by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
<\/em>PJ Media<\/em><\/p>\n Fantasyland<\/strong><\/p>\n I am looking over a pile of form letters and going over emails of anguish, all decrying the cuts in state government. Indeed, I just got my regular alumnus email note from the UC system \u2014 outraged over the destruction of the university through massive budget cuts. Of course, there is very little self-reflection in all of this furor. Not one of these notices suggests, \u201cThere is no money left. It does not grow on trees. Look in the mirror.\u201d<\/p>\n You, the Greedy \u2014 Not Us, the Anointed<\/strong><\/p>\n No, nothing is much said about the gargantuan number of UC administrators, their pay, the percentage of administrative costs in the budget, the number of non-academic employees serving in the system, or any explanation why the rate of annual increase in the university budget has consistently over the years exceeded the rate of inflation \u2014 in many years at twice the rate of inflation. Taxes climb; guaranteed federal loans that pay tuition expand; state borrowing increases; standards decline; admissions increase; life is good \u2014 so why worry?<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u201d Did It!<\/strong><\/p>\n Instead the\u00a0modus operandi<\/em>\u00a0is to cite students turned away, classes canceled, programs slashed \u2014 never any sense that the first cuts should be vice chancellors, associate provosts, assistants to the president, and other top echelon administrators \u2014 absences in many cases that would not affect the quality of instruction. Slash UC administrators by 50%, make all UC professors teach 2 classes per semester (those at CSU teach 4), cut out \u201csupport\u201d personnel in various centers, end tenure \u2014 and at least some of the crisis would ease.<\/p>\n From my 21 years in the CSU system, I can attest that most of the \u201ccenters for\u2026\u201d and \u201cassistants to\u201d and \u201coffices of\u201d could easily be terminated. Both UC and CSU have vastly increased the percentage of non-academic, non-teaching expenditures in their budgets \u2014 the expanding number of non-instructional employees subsidized by both increased taxes and the exploitive use of part-time and graduate student instructors, who teach at well less than half the pay of normal faculty and now at some campuses account for nearly 40% of the total offered units. (Remember that\u00a0the next time a tenured professor rails about pay inequity at Wal-Mart).<\/p>\n Protests Everywhere\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n In general now, University of California students are furious with tuition raises, rioting even at Berkeley. Teachers are angry about cutbacks. State employee unions blast the airways with ads complaining about a scarcity of funds.<\/p>\n So bear with me with a bit.<\/p>\n The cost to attend a University of California flagship campus \u2014 room, board, and tuition \u2014 is about a third of what is charged by a private, comparable institution in California like Stanford or USC \u2014 roughly some $15-20,000 in total costs versus around $50,000 per year. Public higher education is a good deal, in other words.<\/p>\n California public school teachers make on average the highest salaries in the United States, several thousands higher than those in Massachusetts or Connecticut, and about $20,000 more a year than in a place like Maine or Kansas. On average, government employees, state and federal, nationwide make about 50% more (in salary, pension, and benefits) than their counterparts in the private sector. I realize that if one reaches the very top of private enterprise, one can make more than a high-earning state or federal bureaucrat; but, in general, across the spectrum, it is far preferable to work for government, besides the job security, higher pension, and better working conditions.<\/p>\n I won\u2019t quote all the statistics, but again, in general, California employees make considerably more on average than other state employees elsewhere. The result is that the current furious state employee is, in essence, saying, \u201cAll you lower-paid and unemployed taxpayers, now you better listen up: you must pay more taxes, even beyond the current highest rate in the nation, so that I, the far better paid and pensioned employee than you, can continue unquestioned in my current, far more important job.\u201d<\/p>\n No More Juice to Squeeze\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n On the tax side, California has the highest income tax rates in the country. Its gasoline and sales taxes are also the steepest. Prop 13 limitations keep the rates of property taxes competitive with other states, but the assessments on property are so high in California that often homeowners pay almost the same as many with lower real rates elsewhere. Some 3,500 Californians, mostly on the higher end of the income spectrum, are believed to be leaving per week, mostly fleeing to low or no-income-tax states. I assume their thinking is something like, \u201cI can save $20,000 a year in taxes and my children won\u2019t be going to public schools that score 46-48th in national rankings of the states in math and science.\u201d<\/p>\n Barking at the Moon<\/strong><\/p>\n I have talked with a few students and employees over the last year and I think the angst behind the protests runs something like this. In sum, apparently state employees, teachers, and students believe that there is either (a) a \u201cstash\u201d of money somewhere that is unspent and could easily ease their pain (e.g.,\u201d they\u201d have all sorts of money and are lying to us about its undisclosed location); (b) we could raise income, sales, and gas taxes to even more record highs and encourage perhaps 4,000 a week to leave in consequence (e.g., why do some need BMWs or private planes when \u201cwe\u201d need cheaper tuition?); (c) the 1% who pay about 50% of the state income tax burden could easily pay 80-90% of it (e.g., I get along on $50,000, so why can\u2019t someone who makes $300,000 give $250,000 of it to meet \u201cour\u201d needs?); (d) we could renounce our debts to state bond holders (if they have excess cash to buy bonds, why are they so greedy not to give \u201cus\u201d some of it?) and use the savings for more subsidies, entitlements, and salaries (without my job at the DMV, prison, school, (fill in the blanks), the rest of you could not survive.)<\/p>\n Note that lost in the present \u201cI accuse\u201d acrimony (cf. Greece) is any serious, concrete plan of how to make up the budget shortfall. Completely absent is any recognition that we are the highest taxed state populace in the country, and yet have some of the most dismal infrastructure and schools to show for it. And that is logical, not a paradox.<\/p>\n Again, the Greek Model<\/strong><\/p>\n In the long run, we all know the medicine: cut drastically state expenditure by freezing employment and salaries, and cut red-tape, give tax cuts and incentives for businesses to stay in, or move to, the state to increase the number of jobs and create more wealth. But in the short term, here are some possible discussion points, on both revenue and expenditure, that we are not allowed to talk about in the current conundrum:<\/p>\n Place a total limit of $250,000 on all state salaries, including income from overtime and pensions. Radically curtail the number of administrators in both public schools and the state university system (return most to the classroom). Eliminate half of the state boards, and bar term-limited politicians from serving on them. Open up more gas, oil, mineral, and timber land. Restore water to central valley farming. Monitor for tax purposes the many billions sent out of state to Latin America, tax-free, by California residents who are illegally residing in the state. Focus on the large incomes of a few Californians that are manipulated to be taxed at the capital gains rate rather than the income tax rate. Monitor the vast underground market of cash sales transactions that are not taxed at all, and the general noncompliance with state revenue laws of open air markets, roadside food vendors, and off the books day workers. Go after the many millions who ignore traditional fees and assessments on everything from proper zoning laws, statutes requiring single family occupant homes; liens; car registration, etc. Reexamine the abuse of state disability and unemployment entitlements by those who work off the books for cash or are capable of working but are not currently.<\/p>\n What We Do Know<\/strong><\/p>\n Statism and spiraling public sector employment and entitlement (once again cf. southern Europe) alter the public mindset (see Aristophanes\u2019\u00a0Knights<\/em>\u00a0orWasps<\/em>).<\/p>\n When one assumes the state (or \u2018they\u2019) is responsible for all good things, then natural, quite interconnected corollaries follow.<\/p>\n Radical environmentalism is usually the creed of either the hyper-wealthy or the tenured state employee who has lost appreciation that real money does not just appear in the mailbox, but must be created in a rather cruel, unforgiving world.<\/p>\n Utopianism ensures that anything good (and life in the U.S. is very good) is really not ever good enough, because it is not quite perfect.<\/p>\n Equality of result is a natural impulse, since public employment and entitlement mean spiraling private sector taxes, which mean someone else does not deserve to keep what they earn.<\/p>\n Pacifism follows, since military expenditure diverts needed money from entitlement.<\/p>\n Moral relativism is the shared creed, since absolute rules and laws can at times be cruel and work to deny ever expanding appetites.<\/p>\n Coercive government is required to hunt down the lone wolf holdouts and to justify, big brother style, the sameness of culture and the elite bureaucracy that need not follow the rules it imposes on others.<\/p>\n Agnosticism and atheism become more popular as government assumes the role of deity and brags on its heaven on earth powers (what evil God would dare allow inequality on earth?). The government check is far better than the Sunday service.<\/p>\n Depopulation eventually arrives as life is just too good to waste in getting up all nights with colicky babies and dirty diapers; adults (wrongly) assume the state, not children, will care for them in their \u201cgolden years\u201d (cf. the August 2003 French rush to the beach for the annual state-subsidized vacation, as some 15,000 elderly were left behind to be roasted in their non-air-conditioned Paris apartments \u2014 at the very time the French government was damning the U.S. for the supposed inhuman removal of Saddam Hussein.)<\/p>\n I think I just summed up southern Europe, Northern Europe in about a year, California in about five years, and the U.S. in about ten.<\/p>\n \u00a92010 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On Receiving Another Request to Protest, Write a Letter, Give Money by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Fantasyland I am looking over a pile of form letters and going over emails of anguish, all decrying the cuts in state government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[608],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-sW","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2122,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/thanks-to-the-forgotten-part-time-teacher\/","url_meta":{"origin":1794,"position":0},"title":"Thanks to the Forgotten Part-time Teacher","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 27, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner Last week within about an hour, I got a form email from a UC administrator deploring California\u2019s cuts to higher education, asking for money, and pleading for support for the university \u2014 even as YouTube was airing the UCLA student protests over tuition hikes.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "November 2009"","block_context":{"text":"November 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/november-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":527,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-wasted-educational-crisis\/","url_meta":{"origin":1794,"position":1},"title":"A Wasted Educational Crisis","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 12, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce Thornton Pope Center\u00a0Commentaries As former White House Chief of Staff and now Mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel famously said, \u201cYou never want to let a serious crisis to go to waste.\u201d The economic Armageddon facing the country\u2019s largest state university system, the 23-campus California State University, undoubtedly qualifies\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Education"","block_context":{"text":"Education","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/education\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1111,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/in-defense-of-defense\/","url_meta":{"origin":1794,"position":2},"title":"In Defense of Defense","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 28, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Two bedrock beliefs of traditional conservatism are fiscal discipline and strong national defense. Likewise, two general rules of budgetary reform in times of economic crisis are, first, to scale back expenditures rather than raise taxes, and, second, to look at defense for some\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "November 2010"","block_context":{"text":"November 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/november-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7075,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/sacrificing-the-military-to-entitlements\/","url_meta":{"origin":1794,"position":3},"title":"Sacrificing the Military to Entitlements","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 4, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0FrontPage Magazine\u00a0 Vladimir Putin, playing geopolitical chess while our president plays tiddlywinks, has effectively taken over Crimea. Armed men, looking suspiciously like Russian military personnel, have seized both airports and established border checkpoints decorated with Kalashnikovs and Russian flags. This comes after other armed men seized\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Ukraine"","block_context":{"text":"Ukraine","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/europe\/ukraine\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, center, is escorted by U.S. Air Force Gen. Jack Weinstein after arriving at the missile alert facility and launch control center at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyo., Jan. 9, 2014. Hagel was on a two-day trip to visit commands in the western United States.","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/800px-thumbnail.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7757,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/democracies-like-military-cuts\/","url_meta":{"origin":1794,"position":4},"title":"Democracies Like Military Cuts","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 10, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thorton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine President Obama has been rightly chastised for his proposed cuts to our military budget. Critics have gone after his Quadrennial Defense Review and its plan to shrink the armed forces, not to mention the clumsy optics of issuing pink slips to thousands of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Our Contributors"","block_context":{"text":"Our Contributors","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/cuts.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":890,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/california-tuition-blues\/","url_meta":{"origin":1794,"position":5},"title":"California Tuition Blues","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 21, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services In so-called March in March protests, thousands of students in California universities recently demonstrated in outrage over spiraling tuition costs. At both the California State University and University of California multi-campus systems, tuition hikes in recent years have far exceeded the national average.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "California"","block_context":{"text":"California","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/california\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1794"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1794"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1794\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1795,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1794\/revisions\/1795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}