Sen. Dutton wants to go back over the budget

I was going to put this as a comment to Dave’s diary about the Year of Doing Your Job, but, well, I thought it could stand as a compliment to that post. Sen. Dutton’s calling it a fiscal crisis, but really he just wants the governor to hack up the budget. You’ll remember him as being one of the Senate Obstructionists over the budget a few months ago. I’m not sure, but I’m pretty sure he was one of the senators hanging out at Chops when the Democrats were trying to work out a Budget.  But ol Bob wants to call a “fiscal crisis”.  Oooh, that sounds scary, what’s it mean? Well, Arnold would get to hack away at the budget.

Under Proposition 58 passed in 2004, the governor could declare a fiscal emergency if he determines revenue is “substantially below” what was anticipated in the budget and summon the Legislature into special session.

“If we don’t do something now … to deal with this crisis, we could find ourselves right back where we were five years ago,” Dutton said following a Senate budget committee hearing in the Capitol on Tuesday.

The administration’s Department of Finance cautioned that it was too soon to make such a call. (SacBee 11.28.07)

Well, wow, Arnold’s showing some restraint? Or could it perhaps have to do with the fact that he has no real desire to see the budget reopened. Because that went so well the last time. We are going to have some fiscal problems coming up, but the Republicans refuse to look at raising revenues. They simply seek to slash spending. MediCal? Who needs it? Not my family.

How can you negotiate when you are negotiating with your self. The Republicans refuse to look at the entirety of the issue, but yet demand answers now? To call it shortsighted is putting it kindly.

The Real Eminent Domain Reform Initiative Turns in Signatures

(Added YouTube Video from Tenants Rights Folks. – promoted by Brian Leubitz)

Disclosure: I do some outreach work on behalf of the Real Eminent Domain Reform Initiative

Next year there will be two eminent domain reform initiatives.  The Howard Jarvis Taxpayer's Association, has their Hidden Agendas Scheme to end rent control and to make land use planning difficult, if not impossible.  They submitted signatures a few days ago.  Well, today the Real Eminent Domain Reform Initiative, the Homeowners Protection Act, has submitted their signatures, over a million strong. So, we are looking at a face-off on the June ballot.  

While both of these initiatives claim to help property owners. One (the Real One) protects homeowners without ending important programs like rent control. One of them (The Fake One) redefines how government would work, or in actuality, not work.  The Hidden Agendas Scheme creates a litany of collateral damage in our government and follows along with the HJTA historical policy of slash and burn politics.  

Sure, HJTA will tell you all about how they want to save you from the tax man/ the law man/ the Man in general. But what HJTA really desires is an entirely new definition of property. A definition so broad as to practically halt much of our work to build build strong communities, and protect the environment. And more specifically, our decaying water infrastructure could be in the balance with this Hidden Agendas Scheme.   Could eminent domain use some tweaking? Sure. We should be very careful about using eminent domain for anyone's home.  And that's what the Real Eminent Domain Reform does:  

“It's been well over two years since the Supreme Court ruled in the Kelo case, and it's high time that California enacted strong protections for homeowners against eminent domain for private development,” said Ken Willis, president of the League of California Homeowners.  “This measure would provide California homeowners with new, constitutional protections against eminent domain. We're confident that we've collected the necessary signatures to place this measure on the June ballot, and are even more confident that voters will overwhelmingly support our measure when given the chance.”

The Homeowners Protection Act, the Real Eminent Domain Reform Initiative, doesn't have any hidden agendas. How novel and exciting!   For more information on Real Eminent Domain Reform, see EminentDomainReform.com. For more info on the landlords' Hidden Agenda Scheme: NoLandlordScheme.com

See Also:

Prop 90 Tag  

Using the Hidden Agendas for our Own Agenda  

How About A “Year Of Doing Your Job”?

(Bumped to move the 2 budget diaries together. – promoted by Brian Leubitz)

The Schwarzenegger era will be remembered as the era of “blockbuster politics,” where the Governor took the same marketing techniques that made his movies popular and transferred them to the political stage.  He wouldn’t just make an issue a priority, he would structure the entire year around it.  “The Year of Reform!”  “The Year of Education!”  “The Year of Healthcare!”  “The Year of The Environment!” As an actor he only put out one movie a year, so one legislative initiative a year sounded about right for the average attention span.  The details of governance would be pushed backstage; the thrust would be to go big on one issue and hope the goodwill gained from success would mask whatever failures occurred.  This has not been a slam dunk; the year of reform crashed badly, other signature issues have yielded fruit.  Now, with this year’s blockbuster on the rocks due to Republican resistance, legal challenges, initiative politics and structural roadblocks, the inattention to the small problems that weren’t on the big agenda are starting to consume the state.  In an excellent editorial, Assemblyman John Laird, Chairman of the Budget Committee, explains how our current mess of a $10 billion dollar shortfall could have been easily avoided if the Governor would have paid attention to something other than staging the next blockbuster.

… [T]he chronic boom-and-bust budget cycle is rooted in a simple problem: Californians generally believe in government and want it adequately funded — so much so that they repeatedly have voted for laws or constitutional amendments that lock in guaranteed spending for, say, education or transportation. At the same time, the state’s revenue system is antiquated and volatile. It is heavily reliant on income taxes, for instance, and so the pains of an economic downturn have a magnified effect on state revenue.

The short-term solutions that get us through on a year-to-year basis all have been tried — and tried. It’s time for bipartisan hard work to bring California’s long-term spending demands into balance with long-term revenues. It won’t be easy, but the easy paths have been taken, and they’ve left the state awash in red ink.

Wingnut conservatives are calling on the Governor to declare a fiscal crisis.  It’s one of their own doing.  When California could have eliminated the constant catastrophes of the budget process by restructuring the revenue offsets to services the population desires, instead the Governor floated a $15 billion dollar bond in 2004.  The result is $3 billion a year extra in debt, every year, to repay the costs of a senseless short-term fix.  If sound Republican budgeting means “put the problem off to children and grandchildren,” then we’ve got a lot of sound budgeters in Sacramento:

On paper, it may look like spending has increased in recent years, but that is largely driven by the expiration of earlier budget-balancing tricks — such as temporarily shifting school funding to local governments, shifting costs to special funds and the multibillion-dollar temporary cut to education.

There really haven’t been significant program spending increases, with three exceptions: public safety, the result of various court cases regarding our prison system and implementation of “Jessica’s Law” to track sex offenders; debt service, primarily the annual $3-billion payment on the $15-billion deficit bond; and local government funding, a result of the vehicle license fee cut because billions from that fee used to go to cities and counties.

Sacramento does not have a spending problem.  It has a denial-of-reality problem.  The cuts are always accommodated in the state budget, like this year’s delay of COLA (cost of living adjustments) for elderly public assistance, and the $1.3 billion in transportation funding.  The revenue increases are always blocked.  Stopgaps that run out and increases in population wipe out the cuts.  We’re left on an unsustainable track.

The state is rapidly headed toward bankruptcy if it continues down this stupid, temper-tantrum approach to the budget.  if Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to leave a lasting legacy, and let’s face it, that’s all he wants to do, he can work hard to fix the structural problems that will always put the state’s financial picture in peril.  That would require sitting in his office and doing his job, not holding big speeches behind backdrops that say “The Year of the Tiger!” or whatever he’s trying to peddle to the electorate.

OC Lincoln Club joins fight to steal electoral votes

(Well, looks like the rightwing is going all out on the Dirty Trick – promoted by Brian Leubitz)

Capitol Alert from the Sacramento Bee is reporting that OC Lincoln Club is donating $100,000 to help qualify the Electoral College reform initiative for the ballot. [Link] The measure, if it qualifies for the June ballot and passes, would award California's electoral votes by Congressional district instead of the present winner-take-all system.

The initiative qualifying effort was dropped by its original sponsors, but in recent weeks was pickup “by a group led by Republican strategist David Gilliard.” Their goal is to turn in 700,000 signatures by the end of the week.[Link]

The OC Lincoln Club joins 49th Congressional Representative Darrell Issa as the single largest contributors to the effort by the California GOP to malapportion the electoral system here in California. Here is a list of some of the donors who have contributed to this effort.

Cross-posted at San Diego Politico