budget
solution” that cuts programs for those in peril far more deeply than any other.
http://www.ethicsdaily.com/budget-cuts-target-the-poor-faith-groups-say-cms-17499
Our work is to speak out on justice. Charity is not
only in short supply as donations dwindle thanks to the economy, it also does
not offer the justice that social programs must and can. It is unjust to remand
people who are hungry and cold to charity when most churches can barely tend
the needs of their own members. Charity does not guarantee someone their basic
needs if the food panty is empty, the overnight space is all filled, the money
is gone, and there remains nothing to give. Justice must alleviate the want
when the private realm does not, will not, cannot take care of our people.
The budget crisis in California is no different.
The primary cause of our state budget crisis is the
loss of tax revenue. It is compounded by the demands we, the voters, have made
for decades insisting on either guaranteed revenue (education), on wants we did
not pay for (programs and bonds with no revenue streams), or “solutions” with
no foresight (every draconian criminal justice law that locks more people up
for longer times.)
The causes do not lie in public employees who earn
about the state average and whose pensions are paid from the Public Employee
Retirement Systems not from tax dollars. It is not people needing public
support whose programs have been cut and cut and cut over the past eight years.
It is not immigrants who get no social services at all -- unless you count
emergency medical care for which the alternative may be death. It is not those
on In Home Supportive Services or those providing such care.
Eighty percent of our budget spending is tied up by
our own demands for which we refuse to pay. Significant revenue losses have
come from tax breaks to the rich (1998) and to corporations (several over the
years.) For a detailed but easy to understand look at the budget, go to the
California Budget Project’s annual chartbook at:
http://www.cbp.org/publications/state_budget_land.html
You can download the PDF file and see what we spend,
where we spend, how much revenue we’ve lost over the years, and how spending
overall has dwindled, not grown.
We get routine calls about saving some program or
other. Our reply is that to do this -- from our communities of faith in
particular -- is to implicitly trade one program for another, often those
benefiting the same person.
We need a budget that is fair for all people, and we
need to keep our commitments to those whom the private sector cannot help or
whom they have abandoned.
You do not solve an economic crisis by reducing the
numbers of people who can and do spend money locally. You do not support
communities and small business by cutting working people’s incomes so there is
nothing left to feed into the local economy.
You do not sacrifice anyone -- the poor, the public
workers, the general public -- to protect those who have already received
generous tax breaks, incentive payouts, and other taxpayer funded supports. Government
is a responsibility from us all to us all. We need revenues not just cuts, and it is
legislators’ obligations to find them.
Our message to our
legislators: you do not solve the budget crisis by decimating the
income of those who did not cause it. That is a tax on working people and the
poor. They have already sacrificed -- cuts to social programs have occurred
annually, and public employees have already given up over 15% of their pay.
Retirees draw nothing from the General Fund. Making them all the “cash cows” to
support this budget is shameful and immoral. Raise the revenues needed. It is
the moral imperative that guides a just and fair solution.
To contact your specific legislators, go to the
IMPACT pages at:
http://capwiz.com/cachurches/home/
Put in your
address and ZIP, and it will take you to your own Assembly and Senate as well
as federal elected officials. You may send an email, FAX, or phone to let them
know that a cuts only budget does violence to those who did NOT make this
problem. A moral and just budget requires income, and they were elected to find
that solution.
Thank you!
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