Mr. Spirit,
I decided to give you the courtesy of an answer to the specific point you raised.
You said: "It's well known that the GOP state senators want to cut kindergarden for poor kids. Arnold say he wont. So what will he cut? What's left to cut? 90% of spending is mandatory and Davis has already cut a lot."
Let's talk about state spending for kindergarten for a minute. In fact, since most of us need more than kindergarten to succeed in life, let's talk about the line items in the California budget for K-12 education. Conveniently, those are broken out into a separate section in the budget document I cited earlier:
lao.ca.gov
In this document, first go to the upper left hand corner and click "all" for "Type of Fund". This will give you all categories of California state spending for the past ten years (including projections for the current budget year). Then scroll down about two thirds the way to category 6500, "K-12 Education". For your convenience, here are the year by year totals for California state spending on K-12 Education:
1994-95: $18.1 Billion
1995-96: $21.9 Billion
1996-97: $23.4 Billion
1997-98: $25.6 Billion
1998-99: $28.9 Billion
(Gray Davis elected)
1999-00: $33.4 Billion
2000-01: $36.8 Billion
2001-02: $35.9 Billion
2002-03: $44.2 Billion
2003-04: $39.7 Billion (projected)
So, the draconian cut of "kindergarten for poor kids" (cue violins, everybody loves poor kids) reduced the current year's spending so that it is only $3.8 Billion higher than it was two years ago (an increase of more than 10 percent).
Put another way, after Davis cut even "vital" amounts for K-12 education in California, the level of state spending for education is 37.4 percent higher than it was when Davis took office just five years ago. The rate of inflation for that period is (as mentioned in my earlier post) less than 14 percent. And, under the previous Republican governor, funding for K-12 education was not cut; it increased by about ten billion dollars in the previous five years (more than 50 percent).
So Davis took something the state had already chosen to spend 50 percent more for in a short period of time ($18.1 Billion to $28.9 Billion from 1994 to 1999 under a presumably kindergarten hating Republican governor), and he increased it by more than 50 percent more in the next four years.
THEN, he subjected the poor children of California to an awful, crushing blow: he "cuts" funding for their schools to a level "only" 120 percent higher than it was nine years earlier. And you chime in that Arnold can't cut anything without cutting kindergarten for poor kids. Did California not have kindergarten in 1994 when it spent less than half as much as it does now for public K-12 education?
The more I look at the numbers the more I believe that Arnold's job may not be so hard after all. |
