Option 4: Follow the Money

UC COMMUNITY COALITION FOR OPTION 4
Santa Barbara campus
www.option4.org
“The mind and intellect of man is the very essence of the soul.”
--St. Thomas Aquinas

FOLLOW THE MONEY
By the UC COMMUNITY COALITION FOR OPTION 4

1. The recently-proposed oil extraction tax would have maintained CalWorks, In Home Support Services and Healthy Families at current levels with about $300 million left over for public education.

2. If we had anti-tax Alaska’s 25% oil extraction tax it would raise $3 billion, the amount of new budget cuts to all of higher education.

3. The top income tax rate is 9.3%. If we raised it back to Pete Wilson’s 10% on incomes of $300,000, and 11% above $600,000, it would raise $5 billion.

4. $7,973,000,000 (almost eight billion dollars) of the federal stimulus package (ARRA) to California was intended for public education. Where is it?

5. UC’s bond rating was recently affirmed as “stable” owing in part to a
“sizeable balance sheet that remains highly liquid, with $5.4 billion of unrestricted financial resources ($6.5 billion excluding post-retirement health liabilities) and active treasury management monitoring a short-term investment pool exceeding $6 billion.” Huh? What was that? (So how come we can’t use some of those unrestricted financial resources to save California’s middle class?)

6. California’s investment in prisons has risen as dramatically as its investment in education has declined. It costs far more to keep a prisoner in jail annually than it does to subsidize an undergraduate’s education. (An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure; the higher the education level, the higher the salary.)

7. 2.3% of UC employees make over $900 million dollars a year combined. The top ten earners are all coaches, medical faculty, and administrators. Base pay makes up only a small part of their total pay. By “taxing” only base pay salary and not total compensation, Yudof is creating an anti-progressive tax structure.

8. Since February of 2009, top UC executives have already garnered $6 million in the form of stipends, raises, bonuses and the like. The interim Chief Financial Officer at UCSF Medical Center received a $58,625 “administrative stipend” atop a yearly salary of $250,000; a new top executive at UCI Medical Center was given an annual salary of $660,000, a 22% increase over the salary of his predecessor; the Chief Financial Officer of the UCLA hospital system just added $70,000 to his salary, with a possible bonus of $95,000.