Budget Baseball

This appears to be, on balance, a pretty bad budget deal in California, and Calitics is following it closely. They actually snuck a "supply-side economics" curve ball past the Democratic legislature? Wow.

Speak Out California has set up an action alert on this demanding that there be no budget giveaways. Stop by and sign your name.

UPDATE: This goes national. And yes, cutting a billion dollars in public transit, while not quite as much as Schwarzenegger advocated, is asinine, and cuts directly against the whole "Green Governor" and "Green California Legislature" ideas. There's nothing greener than mass transit.

UPDATE II: Go go Don Perata:

Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata is blasting as dead on arrival a last-minute deal that helped win Assembly passage of a $103 billion state spending plan in the wee hours of Friday morning.

"It's an irresponsible action to take in the dark of night, without any debate or discussion," Perata said of the Assembly compromise.

Perata's vow to reporters, which came about noon Friday after he had huddled with his caucus for an hour, raised new doubts about ending the Legislature's lengthy budget impasse.

I do find it hard to argue against tax breaks to stop runaway film production, being in the industry and seeing the impact. We've been consistently losing jobs for years and years because every other state in the union is giving MASSIVE tax breaks out; this is how New Mexico has come to be known as "Tamalewood". My specific part of the industry, post-production, is somewhat more safe. But these are really good jobs, and what they actually do is take people away from families to do these shoots (if local crews aren't hired) and put a lot of stress and pressure on people to maintain work/family balance.

Maybe it's not structured perfectly, but this is a major issue and TV/film production is one of the last "manufacturing" industries left in the state. Especially when you consider that the state added a measly 400 jobs in June.