Here it is, July 13th, and the Legislature still has not approved a state budget. Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez says he’s cancelled his vacation plans and told his colleagues that they may have a long summer in front of them. But it is not only the members who pay the price of a late budget—legislative staff, governor’s office and agency staff and lobbyists also pay the price for a late budget.
But a late budget is better than a bad budget. Given the fact that the state continues to have an ongoing operating deficit of $2 billion, the annual budget process is an opportunity to, at the least, not continue to add to our fiscal problems.
But that’s not the Democrats’ take on the budget. As usual, they are pushing for more and more spending. The governor proposed total spending of $103.8 billion in spending, while the Democrats are promoting a budget of $104.4 billion. This week, the Assembly GOP proposed $2.2 billion in cuts to the Democrats budget, which the Democrats are refusing to adopt. Instead, they are trying to make this is legislative Republican vs. Governor Schwarzenegger problem. Senate President Don Perata told the Sacramento Bee, “This is a fight between Republicans and Republicans.”
Hopefully, the governor’s office will stand firm during the budget negotiations and not feed the Democrats’ addiction to spending. The interest groups for any program that is on the cutting board will scream bloody murder and threaten repercussions on Election Day, but our elected officials need to tune out the public relations pressure and remember their fiscal responsibility to the people of this state.
There are two simple guidelines for the budget negotiations:
–Don’t spend more than we take in. We’ve seen what deficit spending does to the state (think Gray Davis).
–Whatever we put off doing today will simply come back to bite us tomorrow. Ignoring the current fiscal problem will simply mean deeper cuts in the future. If we follow the Democrats lead of spending more than we have, we’ll be looking at deeper cuts in the future (of course, the Democrats will call for tax increases).
It’s not like it’s just the Republicans calling for responsible budgeting: the LAO also continues to remind the Legislature of the systematic fiscal problems facing the state. In the office’s commentary on the Governor’s May Revision, the LAO wrote, “It is also important to remember that the state continues to face a significant ongoing structural shortfall in its budget, as well as pressures related to unfunded retiree health care costs and potential additional costs to the state’s correctional health care system. In view of these factors, it will be important that the Legislature develop a more realistic budget which includes alternative budgetary solutions and avoids raising ongoing commitments.”
Anyone who has worked in or around state government in the last fifteen years has personally felt the impact of late budgets. In late July of 1995, my husband threw me a birthday party that he never showed up for because the budget came together that night and he was staffing a budget committee. But frankly, no matter what personal plans get postponed or cancelled, the people of this state are relying on those in power in
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