Schwarzenegger Seeks Deep Cuts in Welfare Handouts

From the Los Angeles Times, "Pockets Empty, Calif Considers Deep Cuts in Spending for the State's Most Vulnerable Residents":

Carolina Fuentes and her daughter Katherine, 5, wait for an appointment at the Sacramento county welfare office in Sacramento, Calif., Monday, June 1, 2009. Facing a $24.3 billion state budget deficit, Gov. Arnold Schwarzengger has proposed ending welfare for poor mothers and their children, wiping out health insurance for 1 million children and disbanding care for people with Alzheimer's disease or other disabilities. Fuentes, 22, a newly-single mother , doesn't qualify for benefits having crossed the U.S.-Mexico border as a teenage, applied for cash assistance, food stamps and health coverage of her daughter.

With empty pockets and maxed-out credit, California is debating whether it can continue honoring all parts of its social contract with the state's most vulnerable residents.

The state faces an unprecedented drop in tax revenue and a widening budget deficit amid the deepest recession in decades, prompting Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to propose cost-cutting steps that once seemed unthinkable.

At stake are programs for the poor, elderly and frail, placing millions of people in the nation's most populous state at risk of falling through a decades-old social safety net.

Ending the welfare-to-work program for mothers and their children would affect some 546,000 families, and health insurance could be eliminated for 1 million children from low-income families. Services for Alzheimer's patients, disabled and other frail recipients of in-home care also would be greatly reduced under the governor's latest budget proposal, leaving more than 400,000 people without such support.

Schwarzenegger acknowledges that his proposals will be painful.

"I know the consequences of those cuts are not just dollars. I see the faces behind those dollars. ... I see the Alzheimer's patients losing some of their in-home support services," he told lawmakers last week. "It's an awful feeling, but we have no choice."

The twists of political logic to this story are unreal: Here you have a Republican governor who came to power with a mandate for reform. Having blown that, he's presided over the worst fiscal collapse in California history: and he's now being forced by his own political opportunism to adopt the kind of cutbacks in government that he should have been seeking all along!

Also interesting about this story: No talk of the teachers unions facing similar draconianism. The poor need some safety net of c,ourse, but they won't have one as long as average teacher salary in California is higher than anywhere else in the nation.

Photo Credit: Associated Press.