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There is going to be a lot of second-guessing after this is all over. I find it difficult to blame the governor of a state with a $26 billion budget deficit in

There is going to be a lot of second-guessing after this is all over. I find it difficult to blame the governor of a state with a $26 billion budget deficit in 2011 for cutting this. How many people were thinking about pandemics then? How many voters would have chosen to keep this program or discontinue it? We are about to enter another deep recession and similar cuts will be made, which may seem unwise to people a decade from now.

jiqiren 7y ago
Only needed $5.8million/year in an overall budget of $129billion. It also resulted in an ultimate loss of an already spent $200million initial investment.
- triangleman 7y ago
  Not only that but per the article: "In televised remarks Monday, Newsom said the state will lease beds in struggling hospitals around the state and is eyeing convention centers, motels and state university dormitories for use as hospital wards. One such lease, in Daly City, may cost the state as much as $3.2 million a month for 177 beds." Making small investments for the future is what economics is all about.
  - twblalock 7y ago
    > Making small investments for the future is what economics is all about. This isn't economics. It's politics. How could you sell something like pandemic preparedness in 2011? How could you present a long-term picture, knowing what was known in 2011, and argue that such a thing was a budget priority compared to jobs and social services? I can't imagine that any politician in 2011 would have been taken seriously when talking about pandemic preparedness, given the context of the massive recession that we were still climbing out of.
    - selimthegrim 7y ago
      This is Governor Moonbeam here. Remember what he was selling in the seventies? He could have run with it.
    - ipqk 7y ago
      Maybe by mentioning the swine flu pandemic that had just happened in 2009? Californians live in earthquake country – they understand preparing for cataclysmic event in the medium-to-far future.
- masonic 7y ago
  In contrast, CA budgets $98 million/year just for full MediCal plans for undocumented people age 0-26.
ceejayoz 7y ago
> How many people were thinking about pandemics then? Hopefully quite a few, considering the H1N1 pandemic was just two years earlier. The article mentions this was also for earthquake preparedness, which any California government should be thinking of.
TheOperator 7y ago
>I find it difficult to blame the governor of a state with a $26 billion budget deficit in 2011 for cutting this. Guess we should just give up on any emergency preparedness if a recession makes cutting these programs blameless.
joe_the_user 7y ago
I remember those budget cuts. As far as I could tell, the state engaged in efforts to make the most damaging cuts possible in every department while leaving pet construction projects and similar things alone (cutting state parks really hard for example). I think it's combination of wanting to demonstrate the seriousness of the problem combined with cutting projects that don't have constituancy.
- selimthegrim 7y ago
  I was at UCSB at the time and I remember incensed undergrads camping out in the public spaces for weeks.
  - scruple 7y ago
    Yep, you just jogged my memory. I was living and working in Goleta at the time and I definitely recall seeing those folks every time I went to campus and even IV of the course of a few weeks.
- ip26 7y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_Syndrome https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_Syndrome
parineum 7y ago
> I find it difficult to blame the governor of a state with a $26 billion budget deficit in 2011 for cutting this. How many people were thinking about pandemics then? The one who put it in place? Someone had the foresight to implement this program. It's one thing to forgive someone for not having foresight but it's something else entirely to actively dismantle the fruits of your predecessors foresight.
- twblalock 7y ago
  > It's one thing to forgive someone for not having foresight but it's something else entirely to actively dismantle the fruits of your predecessors foresight. A pandemic seemed about as improbable then as an alien invasion. What should the government have cut instead? School spending? Social services? How do you think the voters would have responded? Remember that the budget deficit was enormous. It's pretty hard to defend funding pie-in-the-sky ideas like global pandemics when people have concrete, immediate problems. Just a month ago, the concept of a global pandemic that would shut down a huge portion of the economy seemed insane to 99% of voters.
  - wtdo 7y ago
    The swine flu pandemic ended in August 2010. If it's really the same probabilities, I'm just gonna assume the aliens are already living among us.
  - HarryHirsch 7y ago
    A pandemic seemed about as improbable then as an alien invasion People have warned about a global pandemic for decades, and there were a few near misses - Ebola in 2014, SARS, MERS. Bill Gates was quite vocal. It's a 100-year event, something that people prepare against. No sane person builds in the 100-year floodplain! Next up in California: AR1Kstorm.
    - philwelch 7y ago
      You're not wrong, but a near miss can seem a lot like "crying wolf" to an ignorant populace.
wbl 7y ago
Prop 13 strikes again. Due to it CA has wild revenue shifts.
- briandear 7y ago
  What are they doing with all of the sales and income taxes I pay?
  - thedance 7y ago
    http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/budget/2020-21/#/Home http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/budget/2020-21/#/Home
- WalterBright 7y ago
  The idea is to bank the surplus during the fat years. But no politician was ever re-elected for having a budget surplus.
  - thedance 7y ago
    Jerry Brown passed the California "rainy day fund" in November 2014 on the same ballot on which he was re-elected. Literally re-elected on a budget surplus platform.
    - tathougies 7y ago
      Too bad the surplus came from cutting the emergency preparedness programs that ought to have been funded by a surplus.
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      Having a budget surplus platform is not at all the same thing as having a budget surplus.
  - Gibbon1 7y ago
    Reminds me. Prop 13 was passed in the 70's when Brown was governor. One of the things the proponents hammered on was Brown's budget was running a surplus.
briandear 7y ago
That’s what leadership is: being able to make hard choices and selling that to the voters. I haven’t met anyone opposed to disaster preparedness funding, but I have met plenty of people opposed to the bottomless pit spending for various causes du jour.
- twblalock 7y ago
  How do you convince people in 2011 that preparing for a pandemic is not a "cause du jour"? Nobody would have bought that a month ago. In 2011 you would have been laughed out of the room.
xtracto 7y ago
Your federal government should use 10% of their yearly defense budget (700 billion) for epidemic/health preparedness. In a way it is part of national defense ...
bsder 7y ago
It was a sop to stupid California Republicans. The jungle primaries got rid of those starting in 2012. California should have reestablished this later, though. Unfortunately, everybody forgets once the crisis is gone.
- someguydave 7y ago
  Are you trying to make the case for single party rule here?
  - dodobirdlord 7y ago
    California objectively seems to operate much better since Prop 25 excluded the minority party from having a say on the budget. The behavior in a two-party system of a minority party that knows it's going to be a minority party indefinitely is frequently to sabotage everything possible in hopes of making the ruling party's life difficult, or to make them look incompetent. Stripping them of power doesn't turn legislating into dictatorial rule by fiat, it just moves it into the consensus-building processes of the majority party. Two-party rules with a sidelined minority party looks a lot like a coalition government in a multi-party system.
  - bsder 7y ago
    The jungle primaries actually make even that case better. You don't have the case where some nitwit edges out a reasonable candidate in the primary and then wins the general simply because they have (D) or (R) next to their name. In California's case, if we send two Democrats to the general election, the Republicans get to weigh in on which they find more acceptable. It forces the candidates to the actual center. It would work that way for two Republican candidates as well, but a whole host of Republicans simply quit after we un-gerrymandered the state.
- tathougies 7y ago
  Ah right, the fact that a democrat governor got rid of pandemic preparations made by a Republican one is the fault of republicans
TaylorAlexander 7y ago
Serious question: is $26B a big deficit for California?
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  It's not the end of the world. California currently almost 40 million people. So $650 per capita.
jfnixon 7y ago
It is just a bad choice to cut emergency preparedness. This is California, how many mass transit boondoggles survived the 2011 budget cuts?
GeekyBear 7y ago
>I find it difficult to blame the governor of a state with a $26 billion budget deficit in 2011 for cutting this. Getting rid of funding for pandemic preparedness in favor of funding a high speed rail system to nowhere does seem particularly short sighted in retrospect.

jiqiren 7y ago

Only needed $5.8million/year in an overall budget of $129billion. It also resulted in an ultimate loss of an already spent $200million initial investment.

triangleman 7y ago
Not only that but per the article: "In televised remarks Monday, Newsom said the state will lease beds in struggling hospitals around the state and is eyeing convention centers, motels and state university dormitories for use as hospital wards. One such lease, in Daly City, may cost the state as much as $3.2 million a month for 177 beds." Making small investments for the future is what economics is all about.
- twblalock 7y ago
  > Making small investments for the future is what economics is all about. This isn't economics. It's politics. How could you sell something like pandemic preparedness in 2011? How could you present a long-term picture, knowing what was known in 2011, and argue that such a thing was a budget priority compared to jobs and social services? I can't imagine that any politician in 2011 would have been taken seriously when talking about pandemic preparedness, given the context of the massive recession that we were still climbing out of.
  - selimthegrim 7y ago
    This is Governor Moonbeam here. Remember what he was selling in the seventies? He could have run with it.
  - ipqk 7y ago
    Maybe by mentioning the swine flu pandemic that had just happened in 2009? Californians live in earthquake country – they understand preparing for cataclysmic event in the medium-to-far future.
masonic 7y ago
In contrast, CA budgets $98 million/year just for full MediCal plans for undocumented people age 0-26.

ceejayoz 7y ago

> How many people were thinking about pandemics then? Hopefully quite a few, considering the H1N1 pandemic was just two years earlier. The article mentions this was also for earthquake preparedness, which any California government should be thinking of.

TheOperator 7y ago

>I find it difficult to blame the governor of a state with a $26 billion budget deficit in 2011 for cutting this. Guess we should just give up on any emergency preparedness if a recession makes cutting these programs blameless.

joe_the_user 7y ago

I remember those budget cuts. As far as I could tell, the state engaged in efforts to make the most damaging cuts possible in every department while leaving pet construction projects and similar things alone (cutting state parks really hard for example). I think it's combination of wanting to demonstrate the seriousness of the problem combined with cutting projects that don't have constituancy.

selimthegrim 7y ago
I was at UCSB at the time and I remember incensed undergrads camping out in the public spaces for weeks.
- scruple 7y ago
  Yep, you just jogged my memory. I was living and working in Goleta at the time and I definitely recall seeing those folks every time I went to campus and even IV of the course of a few weeks.
ip26 7y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_Syndrome https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_Syndrome

parineum 7y ago

> I find it difficult to blame the governor of a state with a $26 billion budget deficit in 2011 for cutting this. How many people were thinking about pandemics then? The one who put it in place? Someone had the foresight to implement this program. It's one thing to forgive someone for not having foresight but it's something else entirely to actively dismantle the fruits of your predecessors foresight.

twblalock 7y ago
> It's one thing to forgive someone for not having foresight but it's something else entirely to actively dismantle the fruits of your predecessors foresight. A pandemic seemed about as improbable then as an alien invasion. What should the government have cut instead? School spending? Social services? How do you think the voters would have responded? Remember that the budget deficit was enormous. It's pretty hard to defend funding pie-in-the-sky ideas like global pandemics when people have concrete, immediate problems. Just a month ago, the concept of a global pandemic that would shut down a huge portion of the economy seemed insane to 99% of voters.
- wtdo 7y ago
  The swine flu pandemic ended in August 2010. If it's really the same probabilities, I'm just gonna assume the aliens are already living among us.
- HarryHirsch 7y ago
  A pandemic seemed about as improbable then as an alien invasion People have warned about a global pandemic for decades, and there were a few near misses - Ebola in 2014, SARS, MERS. Bill Gates was quite vocal. It's a 100-year event, something that people prepare against. No sane person builds in the 100-year floodplain! Next up in California: AR1Kstorm.
  - philwelch 7y ago
    You're not wrong, but a near miss can seem a lot like "crying wolf" to an ignorant populace.

wbl 7y ago

Prop 13 strikes again. Due to it CA has wild revenue shifts.

briandear 7y ago
What are they doing with all of the sales and income taxes I pay?
- thedance 7y ago
  http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/budget/2020-21/#/Home http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/budget/2020-21/#/Home
WalterBright 7y ago
The idea is to bank the surplus during the fat years. But no politician was ever re-elected for having a budget surplus.
- thedance 7y ago
  Jerry Brown passed the California "rainy day fund" in November 2014 on the same ballot on which he was re-elected. Literally re-elected on a budget surplus platform.
  - tathougies 7y ago
    Too bad the surplus came from cutting the emergency preparedness programs that ought to have been funded by a surplus.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    Having a budget surplus platform is not at all the same thing as having a budget surplus.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  Reminds me. Prop 13 was passed in the 70's when Brown was governor. One of the things the proponents hammered on was Brown's budget was running a surplus.

briandear 7y ago

That’s what leadership is: being able to make hard choices and selling that to the voters. I haven’t met anyone opposed to disaster preparedness funding, but I have met plenty of people opposed to the bottomless pit spending for various causes du jour.

twblalock 7y ago
How do you convince people in 2011 that preparing for a pandemic is not a "cause du jour"? Nobody would have bought that a month ago. In 2011 you would have been laughed out of the room.

xtracto 7y ago

Your federal government should use 10% of their yearly defense budget (700 billion) for epidemic/health preparedness. In a way it is part of national defense ...

bsder 7y ago

It was a sop to stupid California Republicans. The jungle primaries got rid of those starting in 2012. California should have reestablished this later, though. Unfortunately, everybody forgets once the crisis is gone.

someguydave 7y ago
Are you trying to make the case for single party rule here?
- dodobirdlord 7y ago
  California objectively seems to operate much better since Prop 25 excluded the minority party from having a say on the budget. The behavior in a two-party system of a minority party that knows it's going to be a minority party indefinitely is frequently to sabotage everything possible in hopes of making the ruling party's life difficult, or to make them look incompetent. Stripping them of power doesn't turn legislating into dictatorial rule by fiat, it just moves it into the consensus-building processes of the majority party. Two-party rules with a sidelined minority party looks a lot like a coalition government in a multi-party system.
- bsder 7y ago
  The jungle primaries actually make even that case better. You don't have the case where some nitwit edges out a reasonable candidate in the primary and then wins the general simply because they have (D) or (R) next to their name. In California's case, if we send two Democrats to the general election, the Republicans get to weigh in on which they find more acceptable. It forces the candidates to the actual center. It would work that way for two Republican candidates as well, but a whole host of Republicans simply quit after we un-gerrymandered the state.
tathougies 7y ago
Ah right, the fact that a democrat governor got rid of pandemic preparations made by a Republican one is the fault of republicans

TaylorAlexander 7y ago

Serious question: is $26B a big deficit for California?

Gibbon1 7y ago
It's not the end of the world. California currently almost 40 million people. So $650 per capita.

jfnixon 7y ago

It is just a bad choice to cut emergency preparedness. This is California, how many mass transit boondoggles survived the 2011 budget cuts?

GeekyBear 7y ago

>I find it difficult to blame the governor of a state with a $26 billion budget deficit in 2011 for cutting this. Getting rid of funding for pandemic preparedness in favor of funding a high speed rail system to nowhere does seem particularly short sighted in retrospect.