Recent events have shown what hooey this is. It’s not just the crown jewels of the UC system — the Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses — that continue to thrive. It’s also the lesser-hyped schools:

The Orange County Register notes an honor for UC Irvine.

“As the University of California, Irvine approaches the milestone of its 50th year of operation in 2015, the campus has been honored again by Times Higher Education magazine as the top-rated university in the United States for schools under 50 years old.”

To the south, UC San Diego continues to stake out a global reputation as a leader in biotech and the increasing integration of health care and nanotechnology.

It’s also just an outstanding all-around university. Overall, the school is ranked the 39th-best in the nation in the latest U.S. News and World report rankings.

But in its core specialty — life sciences — UC San Diego is ranked seventh-best in the world. This ranking is only likely to rise as the La Jolla area builds on its reputation as a global biotech-nanotech innovation hub.

Finally, out in the Inland Empire, there is UC Riverside, a campus that rarely gets much love from anyone.

Until now.

As the Sacramento Bee reported this week, in a Time magazine analysis based on Obama administration standards unveiled last year, the Riverside campus gives students the best value for their tuition based on “metrics such as graduation rate, tuition costs and percentage of students who receive Pell Grants, the federal low-income scholarship, to determine which schools offer the best value.”

The Time list puts UCSD second, UC Irvine fourth and UC Davis sixth.

All that budget misery seems to agree with the UC system.

Or rather, all that alleged budget misery seems to agree with the UC system.

By Chris Reed

Nothing brings clarity to the absurdity of unions’ claims that they defend the poor and champion social justice than the annual fights over the state budget. Advocates of social services for the poor and needy are up in arms that Gov. Jerry Brown’s revised 2013-2014 budget doesn’t restore cuts. But state unions, most of which are in salary negotiations with Brown, aren’t backing them up. This San Jose Mercury-News story lays out the complaints:

“Democratic legislators and liberal advocacy groups signaled Wednesday they are ready to fight to restore safety net programs devastated by years of cuts, a day after Gov. Jerry Brown emphasized a sober economic outlook in a revised budget that leaves little room for improving the lot of the poor.

“Brown vowed to spend within the state’s means, proclaiming he is the ‘backstop’ to the ‘big spending machine’ of interest groups and liberal legislators sure to bang on his door for help.

“Brown scaled down hopes with a $96.4 billion budget that was $1.3 billion smaller than he’d proposed in January, saying that federal ‘sequestration’ cuts, lower wages and a hike in Social Security taxes had quelled economic growth.

“But advocates for the poor and disabled argue that a $1.1 billion rainy-day reserve and Brown’s plan to repay certain state debts may not be appropriate during a time when many people are still suffering the effects of the Great Recession.”

The CTA, CFT and AFSCME? All MIA

Nowhere in the Merc-News story or in any similar coverage do you see the CTA or CFT or AFSCME speak up for the poor. It’s not their priority.

And this is true in every economic circumstance. This is from what I wrote last year:

“When times are bad, unions pressure Democrats to always make social services for the poor be the first target of budget cutting, preserving public employee compensation by any means possible.

“When times are good, they pressure Democrats to save extra revenue for them. In the revenue boom that lasted from 2003-2007, social services spending went up by barely the rate of inflation, while spending on schools (teacher unions) and prisons (guard unions) went up at least four times as fast.”

Union power: It’s 24/7/365, whether in recessions or booms, and it’s always about union members’ compensation and job protections and little else. Dems may believe in social justice, but for their most powerful faction, such rhetoric amounts to a convenient smokescreen.

By CHRISS STREET

For the State of California and its counties and cities, tax collections tend to be lumpy during the year due to half of all income, corporate and other taxes being collected in the two months of November and April. Given that the fiscal year starts on July 1 and politicians like to spend money all year long, the state and local municipalities have relied on the sale of short-term municipal bonds to tax free money market funds to even out cash flow. The total amount of this borrowing can run as high as $25 billion.

Unfortunately for California, with the sovereign debt crisis in Europe and the default crisis in the United States government, credit-rating agencies are in the process of downgrading 7,000 municipal bond issuers. California, which has the lowest rating on the continent, could receive a junk bond rating. Such a rating would make the purchase of California bonds, by money funds, deemed to be imprudent investments. Consequently, California is being forced to try to borrow money from banks at interest costs that may be 5 to 10 times higher in cost.

Negative Balances

Starting around the third week in July, California’s Treasury will begin to run increasingly negative cash balances until larger tax payments arrive in early October. With the state continually cash strapped, those nice people at JPMorgan Chase & Co. and their banker buddies bailed California out with bridge loans of $1.5 billion in 2009 and $6.7 billion in 2010 At the time, because there was no risk of the state being downgraded to junk levels, the interest cost on the two loans was less than 2 percent.

But loaning money to government today is perceived as a much more risky proposition. Last week, JP Morgan loaned $2.25 billion to New Jersey, which has a higher rating than California, at a cost of up to 9 percent interest. At a low 2 percent cost of interest, it would take 35 years of compounding before the borrowed money would double. But at 9 percent, the loan doubles in just 8 years.

To instill confidence in the lenders, California voters elected “Moonbeam” Jerry Brown to replace “Terminator” Arnold Schwarzenegger last year. Brown has always been a complicated figure in California politics. In 1975, Jerry Brown became one of the youngest governor in the history of the United States by being elected at age of 37.

After taking office, Brown was widely liberal on social issues, but was actually a fiscal conservative who favored a Balanced Budget Amendment. After the passage of the Proposition 13 limitations on property tax collections, Brown did such a good job balancing the State’s budget that the initiative’s author, Howard Jarvis, actually made a television commercial supporting Brown for his successful reelection bid in 1978.

Two weeks ago, Brown got a chance to begin getting back in touch with fiscal conservatism when he was forced to close the purported $9.6 billion State deficit with $5 billion in spending cuts and promises that the sun will soon begin rising in the West. Brown is to be applauded for implementing the first real cuts in the state budget in the last 20 years. But his job was made easier by strong stock market capital gains and very optimistic projections of strong tax growth for the next three years.

More Cuts

California state and local governments avoided much of the pain of the 2008 Great Recession that seems as if it will never end. But that pain has arrived this year in a big way. It is extremely painful to see large cuts in classroom teachers and active police officers. Nonetheless, California government employee levels have been cut by 62,000 in the last two years.

Unfortunately, according to the UCLA Anderson Business School Forecast, California State and local governments needed to have already eliminated 130,000 positions to balance their budgets.

Over the next three months, California Treasurer Bill Lockyer will need to borrow $15 billion and other local governments will need to borrow $10 billion just to keep the lights on. The combination of irresponsible spending growth and a very unfriendly business climate has left California looking to the credit rating agencies a lot like a deadbeat.

I am somewhat optimistic that California will find a way to borrow huge amounts of money this year, but the costs of that borrowing will be brutal.

The former treasurer-tax collector for Orange County, Chriss Street blogs at Chriss Street and Company.