Faced with a ballooning deficit and a clear signal that voters won't pay more to fix it, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger released a budget plan Tuesday that would eliminate welfare, drop 1 million poor children from health insurance, cut off new grants for college students and shut down 80 percent of state parks.
# The budget proposal would eliminate vast swaths of programs, including CalWORKs — the welfare program serving more than 521,000 families who now receive $526 average monthly grants — and Healthy Families, which subsidizes health care for low-income children whose families don't qualify for Medi-Cal. Those cuts would also cost the state billions in federal matching funds.
# Medi-Cal coverage for dialysis and for breast and cervical cancer treatment for those over age 65 would be cut. Undocumented immigrants would lose nonemergency health care.
# In the prisons, rehabilitation, education and vocational programs would be hacked. So would the sentences of nonviolent, non-serious offenders, who would go free a year early.
# More than 200,000 college-bound students would lose some or all of their tuition assistance under the Cal Grant program. New grants for students to attend college would be eliminated, and existing grants would be reduced. All of that would come on top of $335 million in cuts for the University of California and California State University systems — which already have seen $415 million in cuts this year, forcing student fee increases.
# Surprisingly spared the ax — so far, anyway — were the state's battered K-12 schools. Though they represent California's single biggest budget
expense, the governor proposed no new cuts Tuesday.
