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Schrag: An Agenda for California, Land of Wall to Wall Elections and Budgeting

By Peter Schrag

By now, Californians should be used to wall-to-wall political campaigns. Today will be the 10th statewide election we've had since the 2002 primary, and chances are good we'll have an 11th next year.

But in this great state of now, we may have to get used to wall-to-wall state budgeting as well.

This week, even before all the slimy floors have been washed and the detritus recycled – and almost certainly before all the votes are counted and all the lawsuits filed – California's legislators will be back in session to try to clean up a little of the budget disaster they approved just a little over six weeks ago. And as soon as that's done, sort of, we'll be starting the process all over again.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger may be right that the effort will have a better chance of success with the election over, meaning that for some members, the personal stakes may be lower and the chances for statesmanship marginally higher.

It's also possible – and fervently to be wished for – that the election itself will provide some clarity. It's not likely the Democrats will get a two-thirds majority in either house of the Legislature. But substantial losses for the GOP's ancien régime, both here and across the country, might signal to even the most calcified of our troglodytes that their rigid theology of no new taxes and government as the penultimate evil has to accommodate new circumstances.

Unlike the feds, who will have to deficit-spend the country out of its rapidly deepening recession, California can't borrow its way out of its fiscal mess. It was our attempt to do that over much of the past decade that got us to the monster deficits we now face.

And the damage in this case is to almost everybody – to the schools our kids attend, to the roads we drive on, to public safety and health care, to the universities, to flood control. And as the cliché goes, the timing could hardly be worse.

It's not hard to imagine how we could untangle the knots we've tied ourselves in. But it would require an enormous change in public attitudes and beliefs. The national campaign mercifully coming to an end today resonated with talk about Wall Street greed and "country first." But the me-first ethic has long infected the rest of us as well, and many are now confronted with the terrible thought that in the end, the government we love to hate has to come and help.

So what would be the agenda for California?

• Join the majority of other states by getting rid of the two-thirds vote requirement to enact budgets, raise taxes and approve other fiscal measures. As long as it lasts, political minorities of whatever persuasion will have a veto, and Sacramento politicians will remain unaccountable for California's messes.

• Loosen term limits to give those politicians a perspective that lasts more than six years and a chance to learn their business before they start looking for the next job. It would also give voters in their districts a real chance to hold them accountable.

• Institute a split roll for local property taxes under which homeowners would still be protected but big businesses would pay taxes on the real value of their refineries, power plants, rail yards and factories. Why, for example, should Chevron in Richmond, which netted nearly $8 billion in profits in the third quarter, get the same protection as the retiree in the 1,200-square-foot house down the road?

• Close the billion-dollar loopholes that have quietly crept into the corporate tax laws (by majority vote) in good years and bad, the most recent during the budget crisis in September.

• Revise the autopilot sentencing system that's keeping thousands of offenders who are no longer dangerous in prison cells costing the taxpayers close to $50,000 a year each. In addition to the monster deficit the state already acknowledges, it's likely to be hit with an additional multibillion-dollar bill by the federal courts to shape up its decrepit prison health care system.

• Increase both the sales tax, as the governor has meekly suggested, and the 18-cent-per-gallon state gas tax, whose value has declined against highway miles driven. The state now realizes about $3.5 billion a year from the tax, which goes to road maintenance and other transportation projects. Doubling it after the recent spike (and more recent drop) in gas prices would hardly be noticeable. The additional revenues would not only protect the jobs of a lot of construction workers; they would also reduce highway use and contribute more to clean air than all the political preaching of the last two years.

• And for the governor: Start building fires under your business friends to have them make clear to the legislators they fund that the state's budget mess can't be fixed with cuts alone. If they can't get the Sacramento cave men to see the light, we'll go even deeper into the tank than we already have.

Peter Schrag is the former editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee. This article is published with his permission.

Posted on November 04, 2008

Comments

It is interesting that Schrag doesn't mention redistricting "reform" in any of his policy pronouncements--after years of shilling for such alledged "reform", the policies he argues for are pretty much what would have been adopted already if there was not the 2/3rd's vote requirement. California has lost a generation of progress due to this anti-democratic (1 person vetoing the wishes of 2) provision.

I hope, no matter what the outcome of Prop 11, that Schrag and other alledged "reformers" will stop carrying water for the Republican narrative of "too much government" and "too high taxes". The allocation of resources to the public sector is a classic public goods problem and should be addressed in a scientific, rather than idealogical, manner. If Schrag and others had pushed the 2/3rd's requirement problems the way they have push the (non-existent) problem of redistricting, we would be voting on changing the 2/3rd's requirement rather than on a redistricting "reform" which would just allow Republicans to sit and veto all of the policy changes Schrag outlines above.

Posted by: publius at November 4, 2008 10:20 AM

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