by CalMatters, CalMatters Network
November 6, 2023
The homelessness conversation by California Voices features authors involved with the issue to help Californians grasp the solutions and areas of consensus. Read more voices on homelessness.
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One Comment
“California Senate Republicans proposed using 10% of it – $10 billion – to expand our mental health infrastructure. Unfortunately, this proposal was rejected by Democrat lawmakers.”
There was definitely something in that proposal that Democrats didn’t like. Be it the prohibitive costs that could strain the budget, conflict of interests (oh my contact does this and we can pay them that), or some other motive. And let’s say for argument sake that IF Democrats did approve their proposal, and the project failed, Republicans would have blamed the failed issue on Democrats, so it’s a lose lose scenario regardless.
I am too old for these games. Republicans are just trying to save face so they can say “Hey! We tried doing something about this issue! But Democrats don’t want to work with us!”. This reminds me of the media/conservatives trying to negatively spin the truth when the governor rejected a cap for insulin, but no one understood why, thus making it an incited political issue. It was a smart move for the governor to reject the insulin cap to make it accessible freely and available for everyone (under state administration) without having to increase insurance premiums for everyone. How is having available access to insulin to near $0 cost while eliminating increased premium costs for everyone a bad thing?
On a side note, most people don’t understand that when a current president/administration takes hold of office, they inherit the preceding administration’s economy: Since Trump inherited the fixed spending/budget from Obama and his administration, Trump could have made himself look even better by not spending and tax cutting like a madman, hence everyone currently suffering from his policies and spending under Biden and Biden being blamed for everything in this economy. If people can’t believe that it took Obama nearly 2 presidential terms to undo the mess from Bush, then we are truly done for. I am mentioning this as people tend to blame their frustrations on crime, homelessness and the economy on current administrations that have little or no control from a prior administration’s management.
Being homeless is already horrible, but also being used a political fodder? Sighs.