CA: Will binge go on? - Budget to put 'post-partisan' prattle on spot

San Diego Union - Tribune ^ | 4/16/07 | Editorial

[NormsRevenge]

There's a certain smug self-satisfaction emanating from Sacramento nowadays, one without recent precedent. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Green Giant of U.S. politics, beams from the cover of Newsweek. Democratic leaders, emboldened by polls showing state lawmakers' long-tiny popularity ratings are improving, aggressively push for a relaxation of term limits. The notion that the state is in an era of “post-partisan” productivity reigns over the land.

In coming weeks – when the governor releases his revised 2007-08 spending plan in early May and begins the annual budget haggling in earnest – we'll find out if we really are in a new era of cooperative, competent governance, and on the biggest, most basic issue of all.

The first plan Schwarzenegger unveiled in January – a $103 billion budget that he grandly asserted was balanced – proved to have all kinds of holes. The governor who won office partly by railing against the gimmicky budgets of predecessor Gray Davis came up with a beaut of his own. It touted unrealistically optimistic revenue forecasts and help from the courts in the form of friendly rulings on pension obligations.

It also counted on a suddenly pliant Legislature approving a huge expansion of Indian casino slot machines in return for bigger payments to the state as well as a shift of $1.1 billion in transit funds.

The odds that all this would come to pass rivaled those of a duffer hitting a hole-in-one at Torrey Pines South's 11th hole.

Now, finally, the budget debate is going to make all this glaringly obvious. The Legislative Analyst's Office has done its usual fine job of dissecting all the budget's tricks. And, as skeptics warned in January, revenue is not coming in at nearly the rate Schwarzenegger forecast. The result: Even though overall general fund revenue has soared 23 percent during the past three years, his budget looks to be at least $4 billion in the red.

So what will the governor do in his May revise: drop the gimmicks and produce a balanced budget that eschews the vast spending hikes of recent years? Or rely yet again on borrowed money?

And what will the Legislature do if he does finally offer a balanced budget: work with him to stop burdening our children with our debt? Or, at the behest of public employee unions, continue our spending and borrowing binge?

Obviously, in both cases, we hope for the former but fear the latter. Yet if Sacramento does come up with another irresponsible budget, there could be one small positive effect: silencing all the “post-partisan” prattle.

It has been a highly effective marketing tool to revive the popularity of state leaders. But to date, this new era has yielded exactly zero progress toward fiscal sanity. The result, as Thousand Oaks GOP Sen. Tom McClintock points out, is that the state is on track to soon spend nearly 9 percent of its revenue just to service its debt.

We can avoid this fate – if the governor, Assembly Speaker Fabian NÚñez and Senate President Don Perata finally decide to act like responsible public servants. So pay attention, Californians. There is an awful lot at stake.

[goldstategop]

Asking liberals to forego a spending binge is like asking a sailor to forego a drinking binge. Good luck.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus