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May 4, 2008 | Author: thedyinglords | Filed under: Uncategorized
Budgets And Blood: A Swift Resolution
cross-posted from open left
During the 2003 recall campaign, Arnold Schwarzenegger promised he would “fix” the budget. He fixed it, all right, his first day in office he repealed the vehicle license fee (VLF), leaving the state liable for an addition $6 billion of local spending annually. He then used all kinds of “creative financing” as it’s known in Hollywood, to maintain the illusion that everything was just fine. This January, he dropped the act.
“For several years, we kept the budget wolf from the door, but the wolf is back,” he said, as he announced an 18-month budget shortfall of $14.5 billion, a figure that the non-partisan Legislative Analyst soon upped to $16 billion. The Democratic legislative leadership managed to trim that by $9 billion with some creative financing of its own, before the Governor announced on April 24 that it was up to $10 billion, and still climbing as California’s economy continued to worsen, along with the rest of America, and the world.
For some idea of what this means, in March, the California Budget Project reported that the Governors proposed budget would hit children, seniors, the poor and disabled especially hard. In Los Angeles County alone, this would include cuts of $670 per student for all 1,544,710 students served by the county’s public schools. In the past, conservative Republican governors like Ronald Reagan and Pete Wilson agreed to balancing budget cuts and tax increases to fill budget gaps, but so-called “moderate” Arnold Schwarzenegger is dead set against raising taxes-Republican legislators are even more adamant.
All of which means we need to “think outside the box.”
Mandatory Blood Donations
Because education cuts account for such a large chunk of the budget gap, it seems only natural to think creatively about how these cuts in particular might be made up. Some have suggested instituting a system of mandatory blood donations for all students, and using the proceeds to help fill the budget gap. At first blush, it seems like a promising approach. “We do collect form high schools and colleges,” said Theresa Solorio, Public Affairs Manager for Red Cross Blood Service in Southern California. “About 20 percent comes from high school and college.”
But there’s a catch, it turns out, as Solorio explained further. (Solorio did not address policy questions, but was most helpful in illuminating how things currently stand.) California law requires donors to be 17–16 with parental permission and and a doctor’s approval–while FDA regulations require donors to weigh 110. This would exclude the vast majority of public school students–though not those attending college, another big deficit sore spot.
There is, however, a more fundamental problem: blood is routinely donated–as in, “for free.” Changing a non-profit operation into a for-profit one is hardly impossible, however. Most hospitals were non-profit only a few decades ago. And besides, blood plasma, as opposed to whole blood, is already routinely sold. What’s more, whole blood cannot be drawn more often than once every 56 days–the FDA again. Plasma, however, can be donated twice a week, and there already is a paying market for it–in the range of $20 to $30 per donation.
Since the public school budget shortfall is under $4 per day, plasma donation can clearly fill the funding gap with a single donation a week, at least for those who qualify. There’s the rub. Most school children are too young, don’t weigh enough, or both. There are two other problems. First, even if we could solve these legal difficulties, by getting these legal restrictions removed, younger children just don’t have that much blood. Second, even if we could get that much blood, the market for it simply isn’t big enough to pay for the budget shortfall we face.
However, public policy expert Richard Vigorous–a pseudonym used for work on policies with “special sensitivity”–sees a great deal of promise in exploiting foreign blood markets, where supply and demand may not be so reliably matched. Taking a page from OPEC, Vigorous suggests, we might even be able to manipulate world markets by tapping into the sort of oversupply that a well-run mandatory donation program could generate.
By strategically managing gluts and droughts, Vigorous argues, the results could be spectacular, particularly in dealing with the Middle East. “We have to create an artificial shortage and give people a chance to speculate in futures,” Vigorous explained. “We need to find a way to stockpile it, so we could make a straight exchange of blood for oil.”
Another wrinkle is added when we consider the potential for driving up demand for blood the old-fashioned way–declaring war. “The state of California should be allowed to declare war on its own …
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