You're Missing One

You've got a point (0.00 / 0)

The Denham and Strickland bills wouldn't solve the state deficit. They were merely measures to cut down on waste in the government.

That doesn't change the fact that these bills were good ideas.  Democrats shouldn't shoot down good ideas, like consolidating the CIWMB, because it wont solve the big picture.

Each bill should be individually judged based on it's merit, not by the party identification of the author.

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by: Adam H @ Sun May 03, 2009 at 01:27:24 AM UTC

Except that the Republicans (0.00 / 0)

continually (and I mean continually since Reagan) pretend that there's a magic asterisk labelled "waste" that equals some very very large number relative to the overall cost of the services that the government provides.

And that is simply false.  A lie.  Untrue.  So while I am in favor of eliminating waste, there's no such thing as "waste".  It's sort of like all the howling about "earmarks" in the federal budget, when they add up to about 1% of the budget.  Ditto for "welfare".

If you want to solve actual budget deficits, you have to talk about eliminating entire classes of services completely.  Lots of them.  Nobody wants to do that -- including the Republicans, whose constituents* actually depend on a lot of government services -- so the Republicans continue to tell the lie that if you just eliminate "waste", everything will be fine, and you can have a functioning modern government, including education, roads, and a three-strikes law, but you won't actually need to have taxes.

* Note: The Republican Party seems more than happy to make sure that poor people suffer, so they are willing to cut services that help poor people.  But they cloak their social darwinism in a lot of claptrap about self-reliance and make it OK by talking about welfare queens and illegal immigrants.  

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by: jsw @ Sun May 03, 2009 at 01:50:43 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

I should note that the other way to go (0.00 / 0)

would be of course to have reasonable (and progressive) tax rates relative to the actual services that people want the government to provide.  But for a lot of reasons, many of which have been explored in great length on these very pages, that's not currently possible in California.

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by: jsw @ Sun May 03, 2009 at 02:03:36 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

Umm no (5.00 / 1)

Democrats actually offered to actually make the Denham better, but he refused. The Committee in which Denham's bill was heard offered Denham an amendment to his bill that would abolish the Department of Conservation and merge its operations into the Waste Management Board. This would have resulted in more savings and streamlined more government than the Denham bill. Why is this approach better? Because while the Department of Conservation meets behind closed doors to make decisions, the Waste Management Board is a public body and has open meetings. Not to mention the fact that Schwarzenegger administration itself has lauded the inarguable success of the Waste Board's recycling programs. Denham refused to amend his bill, on behalf of the Administration. - Jim Evans, Communications Director, Darrell Steinberg

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by: Jim Evans @ Sun May 03, 2009 at 04:17:20 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

merger (0.00 / 0)

  I'm guessing the reason behind the offer was that the Waste Management board has legislative appointees while the Department of Conservation does not (and similarly the reason behind the rejection).  Just as a purely public policy point, boards which have appointees from both the legislature and the executive probably do a better job, as oversite from members appointed solely by one branch tend to be "loyal" and hence useless as an oversite agency.  This is a civics lesson that should also be made.

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by: MarkD @ Sun May 03, 2009 at 05:16:40 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

Waste Bd (0.00 / 0)

The Waste Board has appointees from both the Legislative branch and the Executive Branch, actually. The current chair, Margo Reid Brown, was appointed by Arnold Schwarzenegger. - Jim Evans, Communications Director, Darrell Steinberg

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by: Jim Evans @ Sun May 03, 2009 at 07:35:00 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

legislative appointees (0.00 / 0)

  I realize it was unclear what I wrote but I meant that the Waste Board has both legislative and executive appointees whereas the Department of Conservation is under the executive and hence is only answerable to the legislature through the (vastly inadequate) oversite procedures.  My central point still stands--as a matter of good public policy, you want appointees from both branches for boards whose primary function is oversite, particularly given how weak the legislature is in this state (anything that gives it a little more power to offset the executive is a good thing).

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by: MarkD @ Sun May 03, 2009 at 19:47:00 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

making sense of big numbers (0.00 / 0)

I think that the easiest way to give people an intuition about what those big numbers mean is to divide by the population.  So if California proposes to spend $1 billion on something, that's a bit over $26 per Californian (we're up to 38 million now).  If it's $1 million, we're talking about 2.6 cents per person.  These are numbers of a size that people can intuitively understand.

On the national level, $1 billion is about $3.30 per American, $1 trillion is $3,300, and $1 million is 0.3 cents.
Yet politicians will often about all these amounts equally.
 

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by: Joe Buck @ Sun May 03, 2009 at 06:01:18 AM UTC