California’s landmark paid family leave benefit has helped low-wage workers manage time off work to care for a newborn or a seriously ill family member but has not been an unreasonable burden on the state’s employers, according to new research on the six-year-old program. The research, based largely on surveys of employees and employers, found that the family leave program is popular with people who have used it but is still largely unknown and underused among the people who might need it most.
California faces an extraordinarily difficult budget this year. Better management of the state’s finances over the last decade would have made our current circumstance less difficult. But let’s be realistic – given the depth of the recession, we would be in terrible shape in any case.
Assemblywoman Holly Mitchell is a single mom and until last month was CEO of a non-profit agency that manages state-subsidized child care in Los Angeles. Now she is a legislator fighting to restore funding to a child care program she says is crucial to keeping former welfare moms in the workforce. Listen to Daniel Weintraub’s interview with Mitchell about the program.
California has spent many years in budget hell. Deficit has followed deficit, alarm has followed alarm. The temptation is strong to greet this year’s news of the budget crisis with a shrug of the shoulders and a yawn: What else is new? But this year looks different. The two-year budget gap is over $28 billion, the state has piled up debts of more than $85 billion, the gimmicks have been used up, and Washington is turning its back on the fiscal plight of the states. California, a victim of the bizarre and radical governing system it has imposed upon itself, piece by piece, over a century, has seemingly reached a moment of reckoning. It will not get out of budget hell until it makes itself governable.
Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget proposal calls for deep cuts in health and social service programs that form California’s safety net. Brown wants to cut $1.7 billion from Medi-Cal, 1.5 billion from CalWorks, and $750 million from the Department of Developmental Services. Brown would limit access to Medi-Cal services, including prescription drugs and place stricter time limits on welfare. He also proposes to limit reimbursements for home care for people who need help with daily living so they can remain in their homes and not in an institution.
A Stockton non-profit group that originally formed to fight a neighborhood’s drugtrade has morphed out of necessity into an organization that is buying up abandoned homes, fixing them and getting them back on the market. Without the group, life in the blighted neighborhood would be even grimmer.
When Gov. Jerry Brown unveils his first proposal to deal with the state’s $28 billion budget shortfall this week, he probably won’t be offering many new ideas. But he will be hoping that a new approach and a different kind of leadership will help him get his plans through a Legislature and a public that were often hostile to his predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
California’s economy is hurting and too many of its residents are without insurance coverage. Rural communities have been hit even harder by unemployment and the lack of access to care. Here is an idea to use public and private action to improve rural health care and the economy at the same time.
As Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger prepares to end his second and final term as California’s chief executive Monday, his public approval ratings are at an all-time low, the media are beating him up for his record in office, and few if any of his fellow politicians are rising to his defense. Schwarzenegger deserves much of the flogging that he’s been absorbing in his final days on the job. But the real story of his seven years as governor is more complex than it appears at first glance. And historians may view his tenure in a better light than those who are judging him based only on the condition of the state and its economy on the day he leaves office.