Assembly Speaker Nunez Says State Budget Proposal is "Reminiscent of Pre-post-partisanship Governor" and "Out of Sync" With California Values

After reading this budget, I can only think that the Governor has been ill-advised, just as he was in 2005. This budget is out-of-touch with California values and out of sync with reality.

At a time of record prosperity, it punishes low- and middle-income families that are working hard and playing by the rules. The administration wants to pay off Wall Street early even if it means kids on Main Street have to do without.

I have a real issue with that. The severe cuts that are being made on the one end, early payoff of economic recovery bonds on the other end is not the way to demonstrate the kind of balance that we need to show that we're proud Californians.

One of the reasons voters approved the Economic Recovery Bonds in the first place was to prevent slashing aid to poor kids and the elderly blind and disabled. Making those same severe cuts now just to pay off wealthy Wall Street investors early is nothing more than a bait and switch con game.

There’s a bait and switch on transit funding here, too. You can’t pose for the cover of Newsweek as the savior of global warming one day and then turn around and slash funding for public transit the next. You can’t have a press conference urging commuters to take public transit after a highway collapses one day and then turn around and slash funding for public transit the next.

I don't see a shared sacrifice in this budget. Quite frankly, I want to tell you that with respect to closing the budget gap, this budget does have a $2.2 billion reserve as the Governor says we are paying down debt more so than we really need to. You know he's proposing to sell EdFund to deal with the structural deficit, and the way I look at it, you have the aged, blind, disabled, and the poor that have to be the ones to take it in the shorts once again in order to balance the budget.

I don't think we have the luxury, to be honest with you, to deal with the structural deficit in the way the Governor wants to deal wit it. So what if we have a structural deficit that is a little bit bigger than the $1.1 that was on that nice chart in his presentation. It looks nice to say that we're cutting the deficit, but it's a lot more difficult to say to that poor child whose mother depends upon Cal Works to say, by the way, you're balancing the budget this year so that those graphs can look really nice. I just don't share those values. And I don't think those are values that Californians, and I gotta tell you, there's no shared sacrifice in this budget.

We've seen this before, but we also know what the Governor can do. We know the Governor can do better and we hope the Governor does better. In fact, I'm optimistic that the Governor will do better. I'm optimistic that as we reshape and review this budget and express the values of California in it that are more in line with what the people of this state want, I think and hope that the Governor will embrace those changes.

Another thing I saw is the boutique education programs the Governor, which, maybe Don if you were governor or I was governor we'd probably want to do the same thing and fund private stuff we most like but we just all embrace the adequacy study coming out of Stanford which essentially said don't use categorical funds or create more categorical programs. Let the school districts make the decisions that they need to make in order to determine how to best spend education dollars. Well, this value is clearly not reflected in this budget as well.

We’ve seen this movie before. We know the governor can and will do better. We’ll do our job reviewing and reshaping this budget. And I believe we can still have a budget that is on time and on target for what Californians want their state to be.

But as for today, this is just a bad budget. It’s a bait and switch, and it’s a bad deal for the people of California.”

In answer to a question:

I would take about $1.5 billion of the Governor's debt pay down and use that to fund some of these programs, Don talks about CalWorks. If you look at what a CalWorks recipient earns today, it is equivalent, adjusted for inflation, equivalent to what they would have earned in 1970, and that's just appalling.