Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech at 81 Friday was every bit as stentorian as JFK’s at 43: charismatic, never geriatric; forceful, never feeble; affirmative, never authorian.
In contrast, Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is perhaps still regarded as Biden’s most commanding domestic policy surrogate (remember it was Newsom, not Biden, who debated DeSantis on Fox)now finds his signature issue—his “first in a generation” reform of the state’s 2004 Mental Health Services Act (MHSA)—hanging by a filament, with 50.2% yeas and 49.8% nays.
California voters were right to view Proposition 1 skeptically, for only a few details disguish it fromthe 2004 measure, which has generated $26 billion in tax revenue while only exacerbating the problems—-from homelessness to undertreated chronic mental illness—it was meant to solve.
Obviously—because its population dwarfs other states’—California has the largest number of homeless people in the nation.
But it also suffers from one of the highest rates of homeless vis-à-vis its overall population. The last official count found more than 181,000 Californians without homes. Nearly a third of the nation;s homeless population. The number is expected to approach 200,000 later this year.
Newsom’s second MHSA—which is expected to pass but only by a hair— reform is actually the third, for in 1967 then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan backed the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, legislation that began moving state MHSA’s toward “deinstitutionalization”: treating people in communities, not in the padlocked wards that Miloš Forman’s demonized in the 1975 film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
“Everything old is new again,” as the expression goes, and to leaven this piece I tried to share my favorite musical version of the proverb: Peter Allen’s 1974 album “Continental America.” Apparently this was behaviorally inappropriate for I got a 404 e
\rror stating “Access to this song is PROHIBITED in the United States.” Undettered, I relocated my IP to Kyoto and can thus offer these few seconds of the ditty:
Newsom’s reforms differ little from the 2004 ones, although plays them up as pulchritudinously as possible.
He would, for example, “rename the Mental Health Services Act The Behavioral Health Care Services Act.”
I have no clue what that nominal change would accomplish, but it may have peeved the state’s existing (and apparently errantly named) Mental Health Oversight and Accountability Commission or MHC—in charge of monitoring outcomes of the 2004 measure. MHOAC in mid 2023 issued a scathing review of Newsom’s reforms which it repeatedly said would fail to “improve outcomes.” In fact, “return on investment” (aka bang for taxpayers’ bucks) is hard to objectively calculate.
These slides from an MHSOAC meeting in February are a tad more cartoonlike than the detailed Excel spreadsheets that state leaders promised to release years ago:
All state ballot initiatives obviously have opponents and proponents.
But Proposition 1 is the first I’ve seen in 28 years where the state’s independent nonpartisan legislative analyst seems unable to coherently describe the measure.
The analyst says for example Newsom’s proposal would “delete the provisions relating to innovative programs and instead… require that counties spend more of their MHSA dollars on ‘personalized support services’ “
OK I get it, innovation is now bad, but personalization is good. But what does that mean on Planet Earth?
CONCLUSION; WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON
Those in my generation—born in the 1960s—tend to frame our opinions of how society ought to help those unable to find shelter at night or to act within social norms by day on our reactions to Miloš Forman’s 1975 film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” In the film, Jack Nicholson stars as a patient confined in a state mental hospital whom nurses and doctors try to “help” through dehumanizing measures from chemical and physical restraints to lobotomies.
Is Prop 1 proof that California itself is going cuckoo? Worse, since Newsom is arguably Joe Biden’s top domestic policy surrogate (recently he, not Biden, debated Ron DeSantis), does this mean that America is about to go nuts too.
Since “cuckoo” isn’t defined by U.S. psychiatrists in their “DSM” or by European psychiatrists in their comparable ICD, I can’t say.
All I know is that liberal democrats have come to have more confidence in their scientific rigor than warranted.
Last year, for instance, I had a policy spat with Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist and recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize in economics for his analytical rigor about public policy.
I called him to grouse about a column he wrote in which he asserted that that “soft infrastructure spending” is a more quantifiable investment than hard infrastructure spending. In layman’s terms Krugman was saying that early investments in mental health (eg zero to three programs to help parents raise kids) pay off more surely than say investments in highways that reduce skidding during snowstorms. What data are you drawing your empirical conclusion from? I asked Krugman
“I don’t know! He said in exasperation to me. “I’m just an economist.”
I only know two things for sure:
One: All of us, regardless of our political affiliations, know a friend or family member who has wrestled with serious mental illness. And that is still a badge of shame in modern Western thought, which still assumes that the brain is is not part of the body; the latter diseases, in other words, may be God’s will but they’re not our fault.
Two: Existential debates about how to help strangers didn’t start with Reagan.
After all, didn’t the New Testament have something to say about this in the parable of Good Samaritan where in Luke 10:25-37, Jesus tells the story of a man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho who is attacked by robbers, beaten, and left half dead by the side of the road. A priest and then a Levite pass by, but both avoid the man and do not offer help. It is a Samaritan, a member of a group generally despised by the Jews, who stops to help the wounded man. He bandages the man’s wounds, transports him on his own donkey to an inn, and pays for the man’s care. (The angry God of the Old Testament might not be as altruistic, of course.)
The parable is a response to a question posed to Jesus about who one’s neighbor is, in the context of the commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18). All I can say is that my Next Door Neighbor App, focused on finding puppies and baking pies for newcomers, turned dark during Covid and now seems to obsessively focus on which camera security system can best protect your house from intruders.