The Yacht Party’s public relations staff scored a coup by getting one of their press releases into print about those mean, nasty legislators spending all our tax dollars. Now, it turns out that some of the cost-cutting measures put forward by these Republicans have a bit of merit. But it’s all a matter of scale. These measures would produce savings in the millions of dollars, which is a lot to the individual blogger who really welcomes your donations (hint, hint), but not so much to a nation-state of 38 million. However, missing from the litany in this article is any measure that would actually put a dent in the budget crisis, like a broader-based sales tax that captures what people consume. AB178, which was also squashed this week, could have added anything from $2 billion-$5 billion to the General Fund. In other words, it would take more than 1,000 bills of the likes of Jeff Denham’s AB44, to abolish the Integrated Waste Management Board, to have the impact of Nancy Skinner’s AB178. But million and billion sound alike, so the Waste Management Board bill gets in the paper, while the squashing of the bill that would raise almost as much as Prop. 1C all by itself gets… nothing.
More of the essentially conservative slant of the media.
The Denham and Strickland bills wouldn’t solve the state deficit. They were merely measures to cut down on waste in the government.
That doesn’t change the fact that these bills were good ideas. Democrats shouldn’t shoot down good ideas, like consolidating the CIWMB, because it wont solve the big picture.
Each bill should be individually judged based on it’s merit, not by the party identification of the author.
I think that the easiest way to give people an intuition about what those big numbers mean is to divide by the population. So if California proposes to spend $1 billion on something, that’s a bit over $26 per Californian (we’re up to 38 million now). If it’s $1 million, we’re talking about 2.6 cents per person. These are numbers of a size that people can intuitively understand.
On the national level, $1 billion is about $3.30 per American, $1 trillion is $3,300, and $1 million is 0.3 cents.
Yet politicians will often about all these amounts equally.