The SacBee’s Capitol Alert blog is reporting that Democrats are busy rejecting the Governor’s proposed cuts in the budget. Of course they are. Because the Democrats believe that when the economy is in bad shape, that’s the time you want to raise taxes. Actually, to be more accurate, the liberals in the legislature pretty much want to raise taxes any time.
At some point, the Democrats in Sacramento have to understand that when the economy is humming along, then the private sector grows, and the GDP goes up, and also the money available to government at every level increases. But the opposite is also true — and when the economy restricts, it is not just the private sector that has to go through proverbial belt-tightening, it is also government that must do this. Adding more taxes is problematic for many reasons, but a great pragmatic reason is that doing so will damage economic recovery efforts.
Fortunately the State of California, unlike the Feds, cannot print money. And since the resolve of the Governor and legislative Republicans is firm against another tax increase (on the heels of the state’s largest last year) — then there is going to be a debate about prioritizing existing, available tax revenues.
Yeah, sure, the committee today rejected some of the Governor’s proposed cuts. Well, then they had best figure out where they DO want to cut. Education? Pensions? Apparently not welfare.
Look, everyone in the legislature moans about how the budget process always devolves, ultimately, into a series of closed-door "Big 5" meetings to resolve everything. Heck, newly minted Speaker John Perez has made a big deal about how that will not happen any more.
Well, guess what? In order to use the legislature process, in the open, to work towards a budget that can be adopted, the various budget committees and subcommittees need to operate in the "real world" with realistic actions. If the Democrats push their "their own" budget that is in complete conflict with the priorities of the Governor and legislative Republicans, then it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that everything will, at crunch time, get kicked back to the Big 5.
Look, I understand that the most obvious reform to the budget process — filling committees to meet the partisan ratio of each chamber, and putting a 2/3rd requirement on budget committee votes — may not seem ideal to the Democrat majority. But it is how you make sure that things get WORKED OUT in committee. But Democrats are so far from that it is like a comic tragedy. Democrats aren’t even trying to think about a budget end game.
The good news is that the legislature budget process is transparent and public. The bad news is that it just means we can also all see exactly what a waste of time it is, based on what Democrats are doing (or not doing) with it.