Putting Down the Fiddle So We Can Do More Fiddling Later
From the Wall Street Journal, here’s the outline of a budget plan:
Mr. Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders have agreed on $14 billion to $15 billion in spending cuts, with about a third of that in education, said staffers for the two sides. Higher education is also set to take a hit; a University of California committee on Wednesday approved a budget plan that would force most of its 180,000 workers to take unpaid days off.
The remaining gap would be closed through one-time fixes and accounting gimmicks — such as issuing state workers’ paychecks in July 2010 instead of June 2010 to save money for the current fiscal year — despite the Republican governor’s repeated demands for a lasting overhaul of spending.
At this point, anything that will let the state government pay its bills with money instead of IOUs is an improvement on the status quo, but this strikes me as a decidedly sub-optimal way to go about it.
First, it’s not a real fix. Even if we manage to scarp something together that allows the state to muddle through until capital gains and incomes start going up again and we get more tax revenue, we will not have really gotten anywhere. The state’s problems weren’t caused by the recession, the recession merely exposed how our insane political system — which at the sametime encourages massive spending while making it nearly impossible to pay for it, especially in a recession — bankrupted America’s largest state. The problems are structural, and until the structure is fixed, these “one-time fixes and accounting gimmicks” will just, once again, put off the day of reckoning.
The second way this particular compromise is perverse is how the onus is all on cutting spending. Obviously California needs to cut spending, but it’s totally unreasonable for the Republicans who make up minorities of both houses of the legislature, and of the populace of the whole, to dictate that Democrats have to punish their constituents and take the fall for spending cuts, while they get to insist that taxes remain where they are. Of course, these extremist, stubborn Republicans are enabled by the fact that any budget needs a two/thirds majority, which, in times of crisis, paves the way for particularly absurd resolutions like this one.
