The following comes from a June 10 release from the California Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Late Thursday afternoon, a budget deal was announced that repeals the Maximum Family Grant (MFG) rule, provides additional funding for naturalization and other immigration services and funds teacher empowerment and recruitment items as well as additional early childhood education.
Authorization to purchase lethal drugs for Medi-Cal patients, while receiving no support from Assembly budget negotiators, is still apparently included albeit at a reduced rate as the program is “phased in.” Fortunately, funding for an assisted-suicide “hotline” was not included in the final budget.
Also missing is discussion on the future for the Earned Income Tax Credit, the bipartisan effort that has been shown to be one of the most effective tools in the arsenal fighting poverty.
Support from Catholic Legislative Network members helped turn the corner on repeal of the MFG Rule – a multi-year effort involving a diverse coalition of supports.
California has been one of the few states to retain this misguided regulation that said that any child born into a household while another family member received aid would not get any assistance. Research has shown this rule to be harmful and that it may lead to more abortions as mothers suffer the financial strains of raising families. (Read the Catholic Advocacy Day backgrounder.)
Member support also was instrumental in securing an additional $5 million on top of the $10 million already in the budget to support naturalization funding and the assistance programs known as Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA). The additional funding will help secure a strong investment in One California.
The budget advances two of our top education priorities on the strengthening the teaching profession and access to high quality early childhood education. Opportunities to offer four‑year integrated teacher credential programs have been created and the California Center on Teaching Careers was re-established. Transitional Kindergarten was preserved, which the Governor had proposed eliminating, and early childhood funding will grow by nearly $500 million to add 8,877 additional slots to full-day State Preschool over four years.
Subsidized housing programs and housing for the mentally ill, too, received a boost when lawmakers agreed with the Governor to set aside additional rainy day reserve funding.
Lawmakers and the Governor face a June 15 deadline to complete the budget. They have been in negotiations all week but the deal was not announced until just a short time before legislators began voting on its component bill.
Not all details are known yet – there are still some questions. Those will be revealed as the Senate and Assembly vote on a series of ‘trailer bills’ that formalize their negotiations.
Now if the bishops of California would preach the Catholic faith more ardently and spend less time wrangling with the leftists in the state government over how many millions to allocate to entitlement programs, perhaps the Church in California would be in better shape. If they would call out Catholic politicians who support grave evils and direct that those politicians are not to present themselves for Communion, perhaps the Catholics in the pews would realize the gravity of supporting and committing intrinsic evils. No need for an expensive legislative analysis staff at the California Catholic Conference: just preach the Catholic Faith, bishops!
My ancestors immigrated legally here from Germany, without the aid of one penny from the American government. In 1966 my German aunt wanted to live here, and my parents had to sign a document that they would cover all her expenses in case of an accident or if she committed a crime. The Church can help legal immigrants but it is not the duty of the government to dole them out.
The California bishops, many of whom are effectively self-satisfied socialists bent on wealth redistribution, have no love for the working taxpaying citizen or legal resident. They choose to overlook that a minimum of 34% of this years’ budget, which has increased over 15% from the prior fiscal year, will be spent on health services (their pet advocacy item), mostly for the non-taxpaying class.
They also overlook that the state debt, aside from this year’s projected annual deficit of about $26 billion, is $778 BILLION—almost a trillion $$, and that excludes the unfunded pension liabilities which are at least another trillion $$ (and probably several x’s that amount):
https://watchdog…
source:
https://watchdog.org/215668/california-pensions-crippling-burden/
The numbers are actually so unfathomable, even tho’ tax collections are presently at an all-time high, they do not explain how they will cover these short-falls in the future. In other words, Venezuela. That is what happens when the checks start bouncing.
Your source says nothing that I can find about an “annual deficit of about $26 billion” and it says that the state debt is $340 billion, less than half the number you claim. It goes on to talk about pension liabilities, which it calls “unfunded”, though I think that is quite misleading, and says CA has $754 billion in unfunded liabilities.
I say that the term “unfunded” is misleading because it is only unfunded if the projections for performance of the stock and bond markets turn out to be radically incorrect. My retirement is part of those unfunded liabilities. It is true they are counting on a certain level of stock market performance (dividends and cap gains) to be able to pay me when I reach retirement age.
State Budget Solutions, a non-profit organization, calculated a total California state debt outstanding as of Jan 2014 in the amount of $778 BILLION. (see section “State Debt”) State Budget Solutions is more reliable as a source since the state controller’s office chronically underreports the real debt burden:
https://ballotpedia.org/California_state_budget_and_finances
And actually the $26 Billion estimated annual deficit is a low figure: According to the Wall Street Journal, for the end of 2015:, “As a result, California ended the year $175 billion in debt, up from $119 billion the prior year.” That is a $66 BILLION annual deficit shortfall:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/californias-state-pension-obligations-are-larger-than-previously-estimated-1458351309
As for “unfunded liabilities”, that is a laugher to call the term misleading: that is the official term that the [hardly politically-conservative] Public Policy Institute of California uses to warn of ANNUAL pension shortfalls (for FY 2013 in this case) of $62 BILLION and $74 BILLION in CALPERS (state pension personnel retirement program) and the CALSTRS (state teacher’s pension fund):
https://www.ppic.org/main/publication_show.asp?i=1157
But the real estimate of unfunded pension liability, and that is the correct accounting term, is close to $1 TRILLION (or more) according to Dr. Joe Nation, professor of public policy at Stanford U and director of the research for PensionTracker.org.
“All told, California’s public pension systems are $281.5 billion short, including pension bond debt. Through Nation’s lens, they’re nearly $1 trillion in the hole – or $946.4 billion.”
https://www.ocregister.com/articles/pension-716785-public-nation.html
Now all New Church Catholics proudly in support of the Bishop Blaire/Abp. Gomez wing of the California Bishops’ Conference are free to keep their eyes wide shut: but the future is already present in Detroit and coming…
Where the state budget $$ go to:
https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/California_state_spending_pie_chart
How can the Catholic bishops be happy with the majority —Democrat Party–legislators who just gave us physician assisted suicide and continue to give us coerced taxpayer funded killing of unborn babies?
Only the most deranged people could be happy under these circumstances.
Do they give special recognition to Ned Dolesji, head of the bishops’ lobby, for orchestrating such an immense betrayal of our Catholic faith?
The Government is my shepherd; I shall not waaaa……
Also, “Baaa! Baaa! Baaa!”
Happy little sheep.
In the photo, are the Bishops ashamed of their pectoral crosses?
Gratias, it has been traditional for as long as I can remember for Bishops to put the cross in a shirt pocket or more commonly in the inside pocket of their jackets..They almost never wear it hanging out. I know that doesn’t answer your question, but …
The key thing to remember here is that—besides at least a conservatively estimated total debt load of AT LEAST $340 or so BILLION, and growing, there is a separate CA pension liability to pay, as Dr. Joe Nation at Stanford U. describes, of a taxpayer burden of $1 TRILLION to fund—even tho’ tax collections are at an all time high: cf. PensionTracker.org.
“All told, California’s public pension systems are $281.5 billion short, including pension bond debt. Through Nation’s lens, they’re nearly $1 trillion in the hole – or $946.4 billion.”
https://www.ocregister.com/articles/pension-716785-public-nation.html
The CA pro-redistributionist bishops (not all of them), like the politicos whom they closely emulate, are being…
.. irresponsible now, but will be responsible in 5-7 years for the coming CA bankruptcy. Come it will: Detroit, Venezuela, soon Chicago and the entire state of Illinois.
And you thought it couldn’t happen here.
If the bishops are happy with the state budget, that’s a bad sign …
Incredible that once again the bishops embrace feel-goodism in this ridiculous overspending bloated budget because it might throw a few pennies at various social problems in California. At the same time, it will more rapidly bring the entire state crashing down, not only on the heads of the recipients of govt cash, but on all the families and others who produced all that wasted wealth.
Good job guys! How ’bout some basic economics courses in the seminaries?