The recent "budget forum" of Governor-elect Brown (speaking of fodder for a Monty Python skit, didn’t they do one about him in the 1970’s?) reminded me of that famous line from the old Monty Python television show, when they could think of no easy way to transition from one skit to another, they just punted with the line "And now-for something completely different" and of course, it wasn’t.

So looking for a way to distinguish himself from Governor Schwarzenegger, Brown held a summit, like that hasn’t been done before, about budget issues, as if no one has ever had a discussion about that before, where he suggested that voters should choose between higher taxes or less services, like no one has ever used that line before.  It was the same ol’, same ol’, packaged by the old packager who created most of these problems when he was Governor the first time around.

Did you know that 80% of California residents could afford a median priced home in 1974?  That number down to 17% by 1982 (after the once and future Governor was done with his first two terms), and has stayed there ever since.  Do you realize that over 90% of California’s freeways, thousands of miles worth, were built in the sixteen years of Pat Brown and Ronald Reagan’s governorships?  Now it takes 16 years to build one mile of freeway, after all the studies about rats, flies, weeds, and fluffy little bunnies take place.  We had the number one schools in the country when Moonbeam I started as Governor, they were 26 when he left, and they have stayed there.  Catching a trend here?

And so today, he talks about fixing the budget, a budget that is broken because of the improper influences of the government unions he created, a budget busting government employee pension system he has supported over the years, and a government that spends more time studying problems than it does fixing them, due to a system of studies he put into place.

How about we do something completely different?  In the last couple of budget crises (1991-94 and 2001-2004), the state didn’t really cut spending, it just borrowed money from future years and waited for the private economy to turn around and increase revenue. Once government got out of the way, the economy turned around, and revenues started flowing in.  Why don’t we do that?  Why don’t we do what Governor Wilson did, cut back on government regulatory excess, or what President Bush did, cut taxes?  That would actually be something different than what Governor Schwarzenegger proposed two years ago (a tax increase) that really didn’t work.

Or how about we actually cut back on an out of control bureaucracy whose union bosses are more worried at retiring at the age of 40 after 20 years of not working at the public’s expense than they are about actually bringing some benefit to the public?  That would be really different.  These unions, who spent their last dime (not really, they have lots more dollars coming in from their forced exaction of dues from our glorious public servants) electing Jerry Brown Governor, are the source of the budget problem.  Solving it would require Brown to stand up to those unions.  Villaraigosa is doing it, why not Jerry Brown?  Brown created those monsters, will he actually slay them?  Until he does, the budget problems will remain intractable.

While the Democrats in the Legislature spend their time singing the Lumberjack song, and Governor-elect Brown charges in like the Spanish inquisitors, we in California laugh at the show, at least for the moment.  Really all we are seeing is this merry band of marauders clopping their coconut shells together, thinking they are really riding horses, while we all know they are just pretending.  Unfortunately, as the union bosses demand their shrubbery, and Republicans bring out their dead, the side show that is state government is not getting better.  And it won’t until this Governor really decides to do something different.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 10th, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.