January has come to an end and so has Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger’s honeymoon in office. After basing his entire
campaign during the recall election around California’s
fiscal crisis, his first action as governor was to plunge the state
$4 billion further into debt by eliminating the vehicle license
fee. The result was massive cuts to programs such as University of
California funding. His January budget proposal included an
additional round of $372 million in cuts to the UC for the
2004-2005 fiscal year, on top of the mid-year cuts he made to the
UC back in December of $148 million.
The governor is stepping on UC students, so we students need to
fight back. The recent lawsuit filed by the University of
California Student Association against the governor’s cuts to
the UC is the only real option that we have to overturn this
executive order and repeal the massive budget cuts. Specifically,
the UCSA lawsuit argues that the governor’s unilateral repeal
of the VLF violated two state budget statutes. State law prohibits
repealing the VLF if the lost revenue cannot be supplied from the
state’s general fund and it requires the Legislature’s
approval.
The law basically means that this is a tax that cannot be
eliminated if the only way to cover the shortfall is to cut funding
to other programs. The bottom line is, the governor overstepped his
bounds when he declared emergency powers to bypass the California
Legislature to implement these massive cuts to the UC budget. This
is an important issue that deserves to be heard in a courtroom.
There is nothing frivolous about an issue that deeply affects every
Californian.
His actions reek of authoritarianism. Not only did he make the
massive cuts unilaterally without the approval of the Legislature,
but he also specifically targeted the cuts toward UC programs to
which he is politically opposed. For example, Schwarzenegger cut
$33.3 million from UC minority and low-income student outreach
programs, and he completely wiped out funding for UC labor research
institutes. Notice how the parts of the UC that are in line with
his ideologies ““ like the business schools ““ dodged
these budget decapitations.
His campaign against the VLF was also disingenuous. During his
State of the State address, he called the fee
“illegal,” which by all accounts is a completely false
statement. Additionally, when the fee was first enacted it was set
at 2 percent. During the economic boom of the late ’90s, it
was reduced to 0.66 percent in 1998 because the state didn’t
need the revenue anymore.
However, the legislature specifically stated when it reduced the
fee in 1998 that the fee would have to be increased back to its
original 2 percent level if the state ran short of revenue in the
future. Obviously, the state is running short of revenue right now
““ so the fee deserves to stay in place at 2 percent.
What’s become clear over the last two months is that the
governor’s campaign pledge to cut wasteful and inefficient
spending was a sham. The programs that are getting cut are
efficient and effective programs that are doing a lot of good for
Californians.
In fact, California’s government is the second most
efficient in the country. According to the Center for the
Continuing Study of the California Economy, California ranked 44th
in the nation in 2001 for the lowest number of state employees per
10,000 people. Indeed, after the completion of its first phase, the
governor’s independent audit of California’s government
did not find any waste.
The source of the budget crisis is the economic recession that
was led by the burst of the dot-com bubble. After the economy
crashed, the amount of money collected by the state government from
taxes drastically declined. The real cause of the budget crisis was
inefficiencies in the market economy, not the government.
Schwarzenegger commission can look as hard as they want but they
simply are not going to come up with anything productive enough to
replace the $4 billion of revenue that was lost when he cut the
VLF.
UCSA is standing up for our rights and we should give them our
support and respect in their legal battle against the
governator.
Bitondo is a third-year political science and history
student. E-mail him at mbitondo@media.ucla.edu. Send general
comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.