California cleaning
How liberals saved California
It wasn’t Jerry Brown’s austerity that led the fiscal comeback. It was the state’s smart, bold progressive movement.
By David Dayen, Salon.com
Last week, the Atlantic’s James Fallows penned what has almost become its own genre, a glorifying profile of California Gov. Jerry Brown, positioning him as the savior of the Golden State, single-handedly bringing it back from fiscal collapse. Brown, the story goes, stepped away from his “Governor Moonbeam” past and embraced a new practicality. “I find that a lot of people are more invested in position-taking than they are in the inquiry,” Brown says to Fallows, an expression of his philosophy. “Generally speaking, I am in the inquiry.”
It’s a nice sentiment. It’s also wrong. No politician in California is more invested than Brown in taking a very specific position – demanding restraint in allocating post-recession surpluses to attend to human needs. This pro-austerity pose, a defining characteristic of Brown’s entire political career, now threatens the pace of recovery in the nation’s largest state, the perception of the federal healthcare overhaul, and the lives of hundreds of thousands of Californians.
Contrary to the Great Man theory of politics from Brown’s hagiographers, liberal organizations led California’s comeback, by taking away the tools empowering minority Republicans. The initiative allowing Democrats to approve a budget by majority vote passed in 2010, before Brown’s term began. Online voter registration rules and a massive campaign to engage low-frequency voters led to a sweep of the 2012 elections. Democrats passed a sorely needed tax measure to balance the budget, and attained an overwhelming majority in the Legislature. Success has unsurprisingly flowed from the removal of ideological gridlock.
Brown has appointed himself fiscal watchdog for the state, rejecting the restoration of any social services that were savaged by cuts over the past five years. This would be fully understandable if the money didn’t exist. The lack of a printing press means states can only spend what they have. But thanks to the tax measure and an improving economy, California now has a surplus, which has forced Brown to recalibrate. He didn’t recalibrate his message; he recalibrated the nature of the surplus.
(More here.)
It wasn’t Jerry Brown’s austerity that led the fiscal comeback. It was the state’s smart, bold progressive movement.
By David Dayen, Salon.com
Last week, the Atlantic’s James Fallows penned what has almost become its own genre, a glorifying profile of California Gov. Jerry Brown, positioning him as the savior of the Golden State, single-handedly bringing it back from fiscal collapse. Brown, the story goes, stepped away from his “Governor Moonbeam” past and embraced a new practicality. “I find that a lot of people are more invested in position-taking than they are in the inquiry,” Brown says to Fallows, an expression of his philosophy. “Generally speaking, I am in the inquiry.”
It’s a nice sentiment. It’s also wrong. No politician in California is more invested than Brown in taking a very specific position – demanding restraint in allocating post-recession surpluses to attend to human needs. This pro-austerity pose, a defining characteristic of Brown’s entire political career, now threatens the pace of recovery in the nation’s largest state, the perception of the federal healthcare overhaul, and the lives of hundreds of thousands of Californians.
Contrary to the Great Man theory of politics from Brown’s hagiographers, liberal organizations led California’s comeback, by taking away the tools empowering minority Republicans. The initiative allowing Democrats to approve a budget by majority vote passed in 2010, before Brown’s term began. Online voter registration rules and a massive campaign to engage low-frequency voters led to a sweep of the 2012 elections. Democrats passed a sorely needed tax measure to balance the budget, and attained an overwhelming majority in the Legislature. Success has unsurprisingly flowed from the removal of ideological gridlock.
Brown has appointed himself fiscal watchdog for the state, rejecting the restoration of any social services that were savaged by cuts over the past five years. This would be fully understandable if the money didn’t exist. The lack of a printing press means states can only spend what they have. But thanks to the tax measure and an improving economy, California now has a surplus, which has forced Brown to recalibrate. He didn’t recalibrate his message; he recalibrated the nature of the surplus.
(More here.)
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