![]() ![]() ![]() The contemporary fiscal limits on the human-services professions can be understood by analyzing the recent history of four developments: economic growth, consumerism, racial and ethnic divisions, and democratic civic life. Accordingly, one of the best ways to prepare for work in the human-service professions is to study the often arcane issues of government finance, local politics, and regional economy, which can so severely constrain our ability to carry out our jobs and our ideals. We spend more and more of our time writing reports to justify our existence, informing the public as to the need for our services, combatting public misperceptions and low esteem for our work, protecting our budgets, soliciting voluntary donations, and becoming involved in politics to ensure that our institutions maintain the capacity to care for the people we were trained to help. The practices of the professions of public health, urban planning, library science, social work, and teaching now revolve around fiscal concerns. The only mandate to survive the health-care debate was the political imperative that health-care expenditures should be financed through cost savings, instead of increasing taxes or the deficit. Thinning of the welfare safety net and the growth of the homeless population during the Reagan years. The new fiscal reality for human-service professions has been emblazoned in the newspaper headlines of the past decade and a half: the ballot measures cutting taxes and expenditures in dozens of states the voter backlash against a New Jersey governor who dared to raise taxes and against a presidential candidate who merely mentioned the t-word and the I did begin teaching that fall, and I devoted myself to trying to understand the path that a generation of American homeowners had trodden to the victory celebrations for Proposition 13. As I anxiously waited to hear of last-minute budget decisions, I began to sense how the new reality of Proposition 13 had forevermore changed the practice of the human-service professions in the state sector. In the same communities but in an ethos far away, recently hired college graduates soon lost their jobs as public health workers, schoolteachers, and urban planners. A generation of homeowners celebrated their good fortune in Prop. Then, I read the news headlines that ballot Proposition 13 had passed and had cut property taxes by more than half. In June 1978, after spending twenty-five years of my life as a full-time student, I had finally secured my first full-time professional job, as a lecturer at the University of California at San Diego. How much we cannot be sure, for we are among the losers. opposed the annunciation of Acquisitive Man. These years appear at times to display not a revolutionary challenge, but a resistance movement . . . met Utilitarianism in their daily lives, and they sought to throw it back, not blindly, but with intelligence and moral passion. . . . ![]()
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