But nearly six months later, as final work on the budget wraps up, Brown’s dominance of state finances has gone all but unchallenged. Any assumption that a lame-duck governor in his final year would have less clout has long since been disproved.

For the fiscal year which begins Sunday, the state will have a $138.6 billion general fund. Spending on special funds dedicated to specific programs and on bond debt will bring the total overall budget to $199.6 billion.

Brown made some concessions during the budget process. The state will spend an additional $600 million on programs to help local governments deal with homelessness; give an additional $344 million to the CSU and UC systems; and provide $90 million more for monthly CALworks welfare payments.

But new spending is dwarfed by the billions of dollars the state continues to set aside in reserves. Nearly $14 billion is expected to be in the state’s “rainy day” fund and $2 billion more in other funds by the end of fiscal 2018-19 – so much so that the state may soon have to cut the sales tax to prevent reserves from exceeding constitutional limits.

The governor has emphasized building up reserves because of his frequently voiced belief that the state is overdue for a recession. Because by far the state’s biggest source of money is income and capital-gains taxes paid by the very wealthy, revenue can plunge rapidly when Silicon Valley stumbles. A decade ago, in the first fiscal year after the Great Recession, revenue fell $20 billion – leading to cuts in spending on public education and welfare programs under Brown’s predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The freshness of this budget pain in the memories of dozens of long-serving state lawmakers has made even some ardent liberals open to the governor’s relative frugality.

No expansion of Medi-Cal to undocumented adults

This was evident in the resolution of the fight over access to Medi-Cal, the state program providing health care to the poor. Some Bay Area and Los Angeles County Democrats pushed hard for giving regular, full access to the subsidized care to older unauthorized immigrants, not just to children, as is now the case.

But the governor never budged. All progressives got out of Brown was an agreement to form a commission that will “broadly study California’s health care needs” – a concession that was dismissed as meaningless by some groups which had hoped for much more, according to a Los Angeles Times report. Cynthia Buiza, executive director of the California Immigrant Policy Center, told the Times that the “budget deal is devastating for the health of all that call California home. … We are specifically disappointed that our low-income immigrant neighbors, friends, colleagues and communities will continue to suffer from [Medi-Cal] exclusion.”

Republican lawmakers were largely on the sidelines in shaping the budget. While some praise Brown for restraining his fellow Democrats, others challenge the narrative that he is frugal. A recent budget op-ed in the Los Angeles Times offered some support for this skepticism. It noted that total spending will go up by 9 percent from the current fiscal year to the next one – more than four times the rate of inflation.

When Jerry Brown returned to the governor’s office in 2011, Democrats largely accepted his argument that with revenue down and deficits high because of a deep recession, the state budget needed to be as

Now, as Brown prepares for the final “May revise” of his career, some Democrats’ frustration is boiling over. In a bid to get the governor to drop his opposition to more generous state welfare benefits in his $132 billion 2018-19 budget, they’re planning to depict him as indifferent to and callous about child poverty.

The focus of the fight is the CalWORKS program, which provides cash aid to eligible families with one or more children. Household income and family size are the key factors in determining eligibility. The same factors, and whether any family members have special needs, are evaluated in setting how much help they get from CalWORKS.

But as a recent Los Angeles Times report noted, the payment scale has not been adjusted for inflation for years — meaning the effective spending power of CalWORKS’ payments is down 37 percent since 2007.

To hammer home the hardship faced by CalWORKS recipients — and to make the case for Brown accepting annual cost-of-living increases to CalWORKS payments — Assembly Democrats recently arranged for Rochella Mendoza, a 31-year-old single mother from the Bay Area, to testify before a budget subcommittee. She said the $600 she got monthly from CalWORKS couldn’t cover basic needs and worried that her son would be scarred by the “shame and humiliation” of poverty just as she was growing up, the Times reported.

While the effort by lawmakers to depict Brown as hard-hearted is new, advocates for the poor have gone after the state in general for years for — in their view — tolerating unusually high levels of child poverty. A 2011 HBO documentary (pictured) highlighted this concern with a focus on destitute families in affluent Orange County.

The Census Bureau’s alternative measurement of poverty that includes cost of living shows California as having the highest overall rate in the nation. But narrower measures have also shown high levels of poverty specifically in families with children.

PPIC: 46% of state kids live in poor or near-poor homes

A Public Policy Institute of California report from October 2017 found that 46 percent of children in the state lived in households that were either poor or near poor. The report said more than one-quarter of children met the official definition of living in poverty in counties with nearly half the state’s population, starting with Los Angeles.

The report noted that in the 59th Assembly District, based in South Los Angeles around the 110 Freeway, a staggering 49 percent of children were growing up in impoverished homes – at least those who had shelter. A January 2017 report by the KPCC PBS channel found that the number of CalWORKS families in Los Angeles County who were homeless had tripled from 2005 to 2015. The report quoted Phil Ansell, the head of the county’s efforts to help the homeless, as saying the increase was a direct result of CalWORKS cash assistance not keeping up with the cost of living.

Will such stories and data sway the governor, who has repeatedly warned that a recession is overdue and would create a massive hole for years in future state budgets?

Brown has been characteristically tight-lipped going into budget negotiations. But social service advocates see reasons for hope in the governor’s last-minute concession in budget talks in June 2016. That’s when he agreed to drop a 1996 policy that decreed families receiving CalWORKS assistance couldn’t get more money if they added a child. This led to the state providing an additional $136 or more per month to nearly 100,000 families, according to a Governing magazine account.

The monthly benefit would be given for each child two years old or younger, with a requirement that the money be spent only on diapers.

The benefit would not begin being awarded until 2020, and is expected to cost around $14 million to $18 million annually as part of the CalWORKS welfare program.

Legislative analysis estimates that 26,000 children would currently qualify.

The measure heads to Gov. Jerry Brown for a final verdict.

By Katy Grimes

The Employment Development Department used to be called the “Unemployment Department.” And state welfare recipients are now “clients.”

The majority party in the California Legislature appears determined on expanding social services in the state despite evidence demonstrating that the programs don’t necessarily improve lives, as the very mixed record of the 50-year federal “War on Poverty” confirms. While discussing the need for “safety net” programs for the poorest in the state, legislators always cast a wider net than necessary.

The Assembly held a committee hearing Wednesday about expanding mandatory universal government preschool in California. By Thursday, the Senate Health and Human Services Committee was focused on the CalWORKS program, and how to attract more “clients.” Expansion of the state’s Health and Human Services agency is an obvious goal.

CA has nation’s worst poverty rate

This push to expand government aid programs has as a backdrop California’s poverty rate of 23.5 percent — the highest in the nation and much higher than the national average of 16.1 percent. The U.S. Census Bureau said the high poverty rate was driven in part by California’s high cost of living, which is never a focus of the Legislature.

The stated goal of Thursday’s Senate hearing was to get  several questions answered, including “What does evidence indicate can help families avoid the negative consequences of poverty?”

The challenges of stress are made worse by poverty, according to Sarah Bohn of the Public Policy Institute of California and Ann Stevens, the director of UC Davis Center on Poverty Research.

Stevens said the well-known correlation between poverty in childhood and long-term effects mean poverty later in life, poor health and low educational achievement.

Subsidies for poor advocated, and more of them

“Constant stress is worse in poor people,” said Stevens. “Unobserved things in families in poverty lead to other bad outcomes.”

“Persistent poverty creates chronic stress for children,” Stevens added.

Stevens and Bohn advocated for subsidies for the poor, and for longer periods of time.

“A strong case can be made for reducing material deprivation,” Stevens said. “There’s growing credible evidence to support this.”

But both Stevens and Bohn also advocated for universal mandatory preschool. “There’s growing evidence to support intervention in early childhood and preschool,” Stevens said. She added this is crucial to break the cycle of poverty. “It’s not a trade-off,” said Stevens.

On welfare, mixed messages from Washington

Meanwhile, the federal government is sending out mixed messages. Under President Obama, one form of welfare has exponentially increased since he first took office in 2009. His administration, however, is also pressuring California to limit another type of welfare.

“When Obama was inaugurated in January 2009, the number of Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program (SNAP) recipients was 31,939,110. By October 2012, the latest month reported, they had jumped to 47,525,329,” CNS News reported. “That means the food stamp program grew by approximately 11,133 recipients per day from January 2009 to October 2012.” SNAP used to be known as the Food Stamp program.

CNS News also reported, “[F]ederal spending on SNAP has increased every fiscal year that Obama has been in office. In FY 2009 — when SNAP was still known as the ‘Food Stamp’ program — the government spent $55.6 billion. According to an April 2012 report from the Congressional Budget Office, SNAP enrollment increased by 70 percent between 2007 and 2011.”

In California, spending on such programs is going up. But the Brown administration is also trying to implement some of the welfare reforms seen in other states — because of federal pressure.

“The Governor’s budget proposes $20.3 billion from the General Fund for health programs—a 3.4 percent increase over 2012-13 estimated expenditures—and $8 billion from the General Fund for human services programs—a 7.9 percent increase over 2012-13 estimated expenditures,” the Legislative Analyst’s Office wrote in its 2013-14 “Analysis of the Health and Human Services Budget.”

Recent changes to the CalWORKs program include a phase-out of exemptions from welfare-to-work requirements, and the introduction of a new 24-month limit on adult eligibility in the program.

Existing law requires each California county to provide cash assistance and other social services to needy families through the California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids program. CalWORKs uses funds from the federal Temporary Assistance to Needy Families block grant program, as well as state and county funds.

Reforms prompted by federal pressure

As a condition of the federal grant, the federal government requires states to meet work requirements. But California has been in violation of this rule, and was notified the state will be assessed penalties of $160 million by the federal government. This is just for 2008 and 2009. There is no word yet if California will be penalized for 2010, 2011 and 2012.

The state claims to have a plan to remedy this, but not by requiring CalWORKS recipients to get to work.

“Planned state actions are projected to increase the state’s work participation rate by (1) increasing the number of countable cases that meet the federal work requirement through the work Incentive Nutritional Suppliment program, and (2) removing from the work participation requirement calculation certain CalWORKS cases that do not meet the federal work requirement,” the LAO reported.

The LAO estimates that California “may be compliant with the requirement by 2015.”

CalWORKS recipients are required to work 20, 30, or 35 hours per week, depending on family composition. California allows CalWORKS recipients to substitute mental health and substance abuse programs for work.

CalWORKS reductions may be reversed

California has made $700 million in reductions to the CalWORKS program since 2009. But now, the Legislature is actively pushing to expand the program.

SB 1041, passed in 2012, authorized the changes to the CalWORKS program, but only through 2012.

By Katy Grimes

It appears that Democrats aren’t really sincere or even serious about working toward solutions that will actually help California solve the economic crisis in the state. Last week, Democrats voted against a smart consolidation program which would have provided an additional $1.3 billion to the state.

After Gov. Jerry Brown announced Monday that California’s budget deficit has grown to nearly $16 billion, astoundingly higher than the $9 billion deficit amount announced in January, one would assume that every California politician would be looking under every rock for money to shore-up the debt.

Apparently politics trumps economic stability.

Welfare system maze

One way to cut government is consolidating redundant services. If politicians are looking for redundancy in state government, the biggest mess  is also the most obvious: California currently has four different systems which run Medi-Cal, CalWORKS, and Food Stamp programs. Every county has its own maze of welfare programs as well.

Last week during the Senate Budget Subcommittee No. 3 on Health and Human Services hearing, Democrats moved to repeal the 2009 law directing the state to move towards a single, centralized system for Medi-Cal, CalWORKS, and Food Stamp programs.

In a 2010 report, the Legislative Analyst’s Office found “the new statewide process is intended to achieve two primary outcomes: (1) providing better service to people applying for these programs and (2) lowering administrative costs through better use of technology.”

Even with the LAO’s recommendation to consolidate, for efficiency, simplification, better record keeping, and cost savings, Democrats opposed consolidating the four state programs into one system – even with the $1.3 billion incentive from the Federal Government to do this.

With this opposition, Democrats have jeopardized much needed federal funds. This decision highlights the purely political problems involved in balancing our budget – government jobs and government spending, over efficiency and a slimmer state government.

In 2011 California applied for $1.3 billion in federal funding to streamline the four systems in the state’s largest welfare programs. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services responded in April that they were approving the funding request on the condition that California consolidate the welfare system.

But Democrats said “no.”