How About A "Year Of Doing Your Job"?

The Schwarzenegger era will be remembered as the era of "blockbuster politics," where the Governor took the same marketing techniques that made his movies popular and transferred them to the political stage. He wouldn't just make an issue a priority, he would structure the entire year around it. "The Year of Reform!" "The Year of Education!" "The Year of Healthcare!" "The Year of The Environment!" As an actor he only put out one movie a year, so one legislative initiative a year sounded about right for the average attention span. The details of governance would be pushed backstage; the thrust would be to go big on one issue and hope the goodwill gained from success would mask whatever failures occurred. This has not been a slam dunk; the year of reform crashed badly, other signature issues have yielded fruit. Now, with this year's blockbuster on the rocks due to Republican resistance, legal challenges, initiative politics and structural roadblocks, the inattention to the small problems that weren't on the big agenda are starting to consume the state. In an excellent editorial, Assemblyman John Laird, Chairman of the Budget Committee, explains how our current mess of a $10 billion dollar shortfall could have been easily avoided if the Governor would have paid attention to something other than staging the next blockbuster.

... [T]he chronic boom-and-bust budget cycle is rooted in a simple problem: Californians generally believe in government and want it adequately funded -- so much so that they repeatedly have voted for laws or constitutional amendments that lock in guaranteed spending for, say, education or transportation. At the same time, the state's revenue system is antiquated and volatile. It is heavily reliant on income taxes, for instance, and so the pains of an economic downturn have a magnified effect on state revenue.

The short-term solutions that get us through on a year-to-year basis all have been tried -- and tried. It's time for bipartisan hard work to bring California's long-term spending demands into balance with long-term revenues. It won't be easy, but the easy paths have been taken, and they've left the state awash in red ink.

Wingnut conservatives are calling on the Governor to declare a fiscal crisis. It's one of their own doing. When California could have eliminated the constant catastrophes of the budget process by restructuring the revenue offsets to services the population desires, instead the Governor floated a $15 billion dollar bond in 2004. The result is $3 billion a year extra in debt, every year, to repay the costs of a senseless short-term fix. If sound Republican budgeting means "put the problem off to children and grandchildren," then we've got a lot of sound budgeters in Sacramento:

On paper, it may look like spending has increased in recent years, but that is largely driven by the expiration of earlier budget-balancing tricks -- such as temporarily shifting school funding to local governments, shifting costs to special funds and the multibillion-dollar temporary cut to education.

There really haven't been significant program spending increases, with three exceptions: public safety, the result of various court cases regarding our prison system and implementation of "Jessica's Law" to track sex offenders; debt service, primarily the annual $3-billion payment on the $15-billion deficit bond; and local government funding, a result of the vehicle license fee cut because billions from that fee used to go to cities and counties.

Sacramento does not have a spending problem. It has a denial-of-reality problem. The cuts are always accommodated in the state budget, like this year's delay of COLA (cost of living adjustments) for elderly public assistance, and the $1.3 billion in transportation funding. The revenue increases are always blocked. Stopgaps that run out and increases in population wipe out the cuts. We're left on an unsustainable track.

The state is rapidly headed toward bankruptcy if it continues down this stupid, temper-tantrum approach to the budget. if Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to leave a lasting legacy, and let's face it, that's all he wants to do, he can work hard to fix the structural problems that will always put the state's financial picture in peril. That would require sitting in his office and doing his job, not holding big speeches behind backdrops that say "The Year of the Tiger!" or whatever he's trying to peddle to the electorate.