Give Republicans some sort of budget reform and business regulatory relief. Toss in more spending cuts. Then they'd doubtless help close tax loopholes and balance the budget.
The Capitol could use budget discipline, and Republicans need some wins.
They're right-wingers, but sometimes they're just plain right.
Look, I think Skelton is one of the better columnists covering Sacramento. Not sure that's saying all that much now that there are like 3 people covering our state politics/policy issues, but it's true. Occasionally he's dead-on. And sometimes he's David Broder for California, which is apparently where he's headed with this piece.
The Republicans will get wins...as soon as they win at the ballot box. That is how politics works. Wins aren't handed out based on columnists opinions that they are "overdue" like some slumping ball player. (No, Barry Zito, I'm not looking at you.) The Republicans could care less about fiscal discipline when it comes to tax cuts and building dams, why have they become the authority on "fiscal discipline."
By the way, one of the so-called reforms is the imposition of a two-thirds requirement. I can't think of a bigger example of fiscal irresponsibility than holding up the state budget and revenue process than the 2/3 requirement. Every year the Republicans use their leverage over the budget process to get other "wins." And every year, the Reps block common sense reform of the tax code. Skelton just tosses this one out the window, but you can't pick the sane ideas ignore the insanity when determining "fiscal responsibility" titles.
By the way, the Republican Senate Caucus put up a video (WMV) on their budget website. Apparently they haven't mastered the "YouTubz" yet, so I'll not do them any favors by posting it. But, check it out. See the depth of their hatred of government, and their free-rider mentality. Basically the video outlines a day in the life of some random Californian, pointing out certain taxable events. Apparently the CA GOP doesn't want roads, garbage pickup, electricity, consistent and safe markets, and clean air.
And these are the people that we should give "some wins"? No, but thanks.
I know, I know, it's too easy. But what better headline can one come up with to assess the ridiculous and ineffective solutions proposed by Leon Panetta's high-powered, high cost group of high Broderists to solve the budget crisis?
* Requiring new or expanded programs -- whether created by the Legislature or ballot initiative -- to contain a specific funding source. That could be either new taxes or money gleaned from another program that is eliminated.
* Regularly examining spending programs to determine whether they should be revised, reduced or rubbed out.
* Also regularly reviewing tax loopholes to see if they're still needed: "Treat tax breaks like spending."
* Creating a rainy-day fund fed by unexpected tax gushes. When revenue dwindles, dip into the fund. Or use it for one-time public works projects or even tax rebates.
* Modernizing the tax system "to reflect the contemporary economy." Extend the sales tax to services while reducing the overall tax rate.
* Focusing on multiyear spending plans, rather than merely passing one-year budgets.
* Granting more power and responsibility to local governments.
* Changing the two-thirds majority vote requirement for budget passage. It wasn't suggested what the vote should be, but any change must be tied to "other reforms designed to improve performance, accountability and public trust."
Nowhere is the structural revenue shortfall discussed. Instead Panetta and friends take Republican framing to the budget, believing that the problem is too much spending. Nowhere are the state's pressing problems of underfunded education, health care, and public transportation discussed. It's as if those issues don't exist - as if this is 1985 and gas is at $1.20, a year at UC at $2,000, and health insurance plentiful and affordable.
The California Forward proposals are as backward-looking as anything we've yet seen, an effort to continue obsolete 20th century assumptions, an effort to avoid confronting 21st century realities.
Of course, it should come as no surprise that the group also embraces the unnecessary redistricting reform - an inherently pro-Republican proposal that should suggest where this group's allegiances actually lie.
Skelton takes their bait in his column, and argues - against all evidence - that the problem is simply that Republicans and Democrats won't talk to each other:
The reformers are prepared to take their proposals to the ballot in 2010 if they're ignored by the Legislature. But they're hoping the lawmakers will adopt at least incremental changes. A good time to start will be during this summer's budget negotiations. The reforms could "give Republicans a little comfort on spending and how tax dollars are used," Panetta theorizes.
But first the politicians have to start talking to each other.
Here's a suggestion: Turn off the BlackBerrys and cellphones.
Better yet, lock them in a desk. Look people in the eye. Smile. Sit down and deal.
This is ridiculous to the point of not understanding California politics. Someone as experienced as Skelton ought to know the real problem is with ideology and the rules. The 2/3 rule allows far-right Republicans to hold the state hostage to their rabid anti-tax views, which are not representative of the state's public opinion. It's not gerrymandering that enables this, or a refusal to talk - but the very real fact that the moment a Republican deviates from the firm anti-tax line the Club for Growth, the Howard Jarvis Association, the CRA and even the CRP will come down on that legislator like a ton of bricks. His or her primary opponent will be well-funded and his or her hopes of re-election and higher office are over.
How does Skelton not understand this?
Skelton, Panetta, and the other high Broderists wish it were 1974 all over again. It's not. It's a shame what remains of our state's media prefers nostalgic flights of fancy to realistic assessments of present-day issues.
Last fall I took the LA Times to task for framing the state budget crisis as a problem of "automatic" spending, and not being sufficiently attentive to the structural revenue shortfall that is the true cause of the budget problem.
Take, for example, Sunday's SacBee column from Daniel Weintraub, California Budget 101: What went wrong, when. Weintraub's column purports to be a "a fuller explanation of the dimensions of the problem" - but winds up repeating the same discredited arguments, namely that this is primarily a spending problem:
But the economic issues only worsened a basic, structural problem in the state budget: Spending is programmed by law to grow each year at a rate that is generally faster than tax revenues can match. Current state law would push general fund spending to $113 billion next year if nothing is done to slow it, according to the Schwarzenegger administration. Revenues, meanwhile, are projected to decline further, to about $95 billion. The budget Schwarzenegger celebrated last summer would have bridged the gap for one year at best.
Weintraub then goes on to detail the education, health care, prisons and transportation spending that makes up that growth. But nowhere in his column would you see the following:
Tom McClintock and Arnold Schwarzenegger's $6 billion VLF cut
And of course, the start of the state's budget problem: Prop 13.
In other words, Weintraub makes it sound like the state is in a budget crisis because it is overspending, instead of because it is undertaxing. This is especially important when we consider what the state has been spending on - education, health care, and transportation - the very things California needs to remain competitive in a globalized 21st century economy.
The aforementioned George Skelton column provides an excellent contrast, showing what a more accurate explanation of our budget problem would look like:
People, one place it [additional spending under Arnold's administration] went was for Schwarzenegger's car tax cut. Yes, that tax cut counts as spending -- about $6 billion annually. It's because revenue from the car tax -- the vehicle license fee -- had gone to local governments, not the state. The governor generously agreed to replace the locals' lost revenue with money from the state general fund. But he never replaced the tax he grandiosely whacked. Big hole. Big mistake.
The 2000 decision to spend most of a one-time, $12 billion tax windfall on permanent spending and tax cuts that could not be sustained, leading to the state's chronic budget deficits, is another [wrongheaded move].
And to his credit, Walters has argued for higher taxes, although as part of a holistic budget reform package that contains some problematic ideas.
The fact is that if we are to finally end 30 years of budget crisis, we have to find new revenues. The notion that any new taxes cripple economic growth is absurd - both California and the federal government hiked taxes between 1990 and 1993 and it didn't prevent the 1990s economic boom. The investment in education and mass transit helps create more investment while saving commuters, students, and workers money; and universal health care (or even a modest expansion of government-provided care) creates significant savings for businesses and employees.
A focus on spending, however, blinds us to the structural revenue shortfall and leads Californians and their politicians to assume the only way out is to slash spending - which would make the cost of doing business in California, and the cost of living here, significantly higher.
Without solving the revenue problem, we will never cure this chronic budget crisis.
Over the weekend the CDP resolutions committee endorsed the recall of Jeff Denham in SD-12. The Republicans have thrown a massive hissy fit over this, similar to the hissy fit Yacht Party regulars like Sam Blakeslee have thrown, denouncing those who dare to identify his record in public. All of a sudden we're seeing op-eds throughout the region and across the state decrying what is routinely identified as a "Don Perata-engineered power grab." The latest comes from the fount of conventional wisdom in the California political media, George Skelton:
This is the time of year when the northern San Joaquin Valley is actually bucolic. Temperatures are bearable. The hills are green and the orchards are in full bloom -- almonds gussied in white, peaches in pink.
Too bad that this spring there's also a foul odor of Sacramento political pollution.
In a nutshell, the local state senator -- Republican Jeff Denham of Merced -- didn't vote for the state budget last summer. That contributed to a 52-day stalemate and angered the Senate leader, Democrat Don Perata of Oakland. So Perata now is trying to recall Denham.
Not just a payback, but the political death penalty.
Funny, I don't remember such high dudgeon back in 2003, when the recall of Gray Davis was viewed as a victory for democracy and an opportunity for the people to have their say.
Here's what's actually going on. Professional hack Kevin Spillane is good at getting his propaganda into the papers. And the media obliges without any historical perspective whatsoever. If Republicans want to put forth a measure ending recall petitions and allowing any state officer to finish out their term, go ahead; I'd probably support it. But they don't. They want to use the recall when it suits them and whine about "fairness" and "power grabs" when it doesn't. There could not have possibly been a bigger power grab than the Darrell Issa and Ted Costa-funded recall of Gray Davis. Anyone in the so-called liberal media dumb enough not to understand this notion of asymmetrical warfare isn't worth reading.
I fear that the Spillane hack-o-thon is bearing fruit in scaring off Democrats from pressing forward on this recall; there certainly wasn't a lot of talk about it or enthusiasm at the convention, nor was there any potential challenger in sight pressing the flesh. The Denham recall, in fact, is what the process was invented for: when legislators protect their own or their party's interest at the expense of the people they should be held accountable. Jeff Denham is part of an effort to stop California lawmakers from doing their jobs and eliminate, for practical purposes, the role of government in the state. The Iron Law of Institutions dictate that "people within institutions act to increase their own power rather than the power of the institution itself." The only way to deal with that from the outside is use the legal tools available to exact leverage on the institution. If it was OK for a Republican to use, so too for a Democrat.
So these media types and their hacktastic Republican spinmeisters can shut their whiny little mouths and defend their role in the shutdown of democracy in California to the voters. Jeff Denham ought to be able to defend himself instead of crying about the "process."
(UPDATE: David promised more on how you can help, here it is! - promoted by Bob Brigham)
There is no reason for a well-informed Californian not to know about the Dirty Tricks initiative to steal the 2008 election by changing the way the state apportions its electoral votes. By now practically every newspaper in the state has written an editorial against it. And now one of the deans of Sacramento, George Skelton, bluntly criticizes the maneuver.
The chutzpah award for this summer has a runaway winner. It's the small team of Republican operatives trying to rig the 2008 presidential race.
"Rig" means tilting the playing field to assure continued Republican occupancy of the White House -- perhaps for a very long time.
The Royal and Ancient Hermetic Order of the Shrill has a new member, and he's particularly amped up about some of the little goodies tucked away in the state budget, which is once again too heavily constructed on the backs of the poor:
Anyway, it was about the time of the wine-tasting that the legislative leaders hatched their plan to roll California's most vulnerable.OK, maybe I'm guilty of a cheap shot. But it's no more a cheap shot than picking the pockets of the poor in order to bring spending and taxes closer into balance.
The victims list includes 1.2 million impoverished aged, blind and disabled, plus 500,000 welfare families, mostly single moms with two kids.
George Skelton, pretty much the only state political columnist at the LA Times, is charitable toward Antonio Villaraigosa by using his recent marital troubles as a partial reason, but he really speaks the truth that Antonio has wasted his time in the Mayor's office:
"Ultimately, Antonio will be judged by voters based on their perception of the job he is doing as mayor," says Democratic strategist Darry Sragow.
That's what many people have told reporters: They don't care what a politician does in private. What counts is what he does for them.
OK, a lot of Angelenos are waiting. The mayor better get crackin'.
Get that subway-to-the-sea moving.
Really bust up some gangs, not just stage photo-ops.
That failed school takeover fiasco was a waste of time and political clout. Why would a new mayor allow himself to make so many enemies in his first major endeavor?
I'm beginning to understand. He was distracted.
The mayor has a list of accomplishments about as long as the average Quick Hit. Literally, the list that the Mayor's office was going to put out included his hosting American Indian Heritage Month.
Not that Indian heritage isn't noble, but it gives one the sense of grasping at straws.
This affair of Villaraigosa's may damage him nationally, but locally, the damage is being done every day he fails to deliver on his promises.
While George Skelton's latest column, which Brian linked to below, contains a fascinating revelation regarding a political lesson the governor learned from his wife -- all I'll say is weiner schnitzel is involved -- the part that really caught my eye was some interesting analysis on Skelton's part on the subject of Schwarzenegger's ambitions (or not) beyond the governor's mansion.
He starts out by summarizing the conventional wisdom: that Arnold will challenge Sen. Boxer in 2010.
Does the centrist governor envision personally taking his bipartisan message to the U.S. Senate in 2010, when he'll be termed out? Top advisors are spreading the word that he might run against Democratic U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, who's up for reelection that year.
