A couple of days ago, I wrote a post on the hypocrisy of the Democrats.  Democrats demand Republicans sacrifice what Republicans believe in, but Democrats will not budge an inch on their beliefs.  This refusal of Democrats to budge has had two effects.  First, when the state was swimming in money (two budget cycles ago the budget had a $9 billion surplus), the Democrats spent money like drunken sailors (I am not intending to insult drunken sailors here, since they are generally more responsible with their money than Democrat legislators are with taxpayer dollars).  Second, in bad years, the spending splurges of the good years and the refusal of the Democrats to mend their spendthrift ways has led to the bankruptcy of the state.

Shane Goldmacher of the Sacramento Bee blogged on my post saying: "Haynes makes no mention in his post of how to close the roughly $40 billion budget gap, or the impending Feb. 1 deadline, when California is expected to begin issuing IOUs. But he does lay out the political case for Republicans to lay off new taxes."

Oh my goodness.  I have spent three years writing about, and telling anyone who will listen, that this budget disaster was coming, what to do about it, how to solve the problem without raising taxes, and what to do about it now that the state is in this position.  Yes–this specific post does not say what to do, but only someone who is uninformed, or who wishes to deliberately mislead, would make a comment that I have made no mention of how to solve the problem, and since I know Shane is not uninformed, I can only assume he intended to mislead.

But for his edification, I will make a recommendation on what to do.  State general fund revenues are anticipated to be $91 billion without a tax increase.  State general fund spending in 2005-06 (just two short budget cycles ago) were $91 billion.  (By the way, state revenues in 04-05 were $83 billion and state general fund spending in 04-05 was $79 billion.  Revenues over the next two budget cycles went from $83 billion to $95 billion, while spending went from $79 billion to $102 billion–get the problem?).

Here is my suggestion–restore spending to where it ought to have been had the state not gone through this spending spree.  Return it to $91 billion–that is the deficit.  Things weren’t too bad in 2006.  The state was operating just fine on that budget.  Schools were doing a better job educating the students then, the state economy was going gangbusters, state government did a better job of building roads, freeways and the like then.  In fact, life was a heck of a lot better in 2006.  If the state restored its spending to those levels, maybe those good times would return.

That is certainly a better argument than raising taxes in a bad economy.  More important, in 2006, I and Tom McClintock, and a number of other legislators warned that this collapse would occur, and my Democrats colleagues in the Legislature, and our Governor, claimed that it would not.  We were right then, and we are right now.  Increasing taxes would put good, honest, hardworking people in the private sector out of work, and diminish our tax base even more, but more important would make an economic recovery even harder to achieve, and make the budget problem even bigger.  Reducing spending would put good, honest, hardworking people in government out of work, without damaging our economy, leading to a faster recovery, and getting these government workers back to work faster than if they got fired next year when the budget was worse.

These are not easy choices, I admit.  One, however, leads to a quicker recovery.  One deepens the problems.  Chemotherapy isn’t easy, but the alternative is a painful death by cancer.  Cutting government is not easy, but the alternative is much worse, for the private sector and for the government workers.  Republicans are doing the right thing for the people, that is why is a good political thing to do as well, and will help them keep their jobs.

That is all I have said, for at least three years, but it gets aggravating when deliberately myopic stooges in the media misstate my positions and my solutions.  Oh well, I guess I should just get over it.  It has always been that way, and I can’t expect it to change.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.