After months of playing “chicken” the yearly California budget compromise ritual once again passes the buck to the next year.  Everyone breathes a sigh of relief that the “stalemate” is over.

But the problems aren’t solved at all, they’re worse.  Next year this will happen again but because of this year and previous years’ so-called “solutions” it will be that much harder to agree on a budget.  So if you thought this year was bad…

Friday Dan Walters, in, Revised state budget is still a sham, wrote that the budget,

…remains a stopgap budget filled with accounting gimmicks and questionable “spending cuts” and “revenues” – and still leaves the state’s fiscal house in great disorder. It makes little, if any, headway on closing what those in the Capitol call the “structural deficit” – the chronic gap between revenues and spending that was plaguing the state even before its economy went into the tank.

and wrote yesterday,

They violated every
principle of fiscal responsibility by conjuring up billions of dollars
in sham revenues — basically money borrowed from corporate and personal
taxpayers that would have to be paid back later — to cover a huge
deficit so they could blow town.

Senate President pro Tempore Don Perata (D-Oakland) said,

“I have agreed with the Governor to make some tweaks to the budget we
sent him. I’m not proud of this budget – it just kicks the can down the
road. But the reality is, Democrats agreed to nearly $10 billion in
tough cuts while the Governor could not get a single Republican vote
for the $5 billion in new revenue we need to close this gap and solve
the problem.”

That’s right, once again a small minority was able to get their way by refusing to participate in normal, civil,, give-and-take negotiation.  They are able to do this because the public doesn’t really know what is happening in Sacramento, only that no budget is passing.  So therefore it must be everyone’s fault equally — even if it isn’t.