Democrats’ Budget Priorities Reflect California Values

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

In this week’s Democratic weekly radio address, Assemblymembers Noreen Evans (D-Santa Rosa) and Alberto Torrico (D-Fremont) emphasize Assembly Democrats’ core values and Republicans refusal to be fiscally responsible in the debate over balancing California’s state budget.

You may listen in English or Spanish. The transcript is below.

Hello, this is Assemblymember Noreen Evans, Chair of the Assembly Democratic Caucus.

The art of budgeting is all about setting priorities and making sure the budget funds those priorities. This week Assembly Democrats met for our annual policy summit to set our legislative priorities and to address California’s $14 billion budget deficit.

In order to evaluate possible solutions to the budget deficit, it’s important to first understand how we got here. Only a few short years ago, when Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was first elected, he promised to cut up California’s credit card and slash the vehicle license fee.

The Governor kept one of those promises: He indeed slashed the vehicle license fee – this alone will cost the state $6.1 billion next year.

But he failed to cut up the credit card. Soon after entering office, the Governor proposed to balance the state’s budget with a $15 billion debt bond, which voters approved in 2004. Just paying the interest on this debt bond will cost the state $3 billion next year.

These two actions have contributed a combined $9 billion to our current budget crisis.

Of course, unfunded federal mandates, ballot box budgeting, increased demand for State services, and a declining economy are all an important part of the fiscal story as well. You can find out more about California’s budget crisis by logging onto our website.

But with California deep in the red, the Governor and legislative Republicans have proposed very few practical solutions that Californians can support. In fact, they have proposed only that we make more and more deep cuts into valued public services like education, health care, public safety and public parks.