Recently in California Category

The California Budget Project's Jean Ross offers this outstanding list of resolutions. Her fourth resolution responds to a budget-related idiocy which drives me particularly crazy.

Don't promise to cut taxes and balance the budget. I have the cover of an old New Yorker magazine on the wall of my office. It is a take-off of Dante's Inferno. At the center ring of hell? Politicians that promise to cut taxes and balance the budget. It's a good reminder that the impossible is, well, impossible.

You can see the New Yorker cover here. It's an Edward Sorel illustration from the April 21, 1997 issue. I lost my copy years ago, much to my chagrin.

KQED Radio's John Myers provides a handy list of nine story lines Californians should watch as the 2010 political season begins.

The one part of the story that shall drive many of the others, of course, is the 2/3-vote hypermajority required to pass a budget. A requirement allowing Republicans to have veto power over the state budget even though they hold fewer than 40 percent of the seats in Sacramento.

Actually, if it were just veto power over the state budget, that would be bad enough. But it's more. As Myers writes:

Democrats decry the two-thirds mandate as an invitation for legislative extortion from the GOP legislators who they must cajole; Republicans defend it as the only way they ever get their issues heard in a statehouse where Dems often seem to dismiss GOP proposals out of hand.

You know, there is another way the GOP could get its proposals seriously heard in Sacramento.

Hmmm....what was that again? It's right on the tip of my tongue. Oh yeah, how about winning some elections?

The hypermajority requirements ensure our government cannot function and cannot solve problems. For the radical anti-government factions within the GOP, isn't that a feature and not a bug?

The Los Angeles Times' recaps the list of names readers supplied when he asked for their opinion about who were the best and worst politicians of 2009.

After recapping the typical stereotypical blather from those who wrongly think all politicians are awful, Lopez highlights Brandon Ruiz's observation:

"We pass ballot initiatives with no method of funding," wrote Brandon Ruiz. "We put our legislature in a straitjacket with a 2/3 vote requirement on budgets and then ask them to fix our state's problems. We make it easy to cut taxes, but impossible to raise them, meaning that a small majority can deprive the state of needed revenue. . . .

"We killed the dominant school funding mechanism by passing Prop. 13 and then demanded that the state fix it and fund our schools. . . . We want to protect OUR programs and cut THEIRS. . . . We are our own worst politician and our own worst enemy. We, the short-sighted, instant-gratification seeking, detail averse, California public. We refuse to see the difficult choices, nuance, and complicated details of public policy, yet we give ourselves the power to make laws that can virtually never be repealed."

Lopez remarks that Ruiz "nailed it." I agree.

We have created a system that cannot work with our 2/3 vote hypermajority requirements, a dysfunctional initiative system, and insanely strict term limits among the provisions exacerbating our state's problems and making it virtually impossible to resolve them.

We have created a system that cannot work and pathetically act surprised when it does not. We see reform efforts that are trying not to touch some of the elements I list above. We see tax reform commissions with Governor-appointed leaders who have reached conclusions outside of the promised transparent process.

California's system does not work. It cannot under the present rules. And anyone who says that California can be reformed without touching the hypermajority rules, initiative process, and term limits is selling the same tonic which lead to our current failed system.

I am just shocked, shocked to learn that one of our famous California initiatives apparently did not allocate a reasonable amount of money to get its job done. KQED's John Myers has the story:

Just a little over a year after voters created an independent commission to draw most of California's political maps, the process is costing a lot more money than was allocated.

In fact, it's possible the commission that's slated to convene in 2011 may have as its first task to ask lawmakers for more funding.

Because if it is one thing California's general fund needs, is more unexpected funding demands placed upon it.

One of the reforms under discussion in California right now would require initiatives to spell out a funding source instead of relying on the general fund and thus forcing cuts to education and health and human services programs.

Proposition 11 is just the latest example of the need for such a standard.

The Bay Area News Group's Josh Richman notes a recent example of California's initiative process at work!

Former Sacramento Bee columnist Daniel Weintraub has written a profile of the Bay Area Council's Jim Wunderman, who is one of the leaders of efforts to convene a Constitutional Convention to deal with our dysfunctional government structure.

The profile includes quotes from my local State Senator, Mark DeSaulnier, one of the reform leaders in the State Legislature.

If you are watching the California Constitutional Convention efforts, it is worth your time to learn more about one of the people who has kept the conversation going.

On the Blockbuster Democracy Blog, Joe Mathews notes that the right-wing recall effort against Assemblyman Anthony Adams (R) failed because more than half of the signatures submitted in San Bernardino County were invalid.

Adams was targeted for recall because of his sanity during last February's state budget debates, when he agreed to vote for temporary tax increases. It is part of a long-standing effort among conservative activists to destroy the political career of any Republican who dares consider voting for taxes as part of a balanced budget solution.

For many reasons, I am glad this radical recall effort failed. Recalls should not be used to settle political scores. We have elections every two years in the State Assembly, which is frequent enough.

The Sacramento Bee's comment section rarely fails to provide some "popular" comment that should be mocked, and not celebrated, for its fact-free pronouncements.

Take, for example, this popular comment attached to a story about Attorney General Jerry Brown issuing an opinion stating the California Citizens Compensation Commission can cut the salaries of the state's constitutional officers and legislators in the middle of their terms.

Look at those last two sentences. It assumes that our legislators are rich and it assumes that our legislators would object to being added to our same retirement system as the state workers.

Well, vsormano, I can say that virtually all of California's state legislators would love to have the same state retirement system as state workers. Because California legislators are banned, by a proposition passed by the voters, from having any retirement besides employer payroll taxes paid to Social Security.

Proposition 140, passed by California voters in 1990, is the voter-initiated Constitutional Amendment that created our state's draconian term limits regime. But, as with many propositions, it included other elements: in this case, it also banned our state legislators from receiving any retirement benefits besides Social Security.

Not that people seem to remember.

This is not an insignificant point. Vsormano is trying to attack our legislators. Instead, vsormano is showing just how little he or she knows about how the California government actually operates. Perhaps it is comforting not to acknowledge the facts of our government. But it does nothing to make it work better.

By the way, in a state the requires two-thirds votes for so many things, isn't it interesting that the term limits regime that has been such a contributing factor in our dysfunctional government was created by a vote with just 52.17 percent in favor.

Do Californians realize that some senior members of the Governor's finance team were examining whether the state could become a federal territory as a reaction to the ongoing fiscal crisis? David Dayen found what he justifiably calls the "quote of the year" in a recent Wall Street Journal story about the fiscal problems facing the states:

"I looked as hard as I could at how states could declare bankruptcy," said Michael Genest, director of the California Department of Finance who is stepping down at the end of the year. "I literally looked at the federal constitution to see if there was a way for states to return to territory status."

But, but, I thought the Governor could solve all of our fiscal problems by blowing up the boxes and fighting the fraud, waste, and abuse through the use of his all-powerful blue pencil line-item veto pen?

The next time the Governor or one of his supporters argue that fraud, waste, and abuse or overspending the cause of our fiscal crisis, perhaps we could ask why the governor's team is looking at ending our statehood when he has had five years of state budgets he could blue-pencil without real fear the state legislature would override him.

A PPIC analysis is the latest to show that low-income people are more likely to leave the state than higher-income residents.

Don't worry though: just like previously debunked claims about businesses leaving California, I'm sure you'll continue to hear this talking point repeatedly into the future.

The California Budget Project's Jean Ross identifies a major reason for our ongoing budget crises: California's insane two-thirds vote requirement to pass a budget.

But there's a fourth culprit at work right now in California, one we can do something about: the state's two-thirds vote requirement to pass a budget and tax increases. Without the two-thirds vote requirement, it's likely that California's policymakers would have been able to come to an agreement that could have averted the issuing of IOUs.

Indeed.

You may think it's primarily about solving a deficit. Sure, that's a factor. But with our state's insane two-thirds vote requirement, it often isn't the primary issue in play. MediaNews Sacramento reporter Steve Harmon explains the ambitions of the Republican legislative leaders:

Even as state officials are preparing today to issue IOUs to state vendors and certain taxpayers, Hollingsworth and Blakeslee -- and their caucuses -- are demanding reforms that would undercut labor gains, shrink the social safety net and relax regulations on business. The two leaders said they see the crisis as a chance to instill more discipline on the state's appetite for spending -- and to lift the Republican philosophy of a small-government, entrepreneurial-based economy.

Yes, no need to win those pesky things called "elections" to lift your philosophy. With a base that includes just a little more than one-third of the legislature's members, they get to impose their Norquistian drown-the-rest-of-government-in-the-bathtub philosophy on the state.

The anti-democratic two-thirds vote requirement is at the heart of California's dysfunction. Until democracy is returned to our budget process, the state will continue to falter.

After reading Governor Schwarzenegger's snarky tweets about the state budget crisis last night, I was hoping to see him tweet about the kind of victory cigar he used to celebrate his take-it-or-leave-it result: one that ensure IOUs would be issued on his watch as our state's leader.

Tough talk and snarky tweets do not equal leadership.

The California Progress Report reprints the letter State Controller John Chiang wrote to the governor and legislative leaders on Friday to explain the state's impending cash flow crisis -- and why he needs corrective action taken by June 15.

Our latest projections show that beginning on July 29, California will not have the cash needed to meet all of its payment obligations. On that date, the State will be in the red by $317.1 million; two days later, on July 31, our cash deficit increases to a negative $1.02 billion.

As the attached chart demonstrates, the State's cash problems will only grow in severity in the subsequent months without Legislative action. The State will reach its lowest cash balance in April 2010, when we will fall short of meeting our payment obligations by nearly $22 billion.

And California's radical conservatives get closer to the date for which they have long dreamed: when they can follow Grover Norquist's dictate and drown the rest of California's safety net in a bathtub.

Via KQED Radio John Myers' Twitter feed, I learn that the San Francisco Chronicle's Matier and Ross report sources are telling them Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa will not run for governor in 2010. If true, that would leave Attorney General Jerry Brown and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom as the top two candidates remaining.

Losing two major candidates in this race (as Lt. Governor John Garamendi has decided to seek the 10th Congressional District office in an expected special election) does not make things better. Given how important it is for a Democrat to win this seat in 2010, I'd rather have more top people testing each other to strengthen the eventual primary winner for what will be a tough general election fight.