Shane Goldmacher got the scoop over at the LA Times on Arnold Schwarzenegger's plans to close the budget gap in January 2010: more cuts! Lots of cuts! Huge, wacko, crazy cuts!
Facing a budget deficit of more than $20 billion, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is expected to call for deep reductions in already suffering local mass transit programs, renew his push to expand oil drilling off the Santa Barbara coast and appeal to Washington for billions of dollars in federal help, according to state officials and lobbyists familiar with the plan.
If Washington does not provide roughly $8 billion in new aid for the state, the governor threatens to severely cut back -- if not eliminate -- CalWORKS, the state's main welfare program; the In-Home Health Care Services program for the disabled and elderly poor, and two tax breaks for large corporations recently approved by the Legislature, the officials said....
The shift would gut a voter-approved measure, Proposition 42, that protects how current gas taxes are spent. Public transit -- buses, rail and other forms of mass transportation -- now receives 20% of all gas sales tax. After the tax swap, that requirement would disappear. The tax swap could also cost schools -- as it would result in the share of tax revenues they are entitled to under state law dropping by more than $800 million.
That's the meat of it: further and illegal cuts to public transportation (but apparently no cuts to roads), $800 million in cuts to schools, potential elimination of CalWORKS, drilling, and begging the feds for money.
In other words, more of the same. Oh sure, Arnold is willing to admit the $2 billion in corporate tax cuts created in the February 2009 budget deal was a bad idea. But everything else here is going to the same well Arnold's gone to before, including things he knows the Legislature has rejected, such as offshore drilling.
What this proposal shows is a tired, exhausted, intellectually bankrupt governor playing out the string. This is his last January budget before he is finally termed out of office at the end of 2010. Instead of trying to chart a more sensible course for state finances, such as embracing some of the revenue proposals that have floated around, he is trying to do the same things he's done in previous years, even though we know they'll either fail in the Legislature or fail to balance the budget.
This proposal shows that the Arnold Schwarzenegger experiment is, beyond any doubt, a failure. Brought to Sacramento in 2003 to solve a budget crisis and "blow up the boxes," he instead helped create a far larger crisis by remaining stuck inside his own boxes, including an unwillingness to address the structural revenue shortfall by raising taxes on the wealthy in order to protect the public services that are essential to economic recovery.
The federal government will have to come to the aid of California and the numerous other states still facing big budget deficits, unless Obama wants to risk jeopardizing the oh-so-tentative economic "recovery" some claim to be underway. But here again Arnold has consistently failed to bring federal money to California, another of his 2003 campaign pledges.
It's not yet clear whether any of the gubernatorial candidates plan to chart a meaningfully different course than Arnold when it comes to the budget. But it should be clear to them that Arnold's approach, of cuts and refusal to embrace taxes, is a complete failure. |
