Republicans in the Senate and Assembly should not be in any hurry to vote out a budget that contains deficit spending, that is for sure. But assuming that the Republican Leaders can negotiate a budget that contains no deficit spending at all, which would be a tremendous achievement to be sure, let us step back away from the trees and look a the forest.
For all of the hard work, we are really tinkering with a massive spending package that is bloated with programs and projects that feed the modern welfare State of California.
I don’t envy Dick Ackerman or Mike Villines because the budget they are negotiating over bears very little in common with the one that they would personally pen if they could adopt one on their own. We are taking a terrible budget and trying to make it as good as we can, right? Well, as I said below, there is no reason to support any budget that contains deficit spending.
Frankly, if the hurdle of eliminating the spending of money we don’t anticipate even having is crossed, then beware if you are a super close friend of the leaders. They will have done the best job they could to put "lipstick on a pig" — but it will still be a porker of a budget this year no matter what, and Ackerman and Villines will have to tap a handful of GOPers to vote for it.
I don’t envy those who vote for this big, fat budget. This budget should make the skin of even the most moderate of Republicans crawl. It is representative of where you end up after decades and decades of liberals running Sacramento. Fortunately, in the end, if only the minimum number of GOPers end up on the budget, we can still make sure Californian’s know this was a Democrat budget. If GOPers, for whatever reason, pile on… Then we’ll be like the Republicans in Washington, D.C., struggling with a credibility gap to say we are the party of less spending and fiscal constraint.
I’m not in the Assembly (much to the delight of many), but if I were, I would already have my floor speech written, and the phrase, "Iceberg, dead ahead!" would be prominently mentioned.
We are happy to be far from Sacramento, but In the parlance of the building, we here at the FlashReport urge a "no" vote on a bloated, fat, liberal-program laden state budget.