California’s lawmakers meet tonight to try to resolve the worst budget crisis in the state’s history. For more than six months, the majority Democrats and Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger have tried to win the support of three Republicans in each house of the Legislature, which they need for the constitutionally mandated two-thirds vote to approve the budget. As a result, the California budget has been held hostage for more than half a year by six members of the minority party.
Why is California the only state besides Rhode Island and Arkansas to require a supermajority to pass its budget? As Fred Silva explains in this excellent article in Western City magazine, the two-thirds requirement emerged out of a state funding crisis in the Depression. After voters rejected an initiative authorizing an income and sales tax, public officials wrote a constitutional amendment that allowed the Legislature to raise taxes and, at the same time, established a tight spending limit for state government. The amendment stipulated that the spending cap could be lifted by a two-thirds vote of the Legislature. In 1962, voters approved a new initiative that eliminated the spending cap but required a two-thirds vote for every budget.
The pressure on the Democrats to compromise on the proposed budget is tremendous. As the crisis continues, state workers have taken a 10 percent pay cut, construction work has halted on aging bridges and crumbling roads, and schools and universities have laid off instructors and slashed their expenses. The pressure on Republicans to compromise is nil. There are few competitive legislative districts in California. This means that the Republicans have no incentive to compromise on spending or taxes; indeed, such a compromise could well doom their careers. Each day that passes without a budget helps to “starve the beast,” which serves their ideology and helps their political futures. (Ironically, though, as the San Francisco Chronicle points out, the Republican districts receive far more in state services than they pay in taxes. What’s the matter with Fresno?)
As a result, we sit and await the Legislature’s vote on what nearly everyone agrees is a terrible budget, with tax increases for ordinary Californians but windfalls for multinational corporations; with the prospect of short-term revenue increases offset by the potential long-term disaster of a new, permanent spending cap.
The University of California will survive the crisis, in part because only about a third of its budget comes from the state. But its incoming students will be forced to work more hours to pay for their “tuition-free” education (there’s still no tuition at the UC; only “fees”); and they will come from increasingly impoverished, struggling schools. Thus does the best public university system in the world – the democratic, meritocratic dream of the late Gov. Pat Brown, with his master plan for free higher education for every accomplished California child — continue its slide into mediocrity.
30 comments
February 14, 2009 at 5:23 pm
ari
You’re trying to make me puke, right?
February 14, 2009 at 5:29 pm
dana
Sometimes I suspect California is not capable of self-governance.
February 14, 2009 at 5:46 pm
SEK
But its incoming students…
…of whom there will be 3,400 fewer at UCI. Don’t know about the rest of the satellites. Same apply there?
February 14, 2009 at 6:27 pm
andrew
The two-thirds budget rule is the liberum veto of our time. If I were a border state, I’d be thinking about how to benefit from partition.
February 14, 2009 at 6:28 pm
grackle
Sometimes I suspect
California ishumans are not capable of self-governance.Fixed that.
February 14, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Ahistoricality
Often, it seems, it falls to me to ask the obvious stupid questions:
Is there a movement to alter the 2/3rds requirement at this point? Why not?
How did they get previous years budgets through, and why is it actually different this year?
How have they been allocating spending for the last six months?
Why haven’t most national news outlets actually spent any time on this story?
February 14, 2009 at 7:05 pm
Michael Turner
Or is it that governments can’t self-humanize?
February 14, 2009 at 7:17 pm
andrew
Is there a movement to alter the 2/3rds requirement at this point? Why not?
I suppose it depends on what constitutes a movement. I’ve seen a lot of talk about it on liberal outlets going back to last summer; more recently it’s been showing up in newspaper columns (with the caveat that I’m not as up on CA politics as I was a month ago). But polling doesn’t suggest there’s huge popular support, and if you’re just casually following CA politics, you could easily get the impression that the problem is simply that both sides don’t want compromise enough, partisanship is too high, etc. blah blah blah. Over 60% of the legislature in both houses is Democratic and Obama got 60% in the general, but sometimes the discussion makes it sound like it’s a closely divided state.
Why haven’t most national news outlets actually spent any time on this story?
As far as I can tell, no one nationally cares about state government, even for states that by many measures are the size of some nation-states. California’s budget made news when Schwarzenegger went to Congress to plea for money a few months ago; like the Blagojevich story, it was the congressional aspect that made it news, even though the important details were back in the state.
How have they been allocating spending for the last six months?
Smoke and mirrors? There have been some short-term fixes – fix probably isn’t the right term, but something like that – but I haven’t followed the details closely enough to know what they are.
February 14, 2009 at 7:45 pm
Kathy
As Andrew suggests, there is a movement to fix the 2/3 requirement, but the proposition tends to poll poorly; about 39 percent of likely voters say they support it.
Previous budgets have also been held hostage by the Republicans. This year the situation is dire, though; $42 billion — that’s billion — is a deep hole to fill. California’s budget is heavily reliant on the income tax (since property taxes are limited by Prop 13), and the income tax waxes and wanes with the economy as a whole.
“Smoke and mirrors” is a good way to describe the current allocation of money. Schwarzenegger did sign a budget in September based on a $15 billion shortfall and lots of borrowing. Lenders have refused to loan the state any more money until it passes a realistic budget.
National news outlets are facing their own financial crisis. The Wall Street Journal used to have two people covering Sacramento, but that bureau closed a few years ago. Overall, the number of reporters covering politics and policy in Sacramento has fallen by more than 50 percent over the last two years.
February 14, 2009 at 8:47 pm
Lori
What’s the matter with Fresno?
Oh, where to begin…
Old mayor (“Bubba”) literally rode out of town on a horse and new mayor supported Prop 8. Fresno State did win the College World Series last year (too bad that didn’t come with a Phelpsian million dollar bonus, which would have come in handy for furniture in our new to-open-next-week library). Is it asking too much to pass a friggin’ budget so my students don’t have to bring their own chairs?
February 15, 2009 at 10:01 am
Tom
California’s state government seems so ineffective and its issues so problematic that I wonder, as a non-Californian and thus obviously ignorant of much of California’s politics, if it would just be best to scrap the state’s entire constitution and start over. Is this even possible in the current political climate?
February 15, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Bitchphd
I’m on my kid’s school’s site council, where I have learned that standardized testing costs CA schools something like $80 mil/year (exact figures are buried somewhere in a moving box right now). Notably, the state hasn’t decided to just forego testing for a year or two rather than cutting k-12 funding.
February 15, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Bitchphd
For instance, not testing ONE grade in our district would more than cover the district’s expected cuts. Grr.
February 15, 2009 at 3:39 pm
Brad
For instance, not testing ONE grade in our district would more than cover the district’s expected cuts. Grr.
How much in federal dollars would they then lose?
Locally, a trustee asked the accountants to find out what it would cost to leave No Child Leave Behind behind. It was a lot of money, and it was important money, too. It funded a lot of special needs programs.
February 15, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Brad
California’s state government seems so ineffective and its issues so problematic that I wonder, as a non-Californian and thus obviously ignorant of much of California’s politics, if it would just be best to scrap the state’s entire constitution and start over. Is this even possible in the current political climate?
I have heard of people talking about a Constitutional Convention. This was on a PRI station, so I have little faith that this has any traction outside of a small part of California politics.
The 2/3 majority for budgets is the big issue. The second issue is the way that a lot of spending is mandated to be at a certain level in the budget, but frankly I would hate to see funding for primary and secondary schooling cut to pay for more prisons.
February 15, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Brad
Unlike Kathy, I do not see UC slipping into mediocrity. What I see is UC becoming like CU Boulder or the U of Michigan. Those schools fund a lot of the budget with out of state tuition. UC would be less the pinnacle of California’s undergraduate and postgraduate education and become a pretty cheap, semi-private institution.
Locally, the academic senate is fighting tooth and nail any development work, but every division and some departments have at least part-timers. As more programs get the axe, the pendulum will likely sway.
February 15, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Baaaa
Of course what many of the news outlets leave out is the massive cut to the vehicle license fees which caused the revenue shortfall. I would love to see the members of the California legislature come out and say “It is time to act like responsible adults and realize that if we want services, we need to pay for them. Therefore, we are reinstating the vehicle license fee to where they were in the 90’s”. A HUGE part of our budget would be solved.
Also, term limits have caused the Republicans in Sacramento to not feel the need to compromise. There’s no need to build long-term alliances if there’s no long term in which to enjoy the payoff. It doesn’t help that the Gropenator can’t seem to swing any members of his own party to vote for anything.
Regarding Fresno- it seems to be true across the country as a whole that the anti-tax, anti-gub’ment people come mainly from areas that get way more in services than they pay for in taxes. If I had Lexis-Nexis I could pull up an article about how all the red states are supported by the blue states, as I know I red one a year or two ago showing just that.
February 15, 2009 at 6:17 pm
andrew
Unfortunately, reinstating the vehicle license fee, like getting rid of the 2/3 budget requirement, is apparently something else that really doesn’t poll well. And it would also require Schwarzenegger to essentially admit he was completely wrong about one of the few issues he campaigned on in the recall.
February 15, 2009 at 7:09 pm
Baaaa
Yeah, I know it doesn’t poll well, but I’m not sure the question is being asked right– i.e. “Would you rather we lay off firefighters so that when your SUV rolls over on the freeway, you need to crawl out of your vehicle, drag it’s crumpled wreckage off to the shoulder, clean up the mess and get yourself to the hospital, or should we raise the vehicle license fee?”. Or “Due to lack of funds, less and less agricultural and import inspections are happening. Would you like to see even more people die of food poisoning, or should we raise the vehicle license fee?”.
It’s really all about the framing, and I think the polling questions don’t ask what trade offs people are willing to make.
February 16, 2009 at 11:36 am
MrTimbo
I’ve been thinking lately that the thing to do might be to spend a lot of money to make those republican seats unsafe, to go into those districts and relentless blame those republicans for the budget problems. If we’re not going to win those seats anyway, it certainly frees the dems up to make aggressively pro-revenue arguments. And, given some necessary level of reality-basedness, political ideas seem to gain acceptance in many cases largely because of the boldness/confidence/loudness with which they’re publicly asserted.
February 16, 2009 at 11:46 am
ari
I’d be eager to here the counterargument, Mr. Timbo. It passes understand, for me at least, why leading state Democrats haven’t long since published a list of Republican obstructions.
“Furloughed? Well, here are the ten people you can thank. Worried about making your house payment? Here are the people standing between the legislature and passing a budget that would help you out. Frustrated that your school district is suffering/that you have to pay more for your kid to go to the UC? Here are the idiots who think that education should be more expensive in the state of California.”
That kind of thing. Really, I just can’t fathom how the Democrats don’t play the most brutal kind of hardball with the budget. I’m sure there’s a reason. But I can’t conjure it.
February 16, 2009 at 12:12 pm
Mo MacArbie
We have as good a budget proposal as we’re going to get. So I say we should just stop spending a single penny in all districts covered by no votes. Lay off the CHP. Let the wildfires burn. Close the schools. Open the prisons. Fuck the lot of ’em.
No, this is not a reasonable response. Fuck you too.
February 16, 2009 at 3:00 pm
Decline and Fall. « the Edge of the American West
[…] After voters rejected an initiative authorizing an income and sales tax , public officials wrote a constitutional amendment that allowed the Legislature to raise taxes and, at the same time, established a tight spending limit for state …Continue Reading […]
February 16, 2009 at 3:16 pm
kathy a.
i’m usually in favor of participatory democracy, but CA’s initiative process has resulted in numerous disasters. the 2/3 supermajority requirement for a budget is one; so are the lingering effects of prop. 13. complex legislation with long-term effects is not best handled by people who only know what they saw in ads on TV about the issue. i don’t even watch TV, and i’m capable of actually reading the initiatives and researching them, but i do not feel capable of considering many initiatives in balance with existing law or other budget considerations. but perhaps that is a rant for another day.
February 16, 2009 at 6:58 pm
Megan
The Bay Area Council is talking about a Constitutional Convention. I’m going to that meeting.
February 16, 2009 at 7:41 pm
kathy a.
megan — i do not know much about the bay area council, but from a glance at the website, it seems very heavily laden with business interests. they may be all very well meaning, but i have grave concerns about constitutional reform being undertaken by a bunch of business leaders.
a big part of my problem with the initiative process is that well-funded sponsors OWN the public discussion, and nobody — not them, not the public — has the interest or time or resources to give full attention to all the repercussions. i will be pleasantly surprised if the meeting recognizes that huge efforts need to be made to include all of california’s many constituancies in any constitutional convention, in a meaningful way.
February 16, 2009 at 9:02 pm
Megan
That’s the only reason I think it has a chance of happening: the fact that business interests are concerned about their long-run interests.
Since we’re insolvent and can’t pass a budget, counties are thinking of withholding taxes (isn’t that near-insurrection?) and our prisons are about to be confiscated, I hardly think our governance could be worse. If it takes businesses to make us re-set and start over, I’ll take it. No matter who does it, I want to be part.
February 16, 2009 at 9:59 pm
kathy a.
ok, i can accept this meeting as a start! i haven’t heard about counties holding back taxes; but certainly know the state is holding them back from counties for services they provide. the prison system is under a federal receivership for its horribly poor medical care [just a part of the huge problems with our prison system].
the thing is, starting completely over would be a bad thing, in my view. there is just too much; that would surely throw us into utter chaos. but i think there might maybe be a couple/few changes that would just make government work better in the state.
February 16, 2009 at 10:02 pm
kathy a.
although, i don’t trust business to correctly identify what will help individuals, or small businesses, or poor people, or students, or old people, etc.
February 22, 2009 at 6:30 pm
how much constitution could a constituent constituate if a constitutional convention could be constituted by constituents? « by the wayside
[…] on 22 February 2009 by andrew If you’ve been following the California budget crisis in any detail, there’s a good chance you’ve come across talk of reforming the state constitution. Now […]