California Fights Back by Peter Schrag

Author:Peter Schrag
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781597144490
Publisher: Heyday

IT’S HARD TO LIST all the steps of California’s progress in the past two decades. The state raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour, increased the state earned income tax credit—in essence, a negative income tax for low-wage workers—and made as many as a half million more workers eligible for it. It raised its fuel efficiency standards, which were already high and have become models for thirteen other states, still higher. It’s possible that Trump and Congress will try to end the waivers in the Clean Air Act that Richard Nixon signed in 1970, which allow California and the other states to set those higher standards, but it would be legally difficult. (And if they did, it’s been suggested that California could do the same thing by raising the sales tax on vehicles that don’t meet its standard.)

In addition, California created Secure Choice, an automatic state-sponsored retirement program for workers not covered by their employers, which is scheduled to go into effect early in 2019. Senate president pro tem Kevin de Léon, its sponsor, calls it the largest expansion of retirement security since 1935. It’s certain to be attacked by Trump and Congress, and of course by the insurance industry—the Senate has already overturned the federal rule change that permits California to run the program. But it will be vigorously defended by the state in the courts.

Most important, the sharp expansion in MediCal, California’s Medicaid program, that Obamacare made possible and that Governor Brown and the legislature implemented since 2011, drove the percentage of uninsured Californians down from 19 to 7 percent; among the beneficiaries have been thousands of undocumented minors. Fourteen million Californians now get their health care through MediCal. That number by itself is an indicator of the stakes in California’s resistance. Many of the state’s MediCal beneficiaries live in Central Valley districts—in Fresno County, Kern County, Tulare County—represented by Republicans. Those Republicans all voted for repeal of the ACA. Despite the Senate’s failure to repeal it in 2017, they may come to regret those votes. In effect, as the battle over Obamacare makes plain, California’s economic and social progress and its resistance to Trump and the Republican Congress are inseparably linked. That, too, is a portent for the future.

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