Dan Walters, after taking a roadtrip through the western United States, comes back to California and suddenly discovers that our roads are in disrepair. And for once, he actually gets close to the real causes for our deteriorating infrastructure:

With heavy use, the system needs, but is not getting, an extremely high level of maintenance to stave off deterioration. The gasoline tax, levied on gallonage, hasn’t been changed for many years. And because of greater fuel efficiency, the amount of gas being consumed has increased very little even as travel has increased sharply. Moreover, this flat revenue is being eroded by inflation.

The state Transportation Commission, in its 2008 report to the Legislature, put it this way: “The state’s gas tax can now only cover between 50 and 60 percent of the annual rehabilitation need … rapidly increasing the number of distressed lane miles on the system….

This year it added: “Every provider of transportation – from Caltrans to transit operators to small rural cities – faces a staggering bill for keeping the existing system from falling apart, let alone in good repair. The investment of our parents and grandparents is crumbling before our eyes.”

Walters is of course right to point to the state’s ridiculous unwillingness to raise the gas tax, or index it to inflation, as part of the problem. But it actually goes a bit deeper.

One proven method to extend the life of paved roads is to have fewer cars use them. Buses, trains, and other forms of mass transportation are desperately needed in California’s urban areas. But instead of increasing their availability, the state legislature broke the law and stole local transit agency funds, and appears to be in no mood to provide more money for buses, trains, and bicycle facilities despite growing demand. As a result, some badly needed and worthy projects, like East Bay Bus Rapid Transit, are being shelved due to a lack of funds.

The other factor that contributes to deteriorating roads Walters didn’t mention is state budget cuts. Over the last 20 years one of the frequent targets of budget cuts has been road maintenance. Caltrans has been under pressure to “relinquish” state highways – that is, turn them over to local governments. A state highway is the state’s responsibility to maintain, but when it has been relinquished, the maintenance becomes the responsibility of the local government. Those governments face the same fiscal stresses, owing to the inability to raise taxes and frequent state theft of what money they do have.

For the state highways and freeways that Caltrans has kept, maintenance has frequently been deferred. That results not only in the deteriorating pavement conditions Walters and many others have experienced on Interstate 80, but also causes the cost of the eventual rehabilitation work to soar.

Further, Caltrans maintains some of the most challenging roads in the nation, if not the world. I-80 over the Sierras gets hammered by snow, ice, and plows every winter. Highway 1 through Big Sur often gets washed down the cliff in an El Niño year, and even highways in SoCal deserts often get hit by flash floods. You can’t sustain that on the cheap.

What Walters is discovering is the common sense fact that if you want to have a transportation system – or for that matter, a health care system or an educational system or a domestic violence prevention and assistance system – you have to be willing to make the ongoing investment in its maintenance and effectiveness.

California has not done that. Instead we’ve believed that Two Santa Clauses will come along to provide low taxes and somehow magically provide good roads as well. Walters has part of the reason why this just doesn’t work, but if we’re to have an infrastructure that serves the needs of our state, it not only has to be funded – we must also commit to protecting core and vital government services from those who would destroy it.

The #1 article on the Guardian’s site (the British newspaper, not the SF alt-weekly) is an article from their Sunday sister paper, the Observer, titled Will California become America’s first failed state? As any of you who’ve read Calitics for the last few months or years know, our answer is likely to be “yes.” But it’s still worth examining why that’s the case, and whether the Observer article really gets to the heart of the problem.

First, I think it is worth defining what the “California Dream” is. I think it is actually a broad and yet deeply fundamental concept. The dream is that anyone can come to California, enjoy its natural beauty, and reinvent/find/embrace themselves here, all enabled by the availability of basic economic security and prosperity. That’s really what it’s about, the notion that people can create, innovate, dream, and be themselves in this beautiful place, and do so without having to worry about how they’ll make ends meet, because the state has backed policies that will ensure such fundamental prosperity.

That dream is now dead. Anyone who says otherwise is either lying, totally unfamiliar with California in 2009, or actively promoting and aiding the death of that dream.

It died because of the specific way we went about implementing that dream. In the second half of the 20th century, the California Dream was enfolded within a specific set of land use policies that ultimately undermined the progressive aspects of that dream. Whereas California of the 1960s provided free schools, a generous welfare state, and invested in infrastructure, all of which enabled people to come here and actualize their self-potential, California of the 2000s traps most of its residents in a spiral of downward mobility that endangers not only their ability to be who they want to be, but their ability to be healthy, to be fed, to survive.

This has happened because those that benefited from the earlier iteration of the California Dream, which was predicated on suburban sprawl, have decided to pull up the drawbridge behind them, to blow up the public services that made the Dream possible, and to hoard the remaining benefits and wealth for themselves at the expense of everybody else. The California Dream was about providing a good and secure life to everyone. Now, it is about denying that Dream to everyone who wasn’t able to buy a home before 2000, who wasn’t able to attend college before 1992, who doesn’t make enough money to afford their own health care.

Even though the Observer article mentions the state’s governance crisis, the issue of land use and sprawl, and briefly discusses possible solutions like the Constitutional Convention, the article still misses something fundamental, because it doesn’t examine the political culture now at work here in California – a culture where a small number of people are locking out everyone else from being able to enjoy the California Dream.

What this means is that, as I wrote back in the summer of 2007, we must redefine the California Dream for the 21st century – we must find new ways to provide the security and prosperity that enables people to enjoy the natural and psychic benefits California offers.

But to do that, we have to first challenge and ultimately defeat those who have decided to hoard and exclude.

More below.

Central to the Observer’s article is a discussion of “where did it all go wrong?” And they look in precisely the right places – sprawl. Whether it’s agricultural sprawl in Mendota, or suburban sprawl in Riverside, the causes and consequences are exactly the same. California chose to grow in unsustainable ways, into unsustainable places, through an unsustainable overuse of resources. Mendota is suffering because arid fields were watered to grow cash crops for big agribusiness. Beth Court in Moreno Valley is suffering because arid fields were developed to grow cash crops – mortgages, furniture, etc – for big developers and big businesses like Wal-Mart.

But Mendota and Moreno Valley are just the leading edge of a deeper problem. Their collapses shouldn’t, in themselves, cause a state to fail. When you look at the underlying landscape, however, you can see how they were the first dominoes, certainly the hardest hit dominoes, of a system that had become designed to fail.

The California Dream of the 1960s was the product of a political revolution in the late 1950s – 1958, to be precise. Sick of Republican do-nothing rule, Californians turned en masse to liberal Democrats like Pat Brown and Jesse Unruh to manage and preserve their prosperity, to build the freeways and aqueducts that sustained their suburban dream, to build the schools and colleges that would allow their kids to live the dream as well.

But when this dream ran into trouble in the 1970s, Californians faced a crossroads. Would they redefine the terms of the dream, to be more inclusive, but less focused on freeways, cars, and the single family home? Or would they find ways to artificially prolong the 1950s for as long as possible by protecting the existing homeowners at the expense of those on the outside and those not yet born? As we know, the latter course was chosen. Prop 13 created a homeowners’ veto over virtually all of state government, ensuring that California would never be able to do anything with its government that did not meet with the approval of a vocal minority of self-interested homeowners.

The 1978 system was about more than a tax revolt. It was about preserving the 1950s vision of white suburbia from any and all efforts to change it. Although Prop 13 wasn’t responsible for NIMBY efforts to kill affordable housing, or new hospitals, or LA subway lines, or urban density, it was done at the same time and for the same reasons.

California politics today is dominated by a tension between those who still benefit from the California Dream and those who no longer do, or those who were too young to ever have the opportunity to do so. Our anti-tax politics are based on a fundamental hypocrisy: those who were educated in our schools, who got a heavily subsidized college education, who own homes whose wealth is subsidized by freeways and aqueducts, who were able to start careers and build businesses because the state helped take care of health care costs, they have decided that they’re going to refuse to extend those benefits and opportunities to others, because they believe that doing so will risk their own wealth.

As a result, California has suffered from a generation of inequality, as those who weren’t lucky enough to buy homes before the bubble, who have some money in the bank, who still have a high-income job without student loan debts, are stuck in a state where the California Dream still tantalizes people – nearby but unattainable.

California’s governance problems all stem from this basic political battle. We have a 2/3rds rule hamstringing the legislature because the prosperous beneficiaries of past progressivism wanted stronger safeguards to prevent their wealth from being used to help others enjoy the same benefits. We have land use rules that direct suburban growth into unsustainable places like  Moreno Valley because homeowners in the coastal cities are convinced that to enable more urban density in their communities will result in them losing property value. They fight mass transit solutions that will save Californians money by liberating them from the costs of oil, whether it’s subways or high speed trains, having the effect of denying savings to others in order to protect what they already have.

This dynamic feeds into the main political debate in Sacramento, which is a debate about whether government will be used to help people, whether government will again be used, as it was in the 1960s, to build the California Dream.

Republicans don’t want to use government to do so, and believe that the California Dream should only be available to those with the wealth to afford it. If you can’t afford the cost of the Dream, Republicans argue, then “maybe you shouldn’t be living here” in the revealing words of Chuck DeVore.

Democrats are, as usual, divided. Some understand that government must be used to restore the Dream. Others are afraid to say so, afraid to challenge the post-1978 consensus, perhaps because they instinctively understand that some of their own constituents, certainly the most frequent voters, are those that do not want to give up anything they have to help others enjoy economic security.

And so California slides into collapse.

If we are to rescue California from failure, and if we are to revive the California Dream, we must push hard for a new set of policies and governmental structures that will prioritize mass prosperity and take power away from those who would use their existing prosperity to deny opportunity to others. Here’s some of what that overall agenda should include:

• Adoption of a new system of property taxes, that provide some stability to residential homeowners without privileging a small group. The 1% annual increase limit must be abolished. Progressive property taxes, where higher-value properties are taxed at a higher rate, should be explored and implemented if constitutionally possible. Commercial property taxes must become wholly unlimited.

• Housing policy must shift away from privileging homeowners and toward a more holistic model that provides more encouragement for long-term renters.

• CEQA and other state and local land use policies must be revised to eliminate the power of NIMBYs to block urban density and sustainable mass transit. SB 375 was a good start down this path, but more can and should be done.

• Suburban sprawl must be ended entirely, with urban growth boundaries paired with policies favoring in-fill and dense development in existing urban cores, supported by a robust mass transit infrastructure. This is the successful model used in Portland, Oregon and there is no reason it cannot be adopted here.

• Significant increases in taxation on the wealthy and the upper middle class, with an emphasis on higher corporate tax rates, including an oil severance tax.

• Creation of a universal single-payer health care system.

• Restoration of free higher education, paired with a more robust community college system that can provide training for green jobs.

• Massively expanded public transportation, from a restoration of the illegal raids on transit funding to expansion of streetcars, light rail, commuter rail, and intercity high speed rail.

• State-supported job creation programs, broadly defined.

And of course, key structural governance changes:

• Restoration of majority rule for all budget and revenue decisions at all levels of government

• Expansion of democratic practice, from same-day voter registration to publicly financed elections

• Extension or abolition of term limits

• Meaningful initiative reform

My own view, as I’ve begun to argue lately, is that we will never win the battle to change the way our state is governed unless and until we enfold those process changes into a broader vision of economic prosperity and progressive change.

Californians still want the California Dream. If we are to revive it, we must divorce it from the its 20th century version and create one for the 21st century that is more urban, more sustainable, and more inclusive. To do that we must wage a political battle against those who believe that preserving the status quo is the top priority, whether they are Republican legislators, community NIMBYs, or large corporations.

And the only way we win it is to articulate our vision, to make Californians eagerly want that vision, and to get them mad as hell when they see that vision being denied, blocked, and obstructed.

Many progressive activists, myself included, have worked hard for many years to answer one of the most important questions in California politics: “How do you get Dianne Feinstein to take the action you want her to take?”

Apparently the answer was staring us in the face all the time and we just didn’t know it because we’ve deleted Fox News from our channel lineups:

You have Sean Hannity do it.

In response to the growing temper tantrum being thrown by Westlands Water District and their astroturf allies, including Sean Hannity’s demagoguing visit to the Valley, Senator Dianne Feinstein has decided that reason, caution, sensible water policy and the Endangered Species Act should all be tossed to the wind in order to deliver water to big agribusinesses on the arid west side of the San Joaquin Valley:

[Feinstein] also called for waiving the Endangered Species Act to speed water transfers from the delta to farmers. “Just get it done as fast as we can,” she said.

DiFi did also explain plans to write “one of the biggest pieces of legislation she’s ever attempted” to solve the Delta and the San Joaquin Valley water crisis. It’s a laudable goal, but if she is being pushed around this easily by right-wing front groups and hissy fits, I’m not exactly confident about the outcome here.

The Obama Administration is, so far, resisting the cries to blow up 150 years of water rights and water legislation and take water from existing users and give it to big agribusinesses:

Salazar said the administration has put $400 million into California water projects, adding that it would be a “fundamental mistake for us to use this crisis to essentially create another crisis that will continue into the courts for decades to come without us getting to real solutions.”

Salazar has it precisely correct. The Westlands Water District and the Central Valley Congressional delegation, spooked out of their wits by Sean Hannity, are demanding that we destroy the Pacific Coast salmon fishery, put fishermen out of work and devastate coastal communities, and steal the water coastal communities are already conserving in order to continue unsustainable and reckless uses of the soil. Kudos to Ken Salazar and the White House for refusing to cave into this nonsense.

What Feinstein and others are calling for would be the equivalent of demanding all Americans buy SUVs to prop up a failing car industry, or passing a law mandating all Americans purchase private health insurance to prop up an already-profitable insurance industry that fails to keep Americans healthy.

Oh, right.

The Valley’s economic crisis is indeed dire. But there are ways to help the unemployed that don’t involve putting someone else out of work, or shutting off someone else’s tap. I’d hope that DiFi would embrace such a rational proposal, but I fear that will require us to convince Sean Hannity to do his show from the Monterey harbor, or the Crystal Springs Reservoir.

Ultimately this all comes down to the beneficiaries of 30 years of Republican economic policy raising holy hell that they are now being asked to give up their unsustainable and unjustifiable privileges to help the nation survive an economic and environmental crisis. DiFi isn’t going to stand up to them. It looks like Obama will, but we’re going to need to have his back on this to ensure that we actually fix the Delta instead of break it even further to enrich a few big companies on the Valley’s west side.

The Commission on the Twenty First Century Economy unveiled their 19th century proposals today in a final report supported by only 9 of the 14 committee members (state tax expert Richard Pomp and current Santa Cruz County treasurer Fred Keeley were not among them).

As expected, the proposals are a radical right-wing attack on the progressive elements of our tax system, as Eric Bailey at the LA Times explains:

Under the proposal, the income tax would be flattened from the current half-dozen rates to just two – a 2.75% levy on income up to $56,000 for a married couple, and 6.5% for taxable income exceeding that threshold. Critics have attacked the proposal as a giveaway to the rich, with millionaires on average paying $109,000 less.

To offset the reduction in income tax, the commission called for a revolutionary new tax for business and consumers.

The current retail sales and corporation taxes would be eliminated, replaced by a broader business tax that would tap practically every type of free enterprise, including service sector firms like lawyers and business consultants currently not hit by the sales tax.

Calling the business net receipts tax “revolutionary” is actually understating it. Nowhere in the developed world (and probably nowhere in the world, period) does such a tax exist. As Jean Ross of the California Budget Project explained, the BNRT could backfire very badly:

The new tax would also encourage relocation of California jobs to foreign firms that would be beyond the reach of California’s tax collectors. Incentives for offshoring could be created by provisions rooted in a highly technical, but extremely important, area of tax law. So-called “nexus” issues are among the most contentious in tax law and govern what activities states can and cannot legitimately tax.

There are considerable grounds to worry that courts would constrain the state’s ability to tax service providers – such as call center operators or consulting firms – located entirely outside of California. Should the courts rule against the state’s ability to collect the tax, billions of dollars of revenues – sorely needed to balance an out-of-balance budget – could be lost, and businesses would receive substantial tax savings from moving jobs out of California.

The whole package would also represent a major shift in the tax burden away from the rich and onto everyone else. Jean Ross again:

The magnitude of the shift proposed by the Commission is nothing short of stunning. The changes to the personal income tax structure alone would reduce income taxes paid by the poorest 62 percent of California taxpayers by $4 per year, on average, while providing six-figure breaks to the millionaires. The bottom 81 percent of the income distribution – the vast majority of all Californians – would receive 10 percent of the personal income tax cut, while the top 0.2 percent would receive 27 percent of the benefits.

Also as expected, representatives from virtually the entire California economic spectrum, including management and labor, agreed that the proposals would do severe damage to California’s government and economy. Cal Labor Fed Secretary-Treasurer Art Pulaski explained his opposition:

The proposals are a step backward, shifting the tax burden from the wealthiest taxpayers to middle- and low-income families at a time when we can least afford it. If enacted, these proposals would entomb California in perpetual recession.

Even the Cal Chamber, usually a friend of crazy right-wing schemes, called the report “fatally flawed.”

That hasn’t stopped Arnold Schwarzenegger from calling a special session to try and cram this thing down Californians’ throats. We’ll have to mobilize to let our legislators know that this plan and its constituent parts need to be pronounced dead on arrival, and buried deep underground.

We cannot let Arnold’s effort to finish off the California Dream succeed.

Today’s LA Times has a very good article by Peter Hong with an unfortunate title: “Don’t bank on your home as an ATM”.

The notion that Californians took equity out of their homes during the bubble earlier this decade and spent it on frivolities like cars and vacations is a widespread belief. “Using a home as an ATM” is the way this practice is derogatorily described on many of the otherwise excellent housing blogs that have charted the collapse of the real estate bubble. It’s a frame that’s typically used to place the blame for the bubble and the crash at the feet of “irresponsible borrowers,” excusing or downplaying the role of lax lending practices, reckless banks, and absentee regulators.

There’s no doubt that by 2005-06 much of California’s economy was based on the housing market. But there’s a better way to understand how this worked than the “home as ATM” frame. Jean Ross of the California Budget Project explained it to me recently as Californians “using their home as a second job.” People taking equity out of their homes to pay medical debt, or put kids through college, or yes, to buy consumer goods.

Until the 1980s rising wages enabled most Americans to pay for those things without debt. Beginning in the late 1970s, American policymakers adopted a deliberate policy of suppressing wages, slashing government services, and using debt to sustain the economy. In doing so they set into motion a series of asset bubbles that caused many people to use their homes as a second job.

And that’s what Hong’s article actually gets at. A better, more accurate headline would be “Proposition 13 has failed California homeowners,” as the tax subsidies have not been enough to replace stagnant wages or government subsidy of some of fastest rising costs, particularly the medical and education costs that led many Californians to take equity out of their homes:

With greater debt loads and flat wages, Americans have less to spend on houses, condominium units and everything else. That’s a greater problem today because consumer spending has replaced investment as the chief driver of the U.S. economy, accounting for roughly two-thirds of economic output. In the current economic model, consumption needs to rise to fuel the economic growth necessary to bolster home prices.

Also cutting into money available for housing: Americans are devoting more of their income to healthcare and retirement savings. And expenses such as college tuition have outpaced inflation and wage gains.

Hong’s point there gets to the other aspect of the wage stagnation and housing bubble phenomenon, one that should frankly scare the shit out of middle-class baby boomer homeowners: the strong possibility that there won’t be buyers out there to purchase their homes when the boomers need to sell them for cash to replace their lost 401(k) and pension funds.

Over the next 10 years we are likely to see boomers turn to their homes as a source of funds to help pay medical bills (especially if Republicans undermine Medicare) and to live in their retirement (especially if Republicans undermine Social Security). After having spent 30 years steadfastly refusing to pay higher taxes to help provide to younger generations the affordable education, health care, and other benefits they themselves enjoyed when they were younger, they have now created a situation where they’ll either have to live in their paid-off houses without the ability to provide for their own needs, or will have to sell for cash at fire sale prices in a marketplace without enough buyers.

To be fair, Hong’s article includes quotes from Robert Reich who doesn’t think this scenario will come to pass. But unless we are able to provide economic security to folks under 40 – who are currently drowning under a wave of student loan debt, unaffordable job retraining costs, soaring health care bills and stagnant wages, it’s difficult to see where the future pool of borrowers will come from.

It’s situations like this that provide an opening to forward-looking Democrats who understand that the economic crisis requires policy solutions that unite old and young, homeowner and renter, in the search for government programs to assure economic security for everyone.

And yet we don’t have those Democrats, at least not in California. Instead of searching for cross-generational alliances, many homeowning boomers are clinging ever tighter to the status quo, hoping that if they continue to pull up the drawbridge to younger generations, they’ll still be able to enjoy subsidized homeownership until they all reach the magic age of 65 and become eligible for both Medicare and Social Security.

The economic and political consequences of such an approach would be utterly ruinous. But in the absence of the articulation of clear progressive alternatives, that’s precisely what will happen.

With tomorrow being the recommended deadline for submitting initiatives for the November 2010 ballot, we’re starting to see people file their proposals. One of those is George Lakoff’s initiative to restore majority rule on both the budget and revenues. His initiative is quite simple, reading in essence:

All legislative actions on revenue and budget must be determined by a majority vote.

Of course, this initiative doesn’t address the requirement for voters to approve taxes by a 2/3rds rule, nor does it seem to deal with the Prop 218 requirements for local governments to submit tax increases to those voters. But this would almost totally eliminate the conservative veto in Sacramento.

It’s unclear whether there will be the resources to get this on the ballot. But you can learn more about this in LA tonight at 7PM at a meeting Lakoff and grassroots activists are holding at the SEIU 721 offices at 500 S. Virgil just west of downtown LA.

We still expect to see other initiatives dealing with the 2/3rds rule to be filed in the coming days.

Note: I will be on Angie Coiro’s Live From the Left Coast show tonight at 7 to talk about taxes. Listen live at Green 960 whether you’re listening on the air in SF or via the internet.

Earlier today David Dayen leveled his criticism of the Sacramento Democratic establishment for their apparent failure to produce an initiative to roll back the 2/3rds rule and start fixing California’s broken government.

Here I want to offer a slightly different perspective on the issue of what we need to do to win the battle. This isn’t a disagreement with David, but instead a discussion of something related – the question of how it is we win this battle.

My own views on this have evolved somewhat over the last 6 months. I very much think we need to be “making the argument” for majority rule, and that so far this hasn’t yet been done.

And the way that has to be done is to place the 2/3rds rule into a broader effort to emphasize progressive values. This is a twofold approach that requires us to do two things:

1. Show Californians where progressives want to take them: Universal health care, free higher ed, eliminate traffic, create sustainable jobs, etc. Articulate our end goals and get people excited about them, since it’s hard to excite people about procedural questions.
2. Show Californians how we want to get there. Go populist and hammer the shit out of the corporations and wealthy folks who benefit from the current tax structure, and push for sensible revenue solutions consonant with that populism that can achieve the promised goals.

I think that to emphasize the procedural problems (the 2/3rds rule) before emphasizing the fundamental injustice and inequality of our tax code is to put the cart before the horse. If we are going to reverse the polling and win this, we need to first mobilize Californians behind the notion that our state’s economic problems and our inability to properly fund schools or healthcare or parks or transit is because we are letting those with the money escape their obligations.

The PPIC and Binder polls (the one from the May 19 election) have both shown the public is willing to support certain taxes to preserve important services. So the move should be to push hard for an oil severance tax to fund schools, or closing corporate tax loopholes to expand Healthy Families, or to jack up taxes on the wealthy (particularly taxing unearned income) to bring down higher ed tuition, or something to that effect.

Dems should plan to move these things in the next legislative session and spend several weeks beforehand making this argument. Back Republicans up against a wall, make them defend the unpopular tax breaks for the unpopular bandits that have ruined out economy. And when the Republicans predictably use the 2/3rds rule to block those revenue solutions, then we will be in a much better position to win public support for majority vote on revenue.

We will have the opportunity over the next 12 months to move on this strategy, especially as outrage builds over the existing cuts. That outrage is not about process, but about the basic values of this state being violated and cast aside in order to enable the wealthy to get tax breaks at the expense of everyone else.

There are some folks in Sacramento who seem to get this. Lt. Gov. and future Congressman John Garamendi has been calling for an oil severance tax to fund higher education.

I know that leads some to criticize “ballot box budgeting” and argue that dedicating specific taxes to specific services doesn’t help the problems with the general fund. I have always been much less critical of ballot box budgeting than others, partly because I see it as a necessary holding action until we resolve Prop 13 itself.

But more fundamentally, we need to overturn 30 years of anti-tax rhetoric that has sank very deeply into the minds of many Californians, including those who otherwise call themselves progressive. One of the core tenets of the anti-tax mentality is the notion that government would just waste new revenues. Public hostility to dumping money into the general fund is significant.

So what we have to do is rehabilitate the notion of using taxes to provide services. Californians need to see the connection between low taxes and failing schools, jammed roads, a lack of health care, and a lack of jobs. And they need to see that it is Republicans that are blocking those things from getting done, by the 2/3rds rule.

The only reason anyone in America knows about “reconciliation” in the Senate, or the “mark-up” process, or even the “filibuster” is because those things stand in the way of key progressive goals. Those Senate procedures have screwed us and have needed to be eliminated for a long time, but only when they stood in the path of something people wanted did awareness rise.

In short, we are not going to win this if it is framed as a procedural problem, or even as a way to fix a broken state. We win the majority vote by enfolding it within a broader narrative and a broader campaign that uses progressive populism to beat the stuffing out of the large corporations and their allies in the Republican Party, in the service of clear goals that people actively and strongly desire.

Steve Wiegand of the Sacramento Bee telegraphed his intention yesterday to spread the right-wing myth that California has a spending problem. And sure enough, that’s what we got from Wiegand today in an article with the stunning title of “State officials spread loot like Santa.” That quote comes from Dave Doerr, head of the right-wing California Tax Association, and furthers the myth that California “overspends” and is, unfortunately, not a reference to the “two Santa Claus” theory.

Wiegand’s article repeats many of the right-wing frames about state spending – yet at the same time it actually examines the structural revenue shortfall. The two are related, of course – Wiegand’s study of the structural deficit is vague and lacking much detail, and is used to buttress the argument that California overspends. In short, Wiegand is taking as gospel the right-wing claim that our state budget mess is a product of overspending, when in fact it is a problem of undertaxing. Take this section of the article, for example:

Doerr’s observation is borne out by a Bee analysis of California’s spending and debt patterns compared to other states’, which found California spends more per capita than the national average in every government program except highways and public welfare – but consistently runs budget deficits and takes on more and more debt.

Why would that necessarily be a bad thing? Most other states are penurious with their public spending, and have economic and social problems that reflect such miserly policies.

Doerr appears again:

Doerr’s reference is to a penchant of lawmakers and governors over the past three decades to spend whatever money they have on hand – and promise even more – then let succeeding budget drafters fend for themselves.

This is in fact a core conservative frame. They believe that when it comes to budgets, you can spend whatever you take in, and nothing more. If you have $100 billion in revenues one year and $80 billion the next, then you just have to cut $20 billion in spending, no matter the effect.

A progressive budget frame is that it is government’s job to see to it that certain tasks get done because they are inherently valuable or necessary. This might include keeping open 220 state parks, or ensuring children under age 10 learn in classrooms of no more than 20 students, or that our state’s children and poor families have access to health care no matter the state of the economy.

Under that frame, the “overspending” claims are rendered even more absurd than the Wiegand article shows them to be, given its lack of explanation in most places for what actually caused the spending spikes. California needs to find the revenue to maintain core services, and to maintain and even expand government employment as a counter-cyclical recovery measure. The UCLA Anderson Forecast showed that budget cuts have worsened CA’s recession – but none of that seems to have made it into Wiegand’s article.

Given the dearth of media coverage of California politics, it’s especially unfortunate that when a major paper chooses to devote so much time and space to examining the budget crisis, they have not only gotten it so deeply wrong, but have wound up reinforcing right-wing dogma in the process.