[quote author="no_vaseline" date=1234602681][quote author="waiting2buylater" date=1234599918][quote author="no_vaseline" date=1234519937]
Myth. The "piles of excessive government waste" don't exist. 85% of the budget is used in prisons, schools, and medical.
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<blockquote></blockquote>the voters of California have demanded far too many services and paid too little in taxes for too long.<blockquote></blockquote>
No_vas, these were some of your comments. I was looking for the sarcasm off in your emails but didn't find it.
"85% of the budget is used in prisons, schools and medical". Yes, that's where the bloated salaries/retirement packages for prison guards, teachers, administrators reside plus the fraud in the medicare system. CA is one of the highest taxed states and we have terrible prisons, terrible schools and terrible medical services to show for. Texas has similar demographics and it's citizens pay about 50% less taxes than Californians. That alone should prove to you that this state is run by a bunch of incompetence and spineless morons, being controlled by the powerful unions.
The budget doubled in the last 10 years (almost tripled if you count the deficit), way exceeding population growth. Who are you trying to kidding with your comments above?</blockquote>
No sarcasm. You are living in denial of reality. Which makes you pretty standard for a California voter, or you have been listening to Jon and Ken and drinking thier koolaid. The piles of government waste don't exist. Pete Wilson took care of them a long time ago.
The MediCAL system is near colapse because doctor reimbursements have been slashed and will likely get worse.
<a href="http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20090203/REG/302039970">http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20090203/REG/302039970</a>
<blockquote>A coalition of California hospitals, healthcare associations, pharmacies and Medicaid recipients has filed suit in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles to block the 5% cut in Medicaid rates that is scheduled to go into effect March 1.</blockquote>
Those "overpaid prison guards"? They are babysitting roughly double the population the facilities were designed for. If you look at it that way, we are getting a huge discount. Last Monday the Feds gave notice to expand bedspace or dump 60,000 prisioners.
<a href="http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/comments_blog/2009/02/federal-judges.html">http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/comments_blog/2009/02/federal-judges.html</a>
Your comments on teachers show you to be totally detached from reality.
I don't care if they close schools, shut down all the prisons, stop mental health care and disabilty payments for the disabled. We can shut down all the rest homes. We can radically increase taxes on, well, somebody. I frankly don't give a shit which we choose. But we have to do something.</blockquote>
Yes, "overpaid prison guards". Here is an excerp from from the a 2007 Sacramento Bee's article:
<em>The average annual cost of housing an inmate in the California prison system has more than doubled over the past decade to $43,287 a year, according to figures by the Legislative Analyst's Office.
Most of the increase is due to rising labor costs, but health- care expenditures resulting from federal court orders in Sacramento and San Francisco have more than tripled in the 10-year period and figured significantly into the increase, the LAO reported. "A little bit of it is due to the growth in the inmate population, but that's a relatively small share," said Brian Brown, the author of the LAO's criminal justice report that contained the cost figures. "The bigger portion has to do with the combination of the increases in salary for the correctional officers, who make up the bulk of the prison staff, and all the increases related to health care services for inmates."
The $43,287-per-inmate price tag exceeds the $34,000 average cost that corrections officials were quoting as recently as late last year. It also represents a better than 100 percent increase over the $21,000 average the state used to spend on inmates in 1997.
Security costs, most of which are dedicated to labor, account for $19,561 of the current total, which compares to a figure of about $9,600 a decade ago, Brown said. Inmate health care, meanwhile, now costs $9,330 per prisoner. In 1997, it added up to about $2,500 per inmate, according to Brown.
Favorable contracts won by the California Correctional Peace Officers Association in the past decade have pushed the security cost upward. Rank-and-file correctional officers in the state now earn a top-scale salary of more than $73,000 a year, plus benefits.</em>
Of course we are in 2009 so it's even more costly. Most guards who might just have a high school diploma make over $100,000 due to overtime with their generous holidays and leave policy on top of their generous benefits and pension package.
No-vas, you wrote above that people like me are totally detached from reality. It's people like you who put their head in the sand, send out a few chosen links to support their position, who act like they are superior to those disagreeing with them; those are the ones totally detached from reality.
Reasonable people would look at the broken system and see that the root cause is in an overspending legislature continuing to add governmental programs that we can't afford and dole out generous benefit packages to the unions who dished out political donations.
I agree with you that we have to do something but that something is to cut cost from a bloated and wasteful system, not from adding taxes on the working class who are paying one of the highest tax burden in the nation. I am willing to pay my fair share of additional taxes but only when I can see real progress in improving this broken state government.
