This afternoon, in what we are told is a very rare occasion, the 120 members of the State Legislature will convene in a special join session to get an in-depth briefing on the state of California’s finances. What will they be told? Undoubtedly these presentations being made by various officials ranging from Democrat State Treasurer Bill Lockyer, Democrat State Controller John Chiang, Legislative Analyst Mac Taylor, and the Governor’s Finance Director Mike Genest will paint a dire picture of California’s financial condition. Look for a lot of extreme statements about how the failure of the legislature to take action to deal with the current fiscal year’s deficit of at least $12 billion (or is it $15 billion?) will result in dire consequences. Wee will hear about massive lay-offs and an insolvency in state government finance that come the Spring will bring state government spending to a halt. We’ll hear about the state having to issue IOU’s, and no doubt we will hear about how this situation will drastically and negatively impact some of the state’s most vulnerable residents.
What else will we hear? We will hear from the majority party about how they have already made more cuts in state spending, as of now, than is tenable. Of course, they will not mention that in actual terms, they haven’t cut state spending AT ALL. That’s right, despite the valiant and noble stand that Republican lawmakers made last summer to stave off increasing existing taxes and the creation of new taxes, state spending actually went up by about a half-percent. How can that be? Remember, we are talking about Sacramento, where zero-based budgeting doesn’t exist. Only in the world of government do you project what a budget could be if things would expand and grow at their normal clip, and then call any spending short of that a “cut” – um, that makes no sense.
If you take a look at the history of state spending going back just over the past four or five years, you will see that the state budget increased in size by over 40%! Yes, that is in actual – not theoretical – numbers. Liberals in Sacramento are screaming because they do not want to see state government spending decrease at all, let alone by less than half of its growth over the past few years. But that is what is needed – a severe belt tightening.
Here’s a question for you. Can you take out a pen and make a list of the state agencies and departments that have been eliminated as a part of a process of re-evaluating the scope and role of California government going into this era of austerity? Don’t get too panicked if you can’t, and don’t think that you, an spectator of California government and politics are missing something. In so far as I can tell, at this point, no one is proposing the kind of significant reductions in state government that are needed to resolve our crisis. The only time we hear about deep, programmatic cuts like that are when Democrats articulate what they call “nightmare scenarios” to excite and agitate their base, and try to put more pressure to bear on legislative Republicans, and keep the fires burning under the feet of Democrats like Senator Lou Correa who were elected in swing districts by making pledges not to raise taxes.
The reality of the situation is that those kinds of deep cuts, the ones that mean that the very nature of the relationship between California government and the people of California needs to change, are exactly what is called for here. It means that a lot of the areas of life that Democrats have had state government encroach upon for the past four decades may be getting a fresh and needed dose of liberty.
The Governor, too, needs to take a more aggressive role at proposing deep cuts and eliminating state programs. A great move forward in making cuts and helping our economy to recover would be to, instead of using AB 32 and his jihad against global warming to expand the role of the Air Resources Board, how about following through with the recommendation of his own California Performance Review and abolishing that board? How about prioritizing California’s economic climate over whatever minimal role Californians can play in impacting the temperature of the Earth?
Of course, to most of the liberal ideologies that dominate the State legislative, this kind of talk of really shrinking, reducing and eliminating of state government services, programs, and departments is viewed as the talk of heresy and lunacy. These passionate left-wing ideologues pursue an expansion of government with a religion-like fervor that is almost unmatched in its intensity.
But fortunately for Californians, it is not quite unmatched. Republican lawmakers have finally said enough is enough. Under the leadership of Senate Republican Leader Dave Cogdill and Assembly Republican Leader Mike Villines, all 44 Republican Senators and Assemblymembers have made it clear that the paradigm in Sacramento needs to change. That the size of our government, that the programs that are undertaken – well, they need to be reevaluated and “right sized” or eliminated to ensure that our state government is doing the best it can with what it has available to spend in resources.
The absence of any kind of meaningful presentation of the cuts of permanent cuts in state spending, through the elimination of current government functions, is a clear statement that the majority party has yet to come to terms with the gravity of the situation. In fact, the Senate President, Darrell Steinberg, in the midst of this crisis, is talking about how to make government-provided health insurance available to California’s uninsured young people – a costly program that will cost many hundreds of millions of dollars.
In today’s session, we’ll see an upping of the ante so-to-speak as some dire warnings are given about the consequences of inaction by the state legislature. Hopefully the Democrats who will make up a majority of the listening audience will be listening carefully. Nobody wants the kind of chaotic, non-rational extreme effects of doing nothing (not even the “evil and mean Republican legislators” that they tell stories about to their children at night to scare them). State government is going to have to be significantly pared back, and legislative Democrats have a responsibility and an opportunity to take a thoughtful (and by necessity, speedy) approach to how they want to do this.
If Democrats fail to act, and show leadership by putting the “big spending train” that has been gorging down the tracks for decades, and not only stop but reverse the train, then a lot of the nightmare scenarios portrayed today could become reality. And if that happens, don’t blame Republican legislators. They are not only in the right by saying that Californians should not be over-taxed anymore to pay for this spend-and-spend-more cycle, but they also have economic reality on their side – in the current economy, increasing taxes only will decrease revenues to the government.
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