I’m sure many political observers will laud this New York Times magazine article on California’s crisis and the men and women who seek to solve it, but I found it oddly pedestrian. The profiles of the candidates reveal little of substance, and aside from displaying the salient fact that Arnold has no interest in the well-being of his constituents, I didn’t see the point.
“Someone else might walk out of here every day depressed, but I don’t walk out of here depressed,” Schwarzenegger said. Whatever happens, “I will sit down in my Jacuzzi tonight,” he said. “I’m going to lay back with a stogie.”
Overall, I saw too much focus on personality in dealing with what is essentially a problem of process.
Actually, while I didn’t agree with all of it, I thought Gary Kamiya had a much smarter take, and it didn’t mention Arnold Schwarzenegger or the names of any of his potential replacements more than once. The headline, “Californians are sinking themselves,” doesn’t seem to match the bulk of the article, which focuses on the dysfunctional governing process.
The immediate source of California’s financial problems is a lethal combination of ideology and rules. It is deeply politically divided, and its governmental mechanisms are completely broken. Bay Area leftists stare at Orange County conservatives across an unbridgeable abyss; a large and potent group of anti-government libertarians faces off against an equally powerful group of pro-tax, proactive government liberals. If California, like most states, required only a simple majority to pass its budget, the disagreements between these camps could be worked out; after all, the Democrats control the Legislature. But California requires a two-thirds majority, which gives the GOP, now dominated by anti-government, anti-tax ideologues, veto power over the process. The result is deadlock.
Compounding this problem is California’s notorious initiative process, which allows voters to bypass the Legislature and place initiatives directly on the ballot simply by gathering enough signatures. The initiative process was originally passed by voters in 1911 to circumvent the power of the oligarchic railroad trusts by restoring direct democracy. And it still offers citizens a chance to take control of important issues. But it has gone out of control, abused by powerful interests who hire people to collect signatures and ram through bills that no ordinary citizen can be expected to comprehend. By sidelining elected officials, it achieves the worst of both worlds: It gives ordinary citizens, who lack requisite expertise, institutional memory and accountability, too much power, and then forces legislators to clean up their mess — except that because of ideological gridlock and the supermajority requirement, they can’t.
Kamiya looks at the three strikes law and in particular Prop. 13, which he views as the ultimate manifestation of the Two Santa Claus theory, that California can have endlessly lower taxes with endlessly more social services.
This was, in effect, a mass outbreak of cognitive dissonance, an up-yours delivered to government with the public’s left hand, while its right hand reached out for Sacramento’s largesse. Now, 31 years later, the bill has finally come due. There is no free lunch. If you want good roads, parks, decent schools (California’s schools, once the best in the nation, are now among the worst) and adequate social services, you have to pay for them.
Out of this, Kamiya points his finger at the people who voted in Prop. 13 and failed to modify it over the ensuing 31 years, who are “self-centered” and have “not decided what it thinks about the New Deal, or government itself.” They need to “grow up,” Kamiya says.
I think this ignores the fact that Californians have traditionally been offered precious few choices to rectify the broken system. The Democratic Party essentially has made a pact with themselves to nibble around the edges for three decades instead of confronting the great unmentionable crisis of governance. People see the dysfunctional politics play out year after year and become rightfully disaffected with the system. And they are never told anything from anyone in a position of power to counteract the Two Santa Claus theory, and so they necessarily believe it. I don’t blame citizens for responding to their leaders. The problem lies with the leadership itself, or more to the point the lack thereof.
I was 5 years old and on the other coast of the country when Prop. 13 was passed, and I’m not about to bear the brunt of the blame for that decision. I would blame myself if I continued to live with the failure of the political leadership to confront the root causes. But Californians are starting to use movement politics to go around the leadership and force the necessary solutions. The sheer enormity of the problem and the size of the state makes this a difficult option. But the alternative, to acquiesce and wait patiently for the leadership to figure things out, is unthinkable.
…and lived in California 31 years ago, you’ve never had a chance to vote on the core elements of Prop 13. I wasn’t even alive in 1978, so I’m not going to hold any blame for what those idiots did 31 years ago.
I also think it’s absolutely right to point out that this is a failure of leadership. As I laid out back in May Democrats have spent the last 31 years believing that they could cut deals with Republicans to balance the budget without massive cuts while waiting for another asset bubble to bail them out. Those days are over, but the Democratic caucus in Sacramento refuses to admit this, and are too familiar with the old ways to envision anything different.
That all being said, I think there is a problem in California and among Democrats in particular when it comes to progressive economics. Way too many people still believe that individual initiative, and not government action, is the basis of economic growth and success. There are a lot of Democrats, including the donor class, who accept the core beliefs of neoliberalism in whole or in large part.
Yet we shouldn’t make too much of that. As we have repeatedly shown here, California voters do approve tax increases, even by 2/3 margins. If we had majority rule, California voters would have repeatedly taxed themselves to keep services afloat and we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in.
California is a state with a center-left population and a center-right government – in fact, a government set up to ensure that the center-left population can never govern itself, can never put its ideas and values into action. So Gary Kamiya has gotten close to the problem, but still has some way to go to fully understand it.
I have to look up “Two Santa Claus” theory every time I see it.
Namely, there is not Sanity Clause.
Let no one say that Marx has nothing to say about California.
It’s a classic example of the flaws of modern journalism. 10 pages and 8,000 words and nowhere are Whitman or Poizner described as conservatives (the article actually makes them sound like moderate Republicans). Leibovitz repeats the canard about gerrymandering being a part of the problem, lets Tom Campbell spout off about “tax volatility” without offering any context or explanation to the reader, and equates Republican extremism to a supposed Democratic extremism:
Really? I would be thrilled if Democrats said “no more cuts.” Instead we had Darrell Steinberg saying “cut we will”.
Further evidence of how the press corps routinely fails Californians.
While all these comments are true, it is important to realize that until very recently, Californians truely believed that they could have lower taxes and higher services. Now, under economic duress, they are opposed to new taxes on themselves but would generally favor taxes on oil/corporations/millionaires/cigarettes. The key point is that they never get to consider such taxes in the context of a loss of services–in other words, tradeoffs.
Probably the most pernicious aspect of the Reagan “revolution” was that the concept of a tradeoff was removed from American political debate. When W lowered taxes, there
was no cost–no services had to be given up (similar with Reagan). Why do the Reps lie? Well, Gingrich tried to kill Sesame Street in 1995 and caught holy heck–and now his “non-profit” foundation champions proposals with no tradeoffs, which, not surprisingly, poll test very well with the American public.
It is elementary economics that one choice constrains another (opportunity cost), but supply-side “economics” (for which the political theory was developed first and then the neocons looked for a useful idiot whose theories agreed–Laffer) offered something for nothing (“humanity I love you for when you’re hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink”–e.e. cummings).
Solution: Create tradeoffs when we talk to the public. Don’t propose an oil severance tax for the General Fund (like Bing in 2006). Tie all proceeds to the UC system or education. Give counties “local options” to raise taxes, this being determined by a majority vote.
Possibly I’m too optimistic, but it seems that the Democratic leaders are finally getting the message that they have to tax more to provide the services needed by their constituents. Republicans have a long way to go, and possibly the cuts that will hit their constituents will wake them up to a wave of resistance from those who elected them…we can hope.
Meanwhile, I’m looking back to the time of Pat Brown in my diary “Arnold’s Bathtub” just posted:
http://calitics.com/diary/9290…
There are a few things going on that show that the Democratic Party is trying to get the overall systemic issues revolved.
On the 2/3rds rule there is a petition starting in the Bay Area Dem Clubs to remove the requirement from Revenue and Budget bills.http://www.halfwaytoconcord.com/dems-launch-majority-rule-petition/
Additionally Mark DeSaulnier (D-Senator Concord) has put a motion forward to call for a new Constitutional Convention to re-write the whole thing.
Various other Democrats have spoken about the initiative system has contributing to the problem.
But I bet most people were like me. I didn’t read it. I didn’t understand it. I knew there were some retired people who lost their homes because they couldn’t afford the taxes. That seemed sad. I didn’t think about the long-term consequences. I didn’t realize it applied to commercial property. And I didn’t hear anything about the 2/3 rule on raising taxes. Nor would I have understood the issues unless somebody explained them to me. Nobody did.
I was 28. I had a 5-years-old and my first house. Lower property taxes didn’t seem bad to me. I didn’t think about what it would do to my son’s schools. Or how the state would pay for other things we both needed.
Now I’m older and wiser. I DO read things before I vote for them. I DO research them and think about the consequences. I DO recommend others do the same.
But I still meed lots of people who don’t. Which is why I think the proposition process needs to be changed.
That kind of power is a magnet for pressure groups, corporate lobbyists, and talk-radio hysterics.
When the minority party gained the power to take the budget hostage every year, it became the target of special interest money, and then it’s captive.
Every year, the budget struggle includes attacks on corporate taxes, labor laws, and environmental regulations.
The voters of 1978 trusted the Republicans to exercise the power of the 2/3 rule “conservatively”. That trust has been betrayed.
We have no choice but to disperse that power, and return to the stability of Majority Rule.
The question that always comes to mind when I see this written about the origins of the initiative process is how did the very idea get past the Legislature, which was ostensibly controlled by the railroads?
One cannot “restore” direct democracy where direct democracy is not supposed to exist in the first place. The United States is a democratic republic. We are supposed to elect folks to represent us and use their best judgment in doing so.
The intiative process, according to a number of Constitutional scholars whom I’ve read over the years, violates the United States Constitution, Article IV, Section 4, wherein the Federal government obligates itself to guarantee to the citizens of each state a “republican” (small “r”) form of state government. Here’s a place where the Feds could truly make a difference but are afraid to act.