The Poverty of Our Political Imagination Enabled San Diego's Budget Crisis

...a lack of political courage to stand up to corporate interests has led to our current budgetary dead end.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss? 

In San Diego, that sure seems to be the case if you are on the wrong side of local budget cuts. Despite the sea change we have seen in San Diego politics with Democratic dominance replacing the Republican hegemony of old, the poor and communities of color continue to get the short end of the stick. 

As the San Diego Union Tribune recently reported, an independent analysis of Mayor Todd Gloria’s budget proposal showed that:

Nearly $40 million of the $100 million in budget cuts San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria is proposing would damage recent city efforts to boost low-income neighborhoods and communities of color, a new report says.

The 241-page report from the city’s independent budget analyst is giving new momentum to demands from community leaders and some City Council members that Gloria reverse many of the cuts.

Critics say the proposed cuts to programs for youth, homeless people, immigrants and neighborhoods vulnerable to climate change would roll back progress on social equity and erode morale in affected areas.

The same article pointed out that “City Council members who represent the city’s lower-income areas and communities of color: Sean Elo-Rivera, Henry Foster III and Vivian Moreno” shared the concerns of community activists and other residents who once again see the budget hammer coming down in their direction.  Elo-Rivera has been spot-on recently in pointing out that San Diego’s revenue stream pales in comparison to other California big cities and that it will take a while to reverse the entrenched inequities that the current mayor and council inherited. 

As I argued last spring on my soapbox at Words and Deeds, this is the legacy of “Proposition 13, which ushered in California’s perpetual underfunding of schools and other public services and has ended up enshrining a stark generational inequity with regard to housing and even more severe economic and racial inequality in our now deep blue, liberal state.”

So, if we ever want to do anything consequential to address our decrepit infrastructure, make our city more climate resilient, address homelessness, provide more affordable housing for the 80 percent of low-income San Diegans paying over half their income on rent, and better serve the majority of those left behind in our two-tiered economy, we need to understand this history. 

In the same piece, I note that:

[T]his, at base, is the root of the struggle we are seeing as San Diego transitions from its historically Republican dominated past.  While the Republican Party is now profoundly disadvantaged demographically and ideologically on a wide range of issues, the one area where the thorough liberalization of California as a whole and San Diego in particular has failed is making the argument that we need a permanent, stable revenue stream to fund the big ideas that would make the California dream real for the majority of us.  

Unfortunately, the last time San Diegans had a choice vote on a measure that would have reversed the funding inequities that Proposition 13 enshrined by enacting a split roll on that measure that would leave individual homeowners untouched while reassessing commercial properties, BOTH of the Democrats running for mayor and the leading Republican candidate they edged out of the run-off failed to support this ballot measure that narrowly lost due to a massive corporate disinformation campaign.  This lack of vision, along with similar profiles in political cowardice from other prominent Democrats statewide, made the current dilemma we face inevitable. 

At the time, I made the case in Words and Deeds that:

Neither of the two candidates running for mayor of San Diego are true progressive champions.  In fact, both of them have done things to alienate the local progressive base.  Front and center here is the fact that both Democratic candidates for mayor failed to endorse Proposition 15, which would bring in around $700 million in resources for education and community services to our region and reform one of the most egregious parts of the Proposition 13’s legacy by closing a glaring corporate tax loophole that has robbed schools and municipalities of funds for decades.

This puts both candidates at odds with the state Democratic party and the governor, who endorsed Prop. 15. As any progressive with a historical memory understands, Proposition 13 was at the heart of the rise of the New Right here in California and nationwide.  

Indeed, the biggest legacy of Proposition 13 has been that California, despite being the world’s 5th largest economy, has schools, counties, and cities that frequently struggle with austerity, particularly during economic downturns. 

Another way of putting it is that Proposition 13, the spawn of right-wing backlash politics, was very effective at what folks like Reagan administration official David Stockman charmingly refer to as “starving the beast.”  That is, preventing government from being effective by limiting resources and then calling for more cuts because of that ineffectiveness. 

Thus, when Barbara Bry came out vociferously against the measure and Todd Gloria did so more tepidly, it was a clear sign that neither of the two candidates to be the next mayor in the post-GOP era had deep progressive principles.  Shame on both of them for this.  

Hence, short-term political expediency and a lack of political courage to stand up to corporate interests has led to our current budgetary dead end. 

And with the current race for mayor pitting Gloria against a weak, politically challenged opponent with little more than recycled NIMBY politics and opportunistic fear mongering about homelessness, the mayor is content to put forth an austerity budget that hits the poor and warns his critics that, “restoring cuts they dislike will require them to find corresponding cuts elsewhere in the budget that might be even more painful.” 

While some might excuse or even praise the mouthing of this kind of neoliberal pablum by the mayor as clear-eyed realism, for those of us who hold out hope that blue cities in blue states can offer a different model to the looming fascism on the right, it represents a depressing failure of the political imagination.  Rather than using this opportunity to talk about alternatives to the present cul-de-sac, the mayor seems to have punted. 

After drawing that line in the sand, Gloria quickly retreated from it, rolling back some but not all of the cuts after facing withering criticism from his base.  But as welcome as this reversal is, the mayor did not offer any ideas about where not just immediate but also ongoing revenue might come from in the future. 

What could he suggest?  He could use his bully pulpit to reconsider his previous lack of vision and pivot to the need to support progressive taxes at the state level to help fund the future.  Support something like the Wealth Tax that his fellow Democrat, Governor Gavin Newsom, helped kill in the crib in Sacramento. 

Crazy, I know, but as UC Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman convincingly argued in the New York Times last week:

The idea that billionaires should pay a minimum amount of income tax is not a radical idea. What is radical is continuing to allow the wealthiest people in the world to pay a smaller percentage in income tax than nearly everybody else. In liberal democracies, a wave of political sentiment is building, focused on rooting out the inequality that corrodes societies. A coordinated minimum tax on the superrich will not fix capitalism. But it is a necessary first step.

It must be added that it is shameful that in a place with as much wealth as San Diego, we are witnessing the working-class folks who make our tourist city a paradise for the affluent suffer the consequences of recent floods and now deep cuts to community services and equity programs.  Our choice in November will be whether to support a slew of largely regressive local tax measures to fund the near future or kill them and watch things get much worse, opening the door for a more robust challenge from the local right who have no answers to anything. 

In fact, perhaps eyeing a future presidential run, at the statewide level, Newsom has proclaimed that no new taxes will be sought to help solve the budget crisis, and he is busy suggesting that we monkey around with the funding stream for education in a fashion that could lead to billions of dollars in cuts in future years. If enacted, the Governor’s short-term political gain could mean years of long-term pain for education budgets and other social services. 

Following Newsom’s lead will ensure years of austerity budgeting at all levels and focus discussions more around what sacrifices working people and their children should make rather than thinking hard about how to address the deep economic inequality that is driving us off the economic and political cliff and ensuring that we never have the resources to address our deepest and most urgent crises from homelessness, to education, to climate and more. 

Thus, while I support all the proposed local tax measures that will help ease the current crisis and fund local government and infrastructure, it must be said, as Zucman does, that we can and should do much better as a city, state, and country.