Posted on 04/20/2006 10:54:08 AM PDT by calcowgirl
Until the early 1980s, the track record of the state Legislature for turning out relatively punctual and balanced state budgets was pretty good. But something has happened in the last 20 years that dramatically has reduced its ability to deal competently with the state budget. The result has been increasingly late and unbalanced spending plans.
It all began, I think, on an early summer's day in 1983, when the Legislature had reached a (then) rare impasse in its budget deliberations.
In frustration, Governor George Deukmejian invited the legislative leaders to his office in an unsuccessful attempt to resolve their differences. He emerged from the meeting and nobly said, "It's all my fault. I just couldn't bring them together."
Thus was born the extra-constitutional notion that the governor's job is to preside over budget deliberations. From that moment began the gradual rise of the "Big Five," which first eclipsed, and in recent years has replaced, the normal legislative consideration of the state budget.
Today, neither house of the Legislature deliberates independently on a budget. Although subcommittees still meet, their work is largely irrelevant to the final product. Instead of each house independently and publicly considering, debating, analyzing, refining and compromising a state-spending plan, the matter is simply deferred to a conference committee, whose purpose is to rubber-stamp whatever is agreed to among the legislative leaders and the governor behind closed doors.
This process short-circuits most of the safeguards envisioned in our constitution and denies Californians the care and competence that they deserve to have exercised when a decision is being made to spend their money.
The first casualty is the ability of the governor to check legislative excesses with his line-item veto. Once he becomes a party to the negotiations, he is morally bound by them and unable to wield his blue pencil with the freedom and independence that California's founders envisioned.
The second casualty is the separation of powers necessary to protect the treasury. Ever since the Magna Carta, it has been a settled principle of governance that the authority that requests funds should not be the same one that approves them. And human nature being what it is, it is equally important that two houses independently consider a spending plan to protect the budget from the private agendas of powerful personalities or cabals that might arise within each house. "Big Five" meetings throw these proven safeguards into a blender.
The third casualty is the fiscal stability of the state. In the traditional process, budget numbers are rigorously, independently and incisively analyzed by the Legislative Analyst's Office, the press and every interested party representing taxpayers and tax-consumers. Today, the state's spending plan is often slapped together at the last minute behind closed doors with wildly unrealistic assumptions that are discovered only after the budget is adopted.
The fourth casualty is the integrity of the budget process itself. Justice Brandeis often noted that "sunlight is the best of disinfectants." Public scrutiny assures that questionable spending can be fully exposed before it is enacted. There is no sunlight in the locked and guarded warrens where the "Big Five" meet.
It is said that deferring the work of 120 legislators to a committee of six is more efficient. Certainly the traditional process of legislating--where all legislators are involved, where all voices are heard and where all constituencies are represented--is a much more thorough, laborious and time-consuming exercise. But that is what major decisions require in a representative republic: thorough, laborious and time-consuming deliberation.
Many centuries of parliamentary practice have evolved a process for group decision-making that works very well when it is followed. It allows for the development of public policy through multiple debates and amendments and votes. It preserves the checks and balances, the separation of powers and the public scrutiny that experience has taught us are necessary whenever when mere mortals are spending other people's money.
In his first State of the State address, Governor Schwarzenegger recognized that there is something fundamentally wrong with a system that produces chronically late and unbalanced spending plans, and there are many reforms that would help. But the most obvious one is to restore the constitutional process that had served the state so well for so long.
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Thanks for the ping.
I agree. They'll hold on to the power until we take it away from them.
BTTT
If only...
Schwartzenegger won't do it either, even if he wanted to for some strange reason. Besides he can't as he's already squandered all his political capital and is only surviving through his celebrity capital account, on account of he ain't all that bright to begin with!!!
Succinct and correct, Wasp.
He obviously doesn't want to. In fact, I think the Wilsonegger gang is counting on it. The only opposition there used to be was the Republican party. Now that the CAGOP has been hijacked by the big-spending elitists, opposition is silenced in the name of "unity". Much hope is gone.
The reality is the that the elephant in the room - millions of Mexican illegal aliens laying claim to the land and money of California - makes everything else irrelevant. Talk all you want, as long as court decisions and agency regulations require us to hand over our taxes to the citizens of another country, then all the parliamentary maneuvers in Sacramento are worthless.
The cheap estimate of the cost of the illegals is 8 billion. It's actually more like 15. Kill 15 billion out of the California budget, and magically you're in surplus land. Which is the way it would be in sensible world: California would attract and hold only the best and the brightest, the people who could afford to live here. And their output, taxed at even a low rate, would still amount to a lot. And so the common needs of the state would be well met: great schools, good roads and highways, surpluses of power and water.
But because we are forced to support a lumbering horde of the victims of Spaniard desperation (the case in all of Latin America, and even Spain still), we have chronic shortages, deficits, and unceasing demands for more.
Without curing that, there's no point talking.
That the "big five" process has degraded care in the legislative process is beyond doubt, but it had less effect upon competence, which was virtually destroyed by term limits. In the old system we may have had entrenched crooks, but at least we KNEW that they were competent crooks. These clowns today are just as crooked and have no clue about what they are doing.
Public employee pensions will dwarf the net expense of sustaining illegals.
And there's a court decision a la Plyler v. Doe that forces us to pay them, regardless of what the legislature and the people say?
Believe me, I considered the effects of the public employee unions when I made the statement. But I don't think it's reasonable to conclude that "if we could only get rid of the government unions, why then we could subsidize at least another 10 million people from Mexico". The unfortunate truth is that the people getting those pensions have a right to vote and do. Ergo the benefits. Whether that's a great state of affairs or not isn't the point.
What I'm pointing out - as you know - is that 10-15% of the budget of this state is required to be paid totally against the will of the people - the electorate. The feedback loop known as "The Vote" was short circuited. If it hadn't been, the problem would be 1/100th the size it is now.
The two big underlying problems in this state are the people in the government voting themselves a lifetime sinecure and the people from another country simply helping themselves to one. I think the latter can be more easily solved than the former.
He's like a broken record.. in a 'still don't want to toss it away' kind of way ;-)
I'll give him a big P .. and it's not for Progressive ;-)
Persistent and Persevering come to mind.
BTTT
I doubt that case applies subsequent to a bankruptcy.
But I don't think it's reasonable to conclude that "if we could only get rid of the government unions, why then we could subsidize at least another 10 million people from Mexico".
I was adressing your comment in the present tense regarding future and inescapable impacts to existing contracts, not in terms of hypotheticals, however plausible. I was also speaking strictly in terms of financial impact, not as a political problem, simply because the impact of the latter, however real and significant, is not as objectively and quantitatively measureable.
The two big underlying problems in this state are the people in the government voting themselves a lifetime sinecure and the people from another country simply helping themselves to one. I think the latter can be more easily solved than the former.
We agree on that point, but that doesn't mean that the former, because it is so intractable, doesn't dwarf the financial impact of the latter. It does.
I hope I am wrong.
Bruce Herschensohn won Sonny Bono over by introducing him to conservative principles along the campaign trail in the 1992 U.S. Senate race. Maybe the same will happen with Arnold. Problem is I also believe Sonny Bono is a better human being than Arnold Schwarzenegger who seems self-obsessed with political power and cares not much for issues (liberal or conservative).
I guess I should say "Sonny Bono was..."
Thank you. ..."Hope springs eternal..."
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