© Progressive Christians Uniting
Tell Your Legislators, These New Cuts Must Never Come!!
Once again the leaders of the California Assembly and Senate are being put into a terrible bind by our governor's reckless and irresponsible budget proposal, and once again we are called to help give them some moral backbone for the sake of resisting unacceptable social service cuts.
The governor's bogus budget assumes that the state will be able to wrest an additional $7 billion in special assistance from the Federal government over the next 18 months, when any sober observer can tell you this won't happen. And then the governor goes on to say that if Sacramento does not get the money from Washington, horrendous new cuts like these will be made:
* Complete elimination of CalWORKs which provides basic cash assistance, job training, child care, and other staples to low-income families.
* Complete elimination of Healthy Families, which provides comprehensive, affordable health care to children with incomes too high to qualify for Medi-Cal.
* Redirecting voter-allocated community mental health funds to existing state programs.
* Reducing Medi-Cal eligibility to the federal minimum and eliminating the last few optional benefits.
* Complete elimination of In Home Supportive Services, which provides assisted living services to the elderly and persons with disabilities who would otherwise be forced to live in an institution.
PCU urges you to write today to Assembly Speaker John Perez and to Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg with this simple message:
As a person of faith committed to justice and human thriving, I strongly urge you to resist the governor's reckless budget proposal which stakes far too much on new funds our state is unlikely to get from the Federal government--and which threatens drastic cuts to lifeline social services unless that $7 billion in new Federal funds is delivered. We must have a budget that preserves these lifeline services to the most vulnerable, and the funds must be obtained from the wealthy and corporate beneficiaries of previous tax concessions. Budgets are moral documents, and California must not continue to victimize the poorest on account of its dysfunctional governance system.
