PSL Forum: Capitalist Crisis and the California Budget

PSL Forum and Discussion
Capitalist Crisis and the California Budget
Friday, July 31, 7pm

California is facing a budget deficit of nearly $20 billion. Why are we facing this situation? Is it really because there are no resources to pay for these basic needs? No! It is because trillions of dollars are being used not to help our communities and the people most in need but to save and reward the richest banks, insurance companies and corporations that have created the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Prior to the economic crisis, the state of California covered its expenses from property taxes that soared during the housing boom, the retail sales tax, payroll taxes and personal income taxes. The state budget was drafted with the assumption that these revenues would continue to rise. Once the housing crisis hit, the bottom fell out of the state’s fiscal planning. To make matters worse, during the economic boom, members of the legislature voted huge tax breaks for their friends in big business. If the big businesses were paying taxes at the same rate they did 20 years ago, there would be no state budget crisis at all!

Today, the debate in Sacramento is centered around how the shortfall will be broken on the backs of working people. Ruling class politicians tell working people that there is just no money, so we all have to brace for difficult times. But the fact that the government can give trillions of dollars of bail-out money to banks and corporations completely dispels the claim that there is no money available for the people.

Health care is a fundamental human right. Yet 47 million people in the United States have no health care coverage whatsoever. Millions more have limited access to health care services. The ruling class treats health care not as a right but as a commodity that exists for the profit of pharmaceutical and insurance company owners.

The economic crisis has exacerbated the health care crisis. It has affected access to coverage as millions have lost their jobs—directly losing health care or losing the income that paid for health care.
While workers are losing jobs, insurance, homes and savings, the Obama administration has expressed no obligation, let alone any urgency in fulfilling the right to health care. Such urgency has applied to bailing out bankers, CEOs, and the capitalist class—who caused the crisis. They have been the recipients of the most massive transfer of wealth from the working class to the ruling class in history.

What the administration has done is initiate a debate on health care reform. However, that debate falls far short, because it fails to recognize health care as a right and seeks to protect the profits of the health care industry. Single-payer health care—a comprehensive, public plan for covering every person in the United States—is the only currently proposed reform that could move towards a solution of the U.S. health care crisis.

Hear reports on a socialist perspective on the California budget crisis, the health care crisis, why the capitalist state continues to fail working people in delivering the most basic necessities, and how to fight against continued attacks on people’s basic rights.


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