Dan Walters is touting a UC Riverside poll on budget issues that interviewed 276 respondents, 63% male, with a 42-38-11 split among Democrats, Republicans and independents. He does this with a straight face.
It barely matters what such a flawed poll shows, but I’ll mention it anyway. According to 276 people, 57% support the 2/3 requirement for passing a budget, 24% preferred a simple majority, 6% in between, 4% other (?), and 6% don’t know. Given the bad methodology, these numbers mean nothing.
But I’ll tell you who has historically taken numbers like these as the gospel’s truth and used them to mute themselves about any reform efforts for thirty years. That would be the leaders of the California Democratic Party. And they latch on to any poll numbers showing a view like this as a blunt instrument to kick hippies, not a starting point for the political advocacy and opinion leadership that can and should be done to change perspectives.
Here’s the problem, in a nutshell. In 1978 California passed Prop. 13, and Democrats have run for cover ever since. They should have put up a fight immediately. But instead, Democrats cowered in fear of losing power, despite the demographic shifts in the state since the mid-1990s, so they lay low and never advocate for the necessary reforms, and buy completely into the myth that the 70’s-era tax revolt remains alive and well, and they take public opinion polls like this as static and unchangeable through anything resembling leadership. Obviously Republicans are insane in this state, but they can barely manage 1/3 of the legislature (and if we had a half-decent campaign apparatus among California Democrats they’d lose that too) and shouldn’t be feared in any respect. Yet our Democratic leadership exists in a post-1978 fog, a kind of “Sacramento Syndrome,” where they’ve come to love their captors on the right, and have bought into their claims.
Meanwhile, the David Binder memo, with ten times the poll respondents and a clear majority favoring a broad swath of tax increases over spending cuts to deal with the deficit, goes unmentioned by virtually everyone in this state. And in that desert, voters go vainly on a futile search for leadership. They find nothing but shell-shocked politicians.
…As if on cue, view for yourself the craptastic “Post-Budget Reform Push” press release Assembly Speaker Bass just dropped. You’ll be thrilled to know that your state government will be more “user-friendly” when leaving AIDS patients and the poor to die on the streets. You can almost smell the fear coming off this press release (on the flip):
BASS LOOKS TOWARD POST-BUDGET REFORM PUSH
SACRAMENTO-Assembly Speaker Karen Bass (D-Los Angeles) today announced the California Assembly will begin preparing information and analyses on ways state government can better serve Californians. The move is in advance of a joint Assembly-Senate government reform effort expected to begin in July following passage of solutions to the state’s budget deficit.
Bass released the following statement regarding the effort:
“As the Budget Conference Committee continues to meet and we work to resolve the state’s budget deficit, Senator Steinberg and I are also looking ahead to developing a bicameral, bipartisan, back-to-basics approach to reform what is wrong with California’s system of government.
The following are examples of goals this effort could include:
Making government more customer-friendly.
Giving Californians more value for their tax dollars by making government more efficient and accountable.
Cutting through the gridlock caused by outmoded rules and undue partisanship-gridlock that only leads to late budgets and last minute decision making.
Consolidating agencies and functions so they make sense and save money. Not just blowing up boxes, but also folding, stacking and storing others more efficiently so the ones we need fit the room we have for them.
Building on the upcoming recommendations of the bipartisan Commission for a 21st Century Economy so our revenue system makes more sense.
Making government more transparent and accessible from around the state.
The Assembly will immediately begin compiling a wide variety of ideas, information and input on these areas. This way the bicameral reform effort will have the resources and data they need to move forward quickly and effectively with a lot of the necessary groundwork already out of the way.
We will also be looking at ways to involve outside experts and stakeholders, as well as increase public participation in the reform process.
Senator Steinberg and I have been talking frequently about this, and I know he and his team are making similar headway in the Senate. I look forward to sharing our collective information and working together to help give Californians the government they deserve.”
dan walters makes pete wilson look like a progressive.
the man has not changed his views in 25 years. he is predictable as a clock and correct as often as a stopped one.
The editorial in today’s Bee calls for reform of Prop 13. It links to another OpEd by Harold Meyerson that appeared in the Bee as well as the Washington Post.
What I expect from Bass and Sternberg is a staunch defense of the status quo. What we need is for someone to correct the imbalance between commercial interests and home owners in the tax system. It was not there prior to Prop 13.
Polls are one thing, election results are another.
Even a tobacco tax has trouble at the polls.
Perhaps you can show me a tax increase that has won strong support at the ballot box in California in recent memory, particularly in an off-year election?
Proposition 13 scared them crazy all right. But that was so long ago it was before some in the Legislature or on their staffs were born.
Yes, Jarvis was a nasty, bitter, foolish old man. Kind of like Dan Walters, come to think of it. I used to pester him to retire because he keeps repeating the same tired old crap all the time, but I gave up when it became clear he was too bone stupid to see anything beyond the tip of his nose. He who claimed that the Enron (and ilk) bandits did nothing wrong during the bogus “energy crisis.” Idiot.
However, he can be a useful idiot. He has been very clear about who is out in front of the California “reform” movement, ie: the Bay Area Council and California Forward.
After all, they’ve been going around assembling the support of most of the key top-level stakeholders: the money and finance interests, the surviving real estate interests, the energy and agricultural interests, the major players at the Universities, the various high power political interests and their all-important consultants, the top-level nonprofit interests, the main media and on and on. They’ve been holding their little public meetings around the state and building both an infrastructure and a kind of simulation of a grassroots to force their issues and their constitutional revisions (by re-writing the whole thing) when the time comes.
They are playing this game very professionally, and right now they are so far ahead of any competition, it isn’t even funny.
Karen Bass is doing her part, as I assume is Darrell Steinberg, to smooth the way for the major power play that will be taking place shortly — actually it is under way as we speak. The Governor’s Office seems to have no complaints. Why should they?
Power will not be denied. It is the most overtly upper-class “reform” effort I think the nation has ever witnessed, and even Washington DC seems to be intrigued with it. Certainly they are intrigued enough to stay on the sidelines while the old, the halt, the lame, the sick, and the poor are turned out to die in the streets.
A “reform” that starts by causing as much harm to the people of California as Schwarzenegger and the Legislature have in mind — as punishment for their failure to follow their instructions to pass the Rube Goldberg rattle trap patches to the collapsing budget framework they came up with in February — is right out of the Post Prop. 13 playbook. Make the people suffer. That’ll teach ’em!
And then, solve the suffering by coming up with the brand spanking New California of their fevered imaginations.
A paradise for the rich. A somewhat mitigated Hell on Earth for everyone else. And you watch. Polls will show conclusively that 2/3rds of Californians like the solutions being proposed for them by California Forward and the Bay Area Council. And none of them had any idea there were any alternatives.
Perfect.
That survey was conducted as a class project by the students enrolled in Political Science 146 at UCR. It was designed to give said students (including myself) experience at designing and fielding survey research projects, and is useful for little else.
You can tell anyone who cites it that it wasn’t designed to provide anything close to conclusive results. We scheduled our call shifts around student schedules, we didn’t call back nonresponders, we cut a lot of corners because this study was NOT designed to give conclusive results. Obviously, we also only ran the study for a week or two. Don’t let anyone try and cite this for their own purposes, it was an exercise in methodology and nothing more.