The Budget: September 2008 Archives

Friday morning's San Francisco Chronicle story, Legislature's approval rating at a record low, illustrates why California's budget impasse continues. From the article,

"Democrats and the minority Republicans have hunkered down, with neither side willing to make the compromises needed to put together a budget plan that can garner the required two-thirds support."

The budget problem is that reporting like this keeps the public from understanding what is happening in Sacramento.

Here is what is happening with the budget:

• The Democrats have offered plan after plan, accepting deep budget cuts, some borrowing and offering various ways to raise revenue.


• The Governor has offered a plan, with deep budget cuts, borrowing, and a temporarysales tax increase.


• The Republicans have refused to compromise, refusing any budget that raises any revenue at all, not even asking the extremely wealthy to pay the same sales taxes that the rest of us have to pay.

It is just that simple. The Republicans have been blocking the budget and they are getting away with it because the press refuses to report that the Republicans are blocking the budget. If the press reported this simple fact public pressure would build and the Republicans would have to yield.

Update - A comment on the possible budget "compromise": It just kicks the can down the road by delaying dealing with our problems. It doesn't fix anything, and cuts essential services from the people who need government most. In fact it just makes it much, much harder to solve the problem in the next budget because it steals revenue from next year.

Last week, after months of blocking every single budget and budget compromise the Republicans revealed a budget proposal of their own. This was months later than it should have been, and does little good at this point. Of course it was widely panned and was voted down.

So what was in their budget? They offer a few new cuts -- beyond the Governor's already proposed cuts -- in the "big government" they complain about. They refuse to raise revenues from any source.

Mostly, what the Republicans want to do is borrow. This is the big, responsible solution they offer: more and more borrowing. They want to borrow $2 billion from future lottery revenue. This, of course, means that $2 billion won't be there when needed because they have been borrowed and spent it now.

It costs money to borrow. We have to pay interest. We also have to pay back the borrowed money. This adds up.

Remember, much of the current budget shortfall is because we are already paying interest on previous borrowing. All those bonds that Schwarzenegger floated to meet previous shortfalls without raising revenue were certainly not free.

But there are also other costs. The Republicans offer cuts in health care, assistance to the disabled (including housecleaning and home care) and of course help for the poor. Those cuts mean layoffs and income cuts and these will ripple out through the ecosystem that depends on the purchases these funds would have meant. This at a time of pending recession.

This is all instead of asking rich yacht and private jet buys to pay the same sales taxes the rest of us pay on everything we buy.

This is all instead of asking big oil companies to pay a fee to drill oil in our state to sell back to us for huge profits.

This is all instead of asking huge corporations to pay a reasonable commercial property tax.

This is all instead of asking vastly wealthy individuals to pay their fair share in return for the wealth they gained from the infrastructure that all of us built.

Shame on them. A small minority has been able to block California from passing a budget. They use money from these vastly wealthy individuals and corporations to run deceitful ads to keep just enough of them in office to block the things that will help the people of California restore our infrastructure and economy, just so a few wealthy interests can have a few extra bucks.