Sacramento
California has rung up multibillion-dollar state budget deficits for five straight years despite steadily increasing revenues from a prospering economy, and fiscal experts say the state faces ongoing deficits even if the economy continues to expand.
It is a “structural deficit,” rather than one born of economic conditions. No matter how much money the state takes in, it is obligated by law (schools, health care) or political imperative (prisons, colleges) to spend at least $1.05 for every $1 of revenue, thanks to monumentally irresponsible spending and tax cut decisions made in 2000, when the state received a one-time income tax windfall.
The deficit could be closed only by rolling back spending and/or raising taxes, but the Capitol has been gridlocked for a half-decade, with Democrats resisting the deep spending cuts demanded by Republicans, Republicans blocking the new taxes proposed by Democrats, and both running up more than $30 billion in debt.
Last year, California voters thrashed, by a nearly 2-1 margin, a ballot measure sponsored by Democrats and public employee unions to make it easier to raise taxes by dropping the two-thirds vote requirement to 55 percent, eliminating the Republican veto power.
On Tuesday, if pre-election polls are accurate, voters will reject a measure, backed by Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and business and opposed by unions and Democrats, that would make it easier to cut spending by loosening constitutional guarantees for schools and giving the governor new power to adjust the budget in mid-year.
The fickleness among voters is a stark reminder that California is a land of infinite social, economic and philosophical conflicts that interact with a Gordian knot political system to make it very difficult – and perhaps impossible – to govern effectively.
California’s chronic budget crisis is a potent symbol of its conflicts and its crisis of governance, and Tuesday’s election embodies them. By the time the dust has settled, contending factions on the eight ballot measures – including the four backed by Schwarzenegger – will probably have spent upwards of $300 million on television ads and other forms of political weaponry, and a very possible outcome is that all eight will be dead and the political situation will be left unchanged.
One could conclude that Schwarzenegger’s “year of reform” crusade has been an immense waste of time, money and his own stature.The harsh truth is that we Californians don’t know what we want from government, or perhaps that what we want doesn’t compute. We would appear to want high levels of spending on schools, cops, fire protection, health care and other government services but low taxes, or at least low taxes on ourselves. We threw out Gray Davis and elected Schwarzenegger on his promise to shake up an unresponsive Capitol, and then we rebelled when he belatedly confronted the status quo, saying we want compromise and cooperation – even though, polls say, we think his issues are valid.
Schwarzenegger bears some blame for that political disassociation. He made nice during the first months of his governorship – raising spending while cutting taxes – and inferentially proclaimed that he had mastered the Capitol, that everyone was singing from the same hymnal, and that everything was “fantastic.” And then, having had an epiphany of some sort, he abruptly shifted gears, proclaimed the Capitol to be dysfunctional and launched his crusade to change its balance of power.
Instead of truly challenging Californians to confront their contradictions and resolve them, Schwarzenegger embraced them, sending as many mixed messages to voters as they were sending to him, setting himself up for demonization by public employee unions and other defenders of the status quo – and perhaps squandering a unique opportunity to transform the recall into a restoration of governance.
