The AP has a story about the fact that Arnold’s Prop 49 is breaking a hole in the budget.  Arnold, for his part, is pretty adamant that he won’t gut it. Because, you know, it’s part of his legacy. I guess it’s only okay to mess up Darrell Steinberg’s legacy by repealing the mental health measure.

The problem here is still one of framing.  Solutions now seem to be completely limited to cuts, those who support additional revenue appear to have completely lost:

With California facing another mammoth budget deficit, the state’s nonpartisan legislative analyst says voters should reconsider some of the billions of dollars tied up in ballot measures they have approved in recent years.

Among the suggestions from Legislative Analyst Mac Taylor is an after-school measure that costs $550 million a year and helped launch Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s political career. It is one of many programs contributing to the “autopilot spending” that the Republican governor and fiscal watchdogs often complain about because the plans were approved by voters without specific funding sources. (AP 11/20/09

The seriously messed up part of this: nobody can envision the world both Steinberg’s Prop 63, the millionaire’s tax for mental health, and Schwarzenegger’s Prop 49 could a) both live in harmony and b) have stable revenue sources.

Both mental health and after school programs are important, but so is K12 and higher education, so is IHSS, and so is infrastructure.  We must always balance one interest against another, but it has gotten to the point that we are starving our primary goals. We are cannibalizing programs that should exist to feed other programs that should exist.

We are only punishing ourselves. We must find new sources of revenue.