Opinion> Debra Saunders> Legislature Should Fix What It Broke

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Legislature Should Fix What It Broke

Here's the reason Californians don't trust Sacramento: In July 2003, the state controller's office figured there were 230,000 state employees. Since then, every budget deal has featured legislators' howling protestations that they've been forced to make horrific budget cuts, yet the controller now estimates the state has 244,000 employees.

While state businesses have been forced to lay off good people, state government kept growing. Even now, Sacto's focus has been on moving state workers out of positions bankrolled by the general fund and into state jobs underwritten by other sources.

"Government has always been viewed correctly as an institution that immunizes itself from this kind of pain," noted Darry Sragow, a Democratic political guru. "But governing requires making decisions that are painful."

Not that Sragow sees it this way — he doesn't — but governing is what Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger finally is doing. Payroll is shrinking. Lynelle Jolley of the State Personnel Board explained to me that the 244,000 figure includes some vacant positions. The governor does not have the authority to swiftly lay off state workers, but up to 4,600 staffers could lose their jobs in September.

The biggie: The governor can unilaterally furlough state employees — he recently added a third day to two unpaid furlough days per month. As Jolley noted, the governator's furlough action "translates into a 14 percent cut in pay" for most state workers.

That big pay cut is expected to yield $2.2 billion in savings this fiscal year. The bad news: There's $24 billion to go.

Arnold also has rediscovered "waste, fraud and abuse" — his mantra for the spending cuts he promised during the 2003 recall campaign.

But he couldn't handle the criticism that followed attempts to cut spending and so dropped his campaign promises.

Last year, Schwarzenegger told the Los Angeles Times that if you try to balance the budget on the backs of waste, fraud and abuse, "You are not even going to find 1 percent there."

Then all five of his budget measures tanked on the May 19 special election ballot. Now with support of local prosecutors, Schwarzenegger has targeted fraud in the In-Home Supportive Services Program. (One district attorney said her office had found that alleged in-home workers continued to get paid for work when in jail.) He hopes that reform alone will save $500 million.

This is where I'm supposed to insert the standard lament about how puerile Repubs have soiled themselves by using the two-thirds vote required to pass a budget as a way to block budgets with tax increases. But I think Small Business Action Committee head Joel Fox is right to point out that "this is not a cuts-only budget," as last year's budget raised $10 billion in taxes in this fiscal year.

Sure, in the end, a handful of GOP adults will have to vote with Democrats for a budget that includes more tax hikes and more gimmicks. Math is math.

And math being math, the Democrats have an obligation to fix this mess, instead of proclaiming, as the sometimes-absent-from-negotiations Assembly Speaker Karen Bass recently did, that Schwarzenegger "broke it. He should fix it."

It's time for Democrats to agree to more serious cuts — not just moving around the money and personnel. As Fox argued, in this down economy, it's not even clear if any proposed tax increases can produce what they're supposed to produce.

E-mail Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@sfchronicle.com. To find out more about Debra J. Saunders, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

Comments

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Oh, this is rich: "... governing is what Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger finally is doing." If Californians are dumb enough to go for that swindle they deserve every bit of the miserable consequences they are about be to inundated with.
Stopping the government from growing and "blowing up the boxes" were the very imperatives the Terminator asked us to embrace by voting out Davis. And Ms. Saunders, as you yourself pointed out in a recent column which I guess you've already tried to consign to the land of Alzheimer's, what Termybaby did to cast a protective shell around those boxes and stuff them full of more and more metasticizing civil servants trumps Davis on all counts. It also proclaims to the world what a bunch of idiotic suckers the voters of California are.
But the truly grotesque irony of all this is how, even as Termybaby embarked on one of the greatest races to grow government of all time, he started us fresh out of the gate with the 4 billion dollar deficit he created by ripping that money out of the General Fund and handing it over to the slobbering mob as a vehicle tax rebate. That, of course, was delivering on the bribe he had offered in exchange for their vote.
The state has been running an increasing deficit ever since, and the kind of hypocrisy now being peddled by Termybaby and that one-third-plus gang of thugs in the Legislature who refuse to vote for a tax increase is just soooo Republican: Move in, raid the coffers, and then beat it out of town and leave the rest of us with a rotten infrastructure and an empty, bankrupt piggy bank.
Sound familiar? In California here we're just a few sad steps behind the Madoffing we got from the Bush Administration. And of course, as Termybaby starts having to deal with the repo man, he's shocked to find out there's gambling going on in the house.
Sadder and more ironic still, taxes will go up, sooner or later. They'll skyrocket. The later it happens, the greater will be the price tag. The roof is leaking, the frame and foundation are rotting, and continuing to defer the long overdue maintenance just means it's going to cost exponentially more to fix this old house in the end.
Yes, we have to live "within our means", as Termybaby's newfound wisdom proclaims, but we also have to pay our debts. The money's been spent. However unwisely (and yup, Termybaby, we're talking about you--you are the one, after all, who could have wielded that magic line-item veto any time you wanted), the money's been spent, and the obligation to pay it back doesn't change just because it's the taxpayers who get the bill. If he'd finally gotten to "governing," he'd be standing up right now to those get-something-for-nothing, right-wing terrorists in the Legislature and ending the big game of chicken they're getting such a rush out of playing with our future.

Comment: #1
Posted by: Masako
Sat Jul 11, 2009 10:46 AM