Over at FireDogLake, former Calitics blogger and current slayer of falacies David Dayen, takes on the California budget.  Specifically, he calls out Brown’s budget for a lack of bravery, in the face of a growing chorus of “responsible” voices in the news praising Brown’s actions.  Sure, he’s making cuts that Democrats wouldn’t ordinarily make, but that’s just buying the Republican frame.  Is he getting to the deeper points?

But Brown has ducked many more fundamental governance issues in the state. He hasn’t gone near a tax structure where people making $47,500 a year pay the same in income taxes as those making $999,999. He won’t approach the third rail of California politics, the artificially low property taxes resulting from Prop 13. He won’t expand the sales tax to cover services, which would allow the rate to be lowered while still gaining more revenue (and becoming more progressive, as higher-end services get used by wealthier people). He’s basically doing the bare minimum possible on revenue generation, and even then he won’t commit to raising them himself, preferring to put them up for a vote of the people.

As for the spending cuts, they will be utterly devastating; California already cut the less necessary stuff in prior years of the crisis. And by and large, Democrats in the legislature are going along with it. In the Schwarzenegger years, you’d have a lot of resistance to very similar cuts, both from the outside and the inside. These days, state Democrats don’t want to cross their own governor, and so they’re basically carrying out his wishes. They tell everyone they don’t feel good about it, but that’s of little solace. (FDL)

Redevelopment has been getting much of the attention, but the heart of the cuts is to the social safety net that the Democrats have been working to protect from Governor Schwarzenegger’s raids.  Yet now we are making many of these same cuts.  Meanwhile a full 20% of California families are struggling to even afford enough food:

One in five Californians struggled to afford enough food for themselves and their families last year, according to a new report by the Food Research and Action Center.

The rate in California was slightly higher than the national average of 18%.

Jim Weill, president of the Washington-based nonprofit, said the figures underscore the need for a strong nutrition safety net – including food stamps and school meals – for families that continue to struggle as the economy begins to recover.

“While the nation’s Great Recession may have technically ended in mid-2009, it has not yet ended for many of the nation’s households,” Weill said in a statement Thursday. “For them, 2010 was the third year of a terrible recession that is widely damaging the ability to meet basic needs.”(LAT)

At a time when Californians need more help than ever, we’re closing down our doors and spending a smaller percentage of the state’s personal income for over 40 years. Yeah, that’s right, Brown’s proposed budget would spend just $5.05 per $100 earned, the lowest such figure since Reagan’s 1972-73 budget.  Put simply, we don’t have an out of control tax system, we don’t have a spending problem, we have an obstinate minority that insists on a selfishness of spirit that California hasn’t known before.

I give Brown credit for doing what he thinks he must, perhaps in the only way he thinks possible.  But we’re losing part of what made us great.  There was once a feeling that anything could happen in California, that whatever we worked together toward would be accomplished.  We built an outstanding K-12 education system and the greatest public university system in the world.  We built the information based economy.  We built a network of infrastructure that made tomorrow look better than yesterday.

Today, we are just trying to survive for ourselves. Some of us can’t feed ourselves, while others are grabbing crass and obscene wealth.  Is this really the best we can do?

Here’s the thing: The Republicans understand that there have to be some additional revenues.  They know that even they couldn’t come up with the full $25 Billion in cuts in any way that could possibly help them politically. But, on the other side, they are terrified of their own base.

This is where it gets interesting.  Sen. Bob Dutton, the Republican Leader in the Senate asked the Legislative Counsel if there is any way for the Democrats to put something on the ballot on their own, sans the 2/3 majority.  Now, Dutton would probably tell you out in public that this is just to stop the tax hikes or something like that.  But, you have to think that Dutton was secretly hoping that the Democrats could do the dirty work while the Republicans could maintain their ideological purity by never voting for anything that possibly resembles an increase in taxes.

Speaker Perez, for his part, doesn’t seem to be taking the bait, and has cast that aside right from the get-go:

Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez said Wednesday that he has no intention of sidestepping Republicans by trying to place a tax-extension measure on the June ballot by a simple majority vote of the Legislature.

Pérez downplayed a legislative counsel’s opinion, sought by Senate Republican leader Bob Dutton, that indicated such a measure could be placed before voters without the support of GOP lawmakers, under narrow circumstances.

“No,” Pérez said flatly when asked if he is entertaining such a plan for the tax measure proposed by Gov. Jerry Brown to raise $11 billion for the fiscal year that ends June 30, 2012.

“There is not a single legal analysis that I think holds any water that says we could legitimately put this question before voters on a simple majority vote,” Pérez told the Sacramento Press Club. (SacBee)

I’ll admit, I’m a bit split on this move.  From a practical standpoint, I’m a bit skeptical that the Democrats will, in fact, be able to lure enough GOP votes.  Keeping open the majority vote measure as a way to whip some GOP votes into making some sort of deal seems to make some sense.

But, guessing at the Speaker’s logic here, in order to pass this thing at the ballot, you are probably going to need at least nominal GOP support.  If you have them running around saying how awful this package is, it could create a pretty dicey situation for the actual election.

At any rate, despite the Speaker’s protests, I would still not count out the concept of a majority vote measure quite yet.  

Timm Herdt of the Ventura County Star focuses on a statement from Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval in today’s must-read column:

One thing that hasn’t changed in Nevada is that its Republican politicians continue to be fiscal conservatives. But if GOP lawmakers from California were to return to Reno this year to pick up any lessons, they might be surprised at one thing they’d learn.

They’d find out that the state’s constitutional amendment, passed in 1994, that requires any tax increases be approved by a two-thirds vote of legislators includes a provision that gives ultimate authority to voters. To place a tax increase proposal on the ballot, it says, shall require only a simple majority vote of lawmakers.

Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval, who promised during his campaign to oppose any tax increases, appears to also believe that a public vote on taxes ought to carry more weight than his own opinion.

Asked whether he would sign a bill to put a tax increase on the ballot, Sandoval this week told the Las Vegas Review-Journal, “We’ll cross that bridge when it comes, but I’ve always been supportive of people’s right to vote.”(Ventura County Star)

Now, let’s say this first, Brian Sandoval is nobody’s moderate.  He’s a pretty right-wing governor, and hardly somebody that you could really call anything other than anti-tax/anti-goverment.

But, in the system we have out west, governments frequently defer (for better or worse) to the people.  Perhaps Tony Strickland and his TeaParty Caucus should consider the fact that despite what Grover Norquist is telling them, a vote for Brown’s budget package will increase no taxes.  That’s up to the people, and unless Tony and the Gang don’t trust the people, he should get moving on that pronto.

As Governor Brown continues to fight to get some sort of revenue measure on the ballot, it is also very likely that we will also see a tobacco measure at the same time.  Former Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata and cycling legend and anti-cancer activist Lance Armstrong are aiming to create a roughly billion dollar per year cancer research program.  

“When you walk through the institutions of this state, the potential there is tremendous,” the seven-time Tour de France winner said during a news conference at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. “Whatever happens and is created, or is invented, or changes in California, goes everywhere …. We will have more and more cancer survivors all over the world.”

The initiative, which would raise as much as $855 million in its first year of implementation, according to an analysis by the state’s legislative analyst, could be placed on the ballot as early as June if Gov. Jerry Brown succeeds in calling a special election to address the state’s budget gap. (LAT)

Of course, as we saw when the last tobacco tax was on the ballot, Big Tobacco is going to fight this voraciously. Last time they spent $66million to defeat it, and you’d expect at least $50 million for this measure.  Having the measure this June might change the voter demographic that the proponents were going for.  However, under state law, qualified measures (which this has done) must go on the next statewide ballot.

So, how will this interplay with Brown’s measures? Well it is tough to say exactly, but as the Times Maeve Reston points out, it will hardly be a good thing for a $50million anti-tax campaign to be occurring at the same time you are trying to pass the sales tax continuation.

Speaking of the tax continuation, it is rapidly becoming clear that the Legislature is actively looking for ways to get something on the ballot without 2/3. Don’t be shocked if the Republican votes never show up.