They won the battle, but will they win the war?
Crisis messaging is seen by some as yielding only “Band-Aid solutions.” According to Vanessa Aramayo, the director of California Partnership, a statewide coalition of community-based groups that advocates for programs aimed at reducing and ending poverty (and another partner in Reclaim California’s Future), “Prop 30 is a step in the right direction, but that’s all it really is. It’s a step…California has a serious revenue problem, and that is something that the legislature and the governor still haven’t addressed. We don’t have a spending problem. We have cut our way out of [budget deficits] for years. What we really need to focus on is…’how do we raise the revenues that are needed to sustain the programs that we want?’”
Needs still unmet
Aramayo told Remapping Debate that many of California’s public services remain dangerously underfunded, even after the passage of Prop 30. Health and Human Services is particularly underfunded and has seen dramatic cuts in the last six years, she said. “We’ve seen about $8 billion in cuts so far over the years, and none of those programs have been restored.”
Aramayo emphasized that the programs that have been cut most severely are those that have a direct impact on the state’s most vulnerable citizens: “We’re talking about in-home support services for disabled persons and the elderly. We’re talking about childcare for single parents who need assistance to be able to go to work…[about people] that are completely paralyzed from the neck down that require 10 to 12 hours of assistance at home, and that’s been cut to six hours.”
Aramayo believes that restoring funding to schools was an important first step, but that the ultimate goal should be “rebuilding a California that is successful for all of us. A California where we all don’t just have enough to survive, but a California where we all have enough to thrive…At the end of the day, our kids don’t live in schools. To truly help families become successful and to really get California back on track, we need to look at [repairing] the safety net.” She noted that, by providing a dedicated source of revenue for education, Prop 30 freed up some money in California’s general fund that could go toward restoring these cuts, but asserted that more is still needed.
Dim prospects for additional revenue
It seems unlikely that California Democrats will take advantage of the momentum behind Prop 30 to raise more revenue. Since the passage of Prop 30, Governor Brown has reaffirmed his campaign promise that “the only way to raise a tax is to ask the people.” But Willie Pelote, a senior political and legislative director of the California branch of AFSCME International, warned that voters are unlikely to approve another ballot measure for a general tax hike anytime soon. In doing so, he underlined the problem with selling a ballot measure as a response to an unusual and extreme crisis: “You can’t go to that well but once in a while,” he told Remapping Debate. Prop 30 advocates largely agree it will now be the responsibility of elected officials to complete the restoration of California’s government begun by Prop 30. “I think much of that…is going to have to happen without statewide votes of the people,” said Newman. “There’s plenty that elected officials [can] do without having to lead initiative campaigns.”
Nevertheless, Newman believes that a general tax increase passed by the legislature is unlikely. He told Remapping Debate that despite a Democratic supermajority in both houses of the legislature (the first since 1933), “It’s not as if every state senator and state assembly member with a ‘D’ next to their name are all universally in favor of more taxes. It’s a pretty diverse group…I don’t see them passing any tax hikes anytime soon.”
Advocates for more revenue are also skeptical that the legislature will raise taxes on its own, but they remain hopeful that they can persuade legislators to act by maintaining the organization and enthusiasm created during the Prop 30 campaign. “Whether [the supermajority] translates into action around [taxes] without holding legislators’ feet to the fire, I’m dubious,” said Fred Glass, communications director for the California Federation of Teachers. “I think we need to stay out there in the streets and be visible, and remind people that this isn’t the end. This is a way-station.”
Can tax increases be sold differently?
A key feature of any successful future push — in California or elsewhere — for further revenue, progressives agree, will be the use of aspirational messaging of the type deployed by Reclaim California’s Future in the “parallel campaign” that supported Prop 30. “Lifting up the value of government and its connection to our lives is critical to changing peoples’ perceptions about the role of government and taxes,” said Smith, and changing those perceptions is essential to rallying long-term support for progressive reform.
Asked for an example of aspirational messaging, Smith cited the emphasis by California Calls on what she called the “California Dream” narrative. “The California Dream was built on a system of public schools and colleges that gave every Californian access to the education needed to get ahead,” Smith told Remapping Debate. Systemic underfunding has put the California Dream in danger, the campaign argued, but Prop 30 was a “first step to re-investing in the future and restoring that Dream.”
Contrasting California’s present with its past is also effective, according to Aramayo. “There was a time when going to a Cal State or a [University of California school] was extremely affordable for a working family,” she said. “When we start to talk about where we were and where we are now, people start to get a vision of where we want to go back to…We want to go back to a California that really had its values at its core and didn’t take and continue to take from the poorest and the most vulnerable in the state.”