Jerry Brown is hosting a budget briefing today in Sacramento, which you can watch live via the California Channel’s stream. According to KQED’s John Myers, Brown’s handout being distributed at the event projects a $28.1 billion budget deficit, higher than expected thanks to President Obama’s proposed tax deal that includes a continuation of the estate tax elimination. The handout also states that “short-term or unrealistic fixes” have comprised 75%, 84%, and 85% of the last three budget deals.

Clearly, Brown is planning to reject these kind of quick fixes. We’re hoping that today’s briefing will more clearly lay out what exactly that means. I’ll post some updates here as it goes along, but for more frequent updates, follow my Twitter feed @cruickshank. Once it’s done I’ll post a more detailed review of what, if anything, we learned about the once and future governor’s budget plans.

UPDATE: So, that was interesting. You can view the slides from the presentation over on Jerry Brown’s website. As far as I could tell, the event was designed to communicate the following points:

1. Next year’s budget deficit will be worse than this year’s.

2. That is partly because too many gimmicks and short-term fixes were used, including temporary tax hikes or federal stimulus funds.

3. Borrowing has been a problem – California does too much of it, and it is eating up more and more of the general fund.

4. There is a structural revenue shortfall of about $20 billion.

5. There is no easy way to close this, all options suck. Spending cuts would have be to entire areas of service, like higher ed or Medi-Cal. Tax increases would also have to be significant.

Jerry Brown refused to be drawn into a discussion of solutions, even though the legislators in attendance really wanted to go there. My own Assemblymember, Bill Monning (AD-27), got a round of applause when he called for new revenues to be on the table.

Meanwhile, Republicans called for mass spending cuts, once again reminding us why they are irrelevant. Connie Conway, the new Assembly GOP leader, came off as the crazy aunt who isn’t really in touch with reality.

In fact, there was no good reason for Conway to be up there at all. Senate GOP head Bob Dutton refused to sit on the dais, and I’m guessing they were invited because Speaker John A. Pérez and Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg were there too. But it wasn’t right. The California Republican Party is a minority party that is only barely relevant thanks to the lingering 2/3 rule for new revenues and fees. If that 2/3 rule didn’t exist, the California GOP would be little different than the CA Green Party. Even as things stand, I do not see why the CA GOP should be treated as a legitimate partner in closing the deficit – they’ve shown that they only care about slashing government, which nobody wants. In the future, just ignore the Republicans and their wacko rants.

Anyhow, where was I? Oh yeah. Bill Lockyer quoted the rating agencies as saying that CA’s debt rating, while still in decent shape, was at risk of being further downgraded. My response: so what? The debt rating agencies have proven themselves to be fraudulent and dishonest, and they are almost certainly lowering our ratings so that their Wall Street allies can extract higher rates from us. Nobody talked about a state bank today, but they should have – it would help free us from this bullshit.

John Chiang pointed out that California will probably not run out of cash for the rest of the fiscal year, but because of the way budgets and tax revenues work – checks are cut in July, especially for schools, but revenue doesn’t start coming in until the end of the calendar year – summer 2011 could see a cash crunch.

The right-wing Legislative Analyst, Mac Taylor, argued that both revenues and spending cuts should be on the table, but made it sound like they were equally damaging options, and claimed that tax increases would act as a disincentive to economic activity. That’s not true at all. Better government services that provide for people’s needs help spur economic activity, by freeing people up to create and innovate instead of spending what little money they have to take care of the basics.

Brown framed today’s discussion as a chance to “agree on the problem.” As far as I can tell, there will never be any such agreement, because the GOP minority refuses to ever accept another tax increase again, and unfortunately has the power to block it.

Hopefully Brown will include new revenues – and a restoration of majority rule for revenue decisions – in his own budget plans. Otherwise we’re going to just keep replaying this scene again and again and again for a long time to come.