The Budget Agreement

California finally passed a budget.  It is a bad budget, cutting essential
services, borrowing a tremendous amount, selling our lottery revenues and giving
a huge tax break to big out-of-state companies. 
Each of these came from demands by the very, very few Republicans who agreed
to vote for the budget at all will, of course, just get us through another year
while making it ever more difficult to pass future
budgets.

California’s 2/3 requirement means that a few
corporate-funded extremists can hold the rest of us hostage.  So they had to make a terrible deal to get the
three Republican votes required by the 2/3 rule, or else lay of tens of
thousands and stop paying California’s bills. 
We the People of California were all held hostage to that threat. 

The resulting deal was that if We, the People want schools,
police, firefighters, roads & bridges, courts, all the things our
government does for us, we had to agree
to tax breaks for the big multinational corporations that kick in so much money
to help elect the anti-government extremists
. So the big companies – the kind
that come in and crush local California businesses – get a big tax break while
the rest of us have our taxes raised. 
Oh, and the oil companies can continue to take our oil out of the ground
for free and then sell it back to us.

Here are some reactions around the California netroots:

David
Dayen at Calitics
,

 “The cuts are going to be really, really bad:
10% across the board for education, huge cuts for public transit operations,
health care, etc.  The new revenues basically fill in the loss of revenue
from massive unemployment.

[. . .] The “single sales
factor apportionment,” which is the massive business tax cut, doesn’t kick
in until FY2011, predictably and conveniently after Gov. Schwarzenegger is out
of office and it will be someone else’s problem to make up the revenue!
 It’s almost like somebody planned it that way!”

Richard
Holober at Consumer Federation of California
,

 “The deal reported today does not call on all
California taxpayers to share in the sacrifice. Working Californians will face
billions in higher sales tax and income tax rates. But businesses win about one
billion dollars in new tax breaks.  $700 million in corporate tax cuts
result from a recalculation of how California taxes the profits of big
multinational corporations.   According to the Senate Analysis, the
windfall to multinational corporations, and the revenue loss to California will
eventually grow to $1.5 billion.”

Robert
Cruickshank at the Courage Campaign blog
,

“The only way out, and the first
reform that we must undertake – the tree blocking the tracks, the door that
opens the path to all other reforms – is eliminating the 2/3 rule that
gives conservatives veto power over the state and turns the majority Democrats
into a minority party on fiscal matters. It’s been talked about frequently on
Calitics and in what remains of the media’s coverage of state politics. So it
seemed time for an in-depth discussion of the issue and the prospects for
restoring majority rule to California.

David
M. Greenwald at California Progress Report
,

“Many Democrats and political
observers fear that Maldonado strong-arming the legislature may set a bad
precedent for future attempts at getting a budget on time.”

So here we are.  Our
structural problems have enabled extremists to increase … our structural
problems.  We are one more step down the
road to intentional ungovernability.

Over the next several months, we who love this state must act to fix this.  We must get rid of this 2/3 budget-vote requirement that allows extremists to hold us hostage.  An initiative changing the 2/3 vote requirement is long-overdue but we’ll need the support of every forward-thinking voter to make it happen.  Let’s work together to ensure that it does.

The State Of The State Is Ungovernable

“People are asking if California is governable.”  Governor Schwarzenegger said in the State of the State address today that California faces insolvency within weeks.  He said there is more gridlock in Sacramento than on our roads, if that is possible.

The governor gave a very short speech, saying there is no sense talking about education or infrastructure or water or anything else as long as we have this huge $42 billion deficit.

But the fact remains that the state’s requirement that 2/3 budget-approval requirement means that the state is, in effect, ungovernable.   A few anti-government extremists are able to continue to block the budget, refusing to compromise or even negotiate, demanding that the state lay off tens of thousands of workers, slash medical help for the elderly, slash police protection and firefighting capability, slash funding for courts, raise class sizes to 40 or 50 students, stop repairing roads and levees and everything else the state government does.

David Greenwald writes at California Progress Report wrote, in State of the People is Grim: More Budget Cuts Are Exactly the Wrong Prescription,

“Budget cuts totaling $16 billion over the last three years have already
had severe consequences for the people of California. And the
Governor’s proposed 09-10 budget would further harm California families
and our economy with an additional $17 billion in cuts to schools,
health care, homecare, and state services.”

Leading up to the speech, David Dayen at Calitics wrote, in The State Of The State Is, Well, You Know, “Typically he has done this speech to coincide with the evening news.  This year he’s trying to hide it.”

We at Speak Out California want to invite readers to come up with some solutions for the budget mess.  We are working on some ideas for a prize for the best ideas.