Thousands of students and faculty around the state participated today in a protest against budget cuts and fee hikes from the University of California. The University system is facing a budget shortfall due in part to an appropriation from the state government that was $813 million smaller compared to last year.. To offset the shortfall, faculty face layoffs and pay cuts and student tuition fees for Fall 2010 would surpass the $10,000 mark.
Many people carrying signs that read “Cut from the top” were gunning for UC President Mark Yudof and the growing number of well paid administrators. The justifiable reasoning being that if someone who makes $40,000 a year is expected to get by with less, then surely someone raking in six figures can too.
Attacking fat cats is always a popular route when faced with the kind of problems many Californians confronted today. Surely rich administrators can shoulder some of the burden to help students who are taking on an increasing amount of debt to pay for school and faculty who push aside more lucrative careers elsewhere to promote the goals of public education. Unfortunately, cutting the richest people’s salary does nothing to solve the problem. This is not the first budget crisis faced by the state or the university and it surely will not be the last. In 2000, student fees at UC stood at $3400. Along the way, if another group of students had fought to slash administrator’s salaries it would have momentarily saved them some cash. But once that reservoir of funds is tapped it only becomes a matter of time before fee hikes are back on the table.
Others blasted the California government for failing to adequately fund the state’s public educational system, especially while funding for prisons and all sorts of other items have ballooned. Proposition 13 which places a limit on the property tax rate (eliminating a major source of public education’s funding prior to 1978) and a 1933 constitutional amendment which requires a two-thirds vote to pass the state’s budget (preventing the chances of tax increases to adequately fund things like public education) were also popular targets throughout the day. The politicians in Sacramento play a significantly larger role in affecting how much money will become available for public education. By spending on new projects without providing a sustainable way of funding them, Sacramento is forced to repeatedly take away money from the basics of government, things like schools, police, and roads.
For another source of the budget problems we always seem to be facing we need only look at ourselves. California voters authorized the state to purchase $12 billion worth of bonds in 2008, and $43 billion in 2006 (you can find more examples from the ballot results back to 1998 at SmartVoter). Bonds are a way of paying for short term projects by projecting the costs, with interest, onto the future. Since the state fails time and again to secure funding for many things, bonds are an attractive option for getting what we want. Without a doubt, the bonds are supposed to be funding important projects like school construction and disaster preparedness, but there needs to be greater emphasis on making sure that money comes from today’s revenues and not tomorrow’s future. The prospects for achieving this are diminishing due to voters’ regular rejection of most tax propositions (though there are few that make the ballot to begin with). In 2006 a cigarette tax and a $50 property tax were defeated. In that same year a tax on personal income over $400,000 for a preschool program was rejected. The magic number to pass a tax seems to be seven figures, as illustrated by Proposition 63 (2004) which added a 1% tax to people earning more than $1 million a year to fund mental health services.
The road to where we are now was filled with road blocks that people chose to plow through rather than consider the best way of moving them. Now we have a clunker of a state that looks like could give in at any time. Fixing the state to ensure things like public education are available 20 years from now will require more than quick fix solutions. It will demand leaders who have the guts to make the hard decisions to fix the state’s economy. Higher taxes AND reduced spending can be postponed for a while but the edge of the cliff is somewhere out there, and it’s probably not too far away either.
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News from around the state
President Mark Yudof addresses why cuts and fee hikes are necessary to ensure the quality and accessibility of UC.
Coverage from the UC Berkeley protest, the largest demonstration of the day.
Gubernatorial hopeful Gavin Newsom discusses how the state’s priorities have shifted in the wrong direction.
Video from today’s protest in Berkeley:
