A Moral Framework for Addressing California's Budget Crisis

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In Search of the Common Good

A Moral Framework for Addressing California's Budget Crisis
California Catholic Conference
June 2011

For five consecutive years California has stood on the edge of a budgetary abyss. The state’s credit rating has been seriously eroded. Severe cuts have been made in key social programs with profound implications for the dignity of the human person and the nature of our social compact. Decades of disparate policy in the areas of tax, expenditure and pension structures have created ever-increasing dilemmas with no short-term solution.

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Yet amidst this deepening fiscal crisis, political dialogue has failed to identify a path forward, despite strenuous efforts by many in state government. Partisan dynamics have blocked the crafting of hard but necessary solutions that will genuinely address the enduring problems built into California’s budgetary house of cards. Major elements necessary for genuine remedies for our state’s financial woes are declared “off the table” by both political parties as well as by the vested interests that support them. Policy is dictated more by stalemate and impasse rather than by a search for compromise on solutions that will best serve the interests of all Californians.

In such a climate it is necessary to underscore that the budgetary struggle crippling California is not merely political in nature or implications. Rather, it concerns profound moral questions about who are we as a society, how we view our future and whether as a people we can look beyond our own self-interest to the interest of the larger society. Much of the inability of our political leaders to forge workable solutions to the real budget dilemmas arises from the lack of a common moral frame of reference for evaluating the tradeoffs that lie before us.

For this reason we speak as the Catholic bishops of California on the budgetary crisis that confronts our state. We speak as pastors of those who operate California’s small and large businesses, who teach in our schools, who work in our fields, who staff our local governments, who are unemployed. We also speak as providers of education, social and health services who know firsthand the effects of cutbacks in programs that form the social safety net of our state. We speak as employers who meet payrolls in our parishes, schools and social service agencies, and who understand the problems of rising costs, particularly in the field of health care. Most of all we speak out of the two thousand year old tradition of ethical analysis and moral insight that is contained in Catholic social teaching. We hope that our tradition, in concert with those of other religious communities, can provide a frame of reference for a deeper and ethically-infused public dialogue about the budgetary problems that confront our state.