You know what I like most about Assemblyman La Malfa, he can say in three words what is takes me a one thousand to say. The wisdom of a farmer over the verbosity of a lawyer.
That being said, I wanted to talk about the budget and two articles that appeared today about the dispute, one from Dan Walters and the other from Dan Weintraub. A short synopsis of the Walters article is that the Republican plan is the one most likely to be adopted, not because it is a perfect plan, but because the Legislative Republicans are sticking together. Walters notes the problems in both the Governor’s plans and the Democrat plan, neither of which will fix the budget problem either. The Weintraub artilcle blasts those same Republicans because they won’t vote for a tax increase to "permanently" fix the budget problem in California.
Now usually neither Walters nor Weintraub get things right, not because they are not experienced, but they don’t think outside the box in politics. They like the tired old cliches that masquerade as solutions among the pseudo-intellectual chattering class in Sacramento. They are willing to criticize doctrinaire Liberals because liberals have been proven wrong as the governing majorities time and time again. That doesn’t mean they will always criticize liberals, in fact, they will give them the benefit of the doubt if they haven’t been proven wrong. Weintraub has been consistently right on spending and the budget, and Walters has commented quite often on the brokenness of the budgetary process, but neither are willing to say directly that the liberal majorities, through their spendthrift ways, are the ones who have created these crises time and again. Walters is always quick to criticize tax cuts as a form of government spending, even though, in the last 15 years, the periods of greatest revenue growth have been in the years following tax reductions, and the massive budget crises have followed the years of fastest spending growth. Weintraub constantly criticises spending growth, but always falls back on tax increases as the way to solve the budget crises that the spending growth causes. When Republicans proposed borrowing in 2003 as the way to get out of that crisis (which by the way worked), he criticized us, told us we should raise taxes, and called us doctrinaire. We were right, we solved the crisis, taxes stayed low, spending stayed down until the debt was paid off, and the state did not collapse.
Walters is right, as in 2003-04, the tax increase this year won’t fix the problem. Second, Weintraub’s own solution, a tax increase, actually undermines the main criticism he had of Governor Schwarzenegger in his book Party of One. In that book, Weintraub quite correctly points out that Schwarzenegger’s biggest failing as a Governor was his failure to control the spendthrift Democrat majority in the Legislature. To then follow up and say that, after the Governor’s failure to exercise any degree of discipline on the budget, the big spending lobbies in Sacramento should be rewarded with a tax increase is nonsensical. They should be punished, a tax increase is a reward for those self-indulgent intellectual snobs, borrowing actually punishes them, not only this year, but in the years in the future while we are repaying the borrowed funds.
True, borrowing doesn’t solve the problem of a broken budget system, but neither does a tax increase, and borrowing actually leads to a discipline that could solve the problem over the next two to three years, if the Governor and the Legislature learn their lesson. Of course, this exact scenario has happened twice before, and, although Pete Wilson learned the lesson, Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger did not, and definitely the Legislative majorities did not. The truth is, those of us who preached about increasing spending in the good years were proven right all three times. That is why the Republican solution is the right one for this short term crisis, and the long term solution is mandatory spending limits, to control the spendthrift big government lobbies and their willing accomplices in the Legislature. That is the only solution that will fix these problems over the long run.