If every Californian paid an extra $150 a year in vehicle license fees, $6.1 billion would be raised eliminating the proposed budget cuts to health care, parks, and education. If we closed the tax loopholes that LAO Elizabeth Hill identified – as Arnold kinda sorta agreed we should – we would raise $2.5 billion, over half of the $4.4 billion cuts proposed in Arnold’s budget.

Or we could fire thousands of teachers. From today’s Orange County Register:

More than 1,590 teachers could lose their jobs.

Class sizes in hundreds of classrooms might increase from 20 to 30 students.

And one district may shutter a campus altogether.

The county’s 28 school districts are deep in efforts to develop plans to cut about $204 million, or 5 percent, from their operating budgets in the face of a mounting state budget crisis.

They’re preparing for the worst because school districts, which receive about 70 percent of their funding from the state, often have to approve staffing and much of their spending for the next school year long before Sacramento lawmakers finish wrangling over the state budget.

“These could be the most devastating cuts our schools have ever seen,” county Superintendent William Habermehl said. “I don’t know how some of our school districts will be able to survive this and provide the same quality of education.”

This being the OC Register we should not be surprised that the piece claims “locked-in teacher pay raises, restricted state and federal funds and other fixed expenditures” are a big part of the problem, but let’s look at the bigger picture here.

Restoring the VLF would cost an average of $150 per person per year. But the proposed teacher firings would cost nearly 40,000 Californians around $50,000 a year in income, health care, and other important benefits. That’s money that isn’t going to pay mortgages or rents. Money that isn’t keeping a small business afloat, or a big box store’s sales high enough to prevent mass layoffs. As California slides into recession, and with zero job growth to show for 2007, how on earth does it make any sense to deliver such a crippling blow to the state’s economy through firing all these teachers?

Surely it is more sensible to ask Californians to pay an extra $150 a year for the privilege of driving, and to keep the state’s economy afloat and its schools in session, than to privilege a wasteful and reckless tax cut at the expense of the economy.

Of course, there is also the long-term damage to the state through these crippling education cuts. Larger class sizes and fewer classrooms mean fewer students will learn. Fewer students will attend college, fewer will get good jobs or create new businesses and technologies. The state will be set back even further – California will become Mississippi.

All so that people can save $150 a year on their car registration. All so that a handful of wealthy yacht owners can get a tax break. We are constantly told that tax cuts are necessary to keep the state in business – but as the looming collapse of public education should suggest, this is just not so. California’s economy is still living off of the investments made in education in the 1960s and 1970s – but that is beginning to run out.

Even in Republican Orange County, in cities like San Juan Capistrano and Mission Viejo, voters want to ensure that their kids will get a decent education. Parents know full well that firing teachers means their children will not learn. Republicans are talking a hard line, claiming they’re not going to compromise an inch on the budget.

But I think we should ask the parents in south Orange County whether they agree with their Republican representatives that their child’s future is really worth $150 a year.

It may not happen this year, but CA-03 will be Democratic territory before too long.

Republican voter registration in California is on the decline, but nowhere is the effect more pronounced than in the Sacramento region’s 3rd Congressional District.

Incumbent Rep. Dan Lungren, R-Gold River, now has the slimmest registration edge of any Republican-held congressional district in the state.

According to district registration figures updated before the Feb. 5 primary election by the secretary of state’s office, the Republican advantage over Democratic registration has slipped below five percentage points, 41.6 percent to 36.9 percent. Before the 2006 general election, the GOP margin was almost 6.6 points.

This was made pretty clear when the percentage of Democratic turnout in the February 5 primary was 53.1%, also the largest of any Republican-held district in the state.  There’s something definitely happening in this district, most of which is located in Sacramento County.  The demographics are shifting and Democrats have been very aggressive in registering new voters.  Debra Bowen’s focus on increasing registration led to thousands of new voters placed onto the rolls before the primary, and the residual effect of that is more Democrats.  They of course need to be turned out.  But it’s clear that Lungren is paying attention to this development.  After Bill Durston launched an effort to highlight Lungren’s terrible environmental record (he has a 5% rating from the League of Conservation Voters), Lungren took a walk on the most recent environmental vote in the House – a vote to eliminate subsidies for oil companies and re-route those tax breaks to renewable energy companies.  He was the ONLY California Republican in Congress to miss the vote; everyone else voted against it.  Lungren obviously feels some vulnerabilities on this, and he need look no further than at Richard Pombo.  The LCV listed him as one of their “Dirty Dozen” in 2006, and that year, not only did Pombo end up losing, but 9 of the 13 “Dirty Dozen” (I guess it was a baker’s dozen) lost as well.

If Bill Durston could secure some outside resources like that, this could be the sleeper Congressional race of 2008 in California.  Keep an eye on this one.