True to the reality of a weak political media and an inattentive public, the chatter over the results of the July budget revision, despite major cuts to the social safety net, has completely subsided.  No taxes got increased and nobody “important” got hurt, so it was just time to move on.  Politicians just move on to the business of raising corporate money, special interests can move on to the business of writing laws that help their bottom line, and everybody in Sacramento can praise everybody else for “sacrificing” to get things done.  

Only, for the people living under the consequences of these budgets, created through a choice not to properly pay for needed services, the budget battle is not forgotten.  And it doesn’t consist of a group of numbers in a column.  It’s entirely real and it hits them every single day.  Here’s just one example.

Six domestic violence shelters in California have been forced to close while dozens more are scaling back services after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger eliminated all state funding for the program that supports them.

Shelters in the Central Valley town of Madera, the Sierra foothill town of Grass Valley and in Ventura County in Southern California have closed. Others in the San Francisco Bay area, Los Angeles and Bakersfield are on the verge of closing.

Many centers are laying off staff and closing satellite offices that serve remote areas of the state as they cope with the budget cuts. A national domestic violence group describes California’s as the deepest cuts to such programs nationwide, even as other states have reduced funding.

In Madera County, officials have turned away six domestic violence victims and eight children since the county’s only shelter closed Aug. 7, said Tina Figueroa, the shelter’s director. The Martha Diaz Shelter served about 100 victims a year, many of them low-income and with no place else to turn, she said.

So 100 victims of domestic violence in smallish Madera County now have truly nowhere to turn, and will either suffer under the boot of their abusive partners or, in many cases, be killed by them.  The director of domestic violence policy in the LA City Attorney’s office pretty clearly calls these programs “homicide prevention.”  It also saves money relative to what you spend prosecuting the eventual homicides.  I’ve seen “tough on crime” conservatives over the years invoke the name of victims and stir up public support for laws in their name.  They go curiously silent when hundreds of domestic violence victims are put at risk of death because they want to save rich people and corporations from having to pay for their fair share of the commons.

These closures are the direct result of line-item cuts by the Governor.  So the blood is on his hands.  Leland Yee has a bill that attempts to cover the domestic violence shelter budget with cash from a crime victims fund, but under 2/3 rules, it’s not likely to pass this week.

Kudos to the AP for doing a story on this; but there need to be many more.  There’s a human face on the budget cuts that has completely been lost and forgotten.  Those suffering are right to suspect that nobody in Sacramento cares about them.

When business groups began to object to various provisions in the Parsky Commission effort to upend the tax structure in California, including anything that even smelled like an increase (even though the plan had to be revenue-neutral to clear the Legislature), I figured the effort was dead and buried.  It appeared that the entire effort was a complete waste of time, and the effort to Latvia-ize the state by shifting the tax burden from the upper class to the lower class had been sniffed out and extinguished.  However, the recent secrecy on the part of the commission, after a pledge of transparency, has many wondering if the shock doctrine is alive and well.

The plan is that, just about 24 hours from now – or 11 a.m. Thursday, to be precise – a state commission will consider and potentially adopt a proposal for an entirely new tax system for the state of California.

It would be a radical undertaking, slashing some taxes, eliminating others and establishing a new tax about which no one in California is familiar. No one can say with anything approaching certainty how much it would cost businesses and consumers or how much revenue it would generate to finance state services.

Yet, despite the significance of the task, despite all the unanswered questions and despite the imminence of a decision, as of this writing – midafternoon Tuesday – the details of the proposed new tax plan have not been made available for public review.

A spokeswoman told me a little after 3 p.m. there was still hope that the detailed proposal would be posted on the commission’s Web site before the day was out.

The Legislature has made no indication that they would take up whatever plan the Parsky Commission votes out, even after the Governor orders a special session to deal with it.  And with both sides of the aisle condemning aspects of the plan, liberals for the tax burden shift, and conservatives for the unknown tax increases that may be part of any deal, I wouldn’t call the prospects likely for a Parsky Commission plan to become law.  But the secrecy is certainly troubling, as well as the revival of provisions voted down by the people on multiple occasions.

But members of the tax commission are reviving the rainy-day fund idea once again. Most notably, the idea has had some of its strongest support from Democratic-appointed commissioners.

Former Assemblyman Fred Keeley said recently that while many commissioners believe the state can reduce its budget volatility through changes in the tax system, he believes the tax system isn’t so much the problem.

“My belief is that volatility of the general fund, to the degree it’s a problem, is due to the governor and Legislature with regard to spending,” Keeley said. “That can be solved by way of an appropriately designed rainy-day fund or lockbox.”

Another Democratic appointee, University of Connecticut law professor Richard D. Pomp, reminded the commission this month that he has long believed the reduction of volatility was a spending issue.

“From the outset, I have argued, and continue to believe, that volatility, which is a feature of every state’s tax system, is a spending problem and not a tax problem,” Pomp wrote. (That comes awfully close to the oft-used GOP line that California’s budget problems are “a spending problem, not a revenue problem.”)

I think these Democrats are trying to argue that volatility in the tax structure is a good thing, which it is.  But the leap from that to a spending cap doesn’t follow.  There’s a difference between spending wisely in good years and a third-party mechanism that limits the ability to restore chronic budget cuts from bad years, which is what a cap would inevitably do. (A rainy-day fund without a cap would be different, but may end up serving the same purpose.)

I stick with my prediction that the commission is doomed, but it still bears watching.

…Kevin Yamamura has more.

Whether it’s the continued foreclosure crisis, the impact of state budget cuts or the cumulative effect of depressed consumer spending, it’s now extremely clear that the state’s employment picture shows no sign of bottoming out, reaching an all-time high in the post-war period.

California’s unemployment rate took an unexpected leap in July, reaching a post-Word War II high of 11.9%. The increase contrasts with the national rate, which declined slightly over the same period, and reflects ongoing weakness in the state’s battered construction and financial services industries.

The state lost a net 35,800 jobs last month, more than any other state, the U.S. Labor Department said today. It has lost 760,200 jobs over the last year.

Every category of nonfarm jobs in the state except education and health services experienced year-over-year losses. The construction sector was the hardest hit, shedding 18.6% of its jobs. Manufacturing jobs fell 8.7% from the same time last year.

Job loss did slow relative to the previous two months.  But I don’t think anybody believes that 11.9% is a floor.  Los Angeles, where the jobless rate jumped 0.7% in just a month, is one of the worst big cities to find a job in America.  The city has 15,000 homeless veterans.  And areas of the Central Valley and the Inland Empire are in far worse shape.  It’s basically a depression in those parts.

And we are just starting to add a round of painful state budget cuts to increase the economic shortfall.  Whether it’s closing parks that provide economic benefits, or dropping or cutting aid to 100,000 IHSS recipients, or wiping out the entire domestic violence budget, the cuts will not only force the poor and infirm to slip through the cracks and cause mass suffering and even death, but the economic impact will be profound.  Caregivers will lose their jobs.  Relatives will shift their schedules to care for their families.  Productivity will reduce.  It’s just a plain fact that lowering public spending during a deep recession will negatively impact the economy.  Consumers aren’t spending, companies aren’t trading and businesses aren’t investing.  Government is the spender of last resort.  And that spending has been slashed.

I honestly don’t know where the bottom is.

We’ve already seen a trend of national columnists using California’s budget woes to conveniently push whatever obsession they want.  Two more of these land on the nation’s most august op-ed pages today, both of them inaccurate and out of touch with the nature of the situation here in the Golden State.

First we have fiscal scold Robert Samuelson trying to use California’s budget crisis to make a larger point about a national “fiscal reckoning.”  He claims that California has “made more promises than its economy can easily support,” as has the nation, and only fiscal austerity can remedy the problem.

On paper, the state could solve its budget problems by raising taxes further. But in practice, that might backfire by weakening the economy and tax base. California scores poorly in state ratings of business climate. In a CNBC survey, it ranked 32nd overall but last in “cost of business” and 49th in “business friendliness.” Information technology (Intel, Google, Hewlett Packard) and biotechnology remain strengths, but some traditional industries are struggling. High costs, as well as tax breaks from other states, have caused movie studios to shift production from Southern California. In 1996, feature films involved 14,500 production days in the Los Angeles area, says FilmL.A.; in 2008, the figure was half that.

So California is stretched between a precarious economy and a strong popular desire for government. The state’s wrenching experience suggests that, as a nation, we should begin to pare back government’s future commitments to avoid a similar fate. But California’s experience also suggests we’ll remain in denial, prisoners of wishful thinking, until the fateful reckoning arrives in the unimagined future.

Ezra Klein does a pretty good job with this column, noting it provides a lesson for the difference between fiscal responsibility and fiscal conservatism.  Samuelson, of course, is the latter, wanting a low-tax, low-spending country.  Rather than arguing for a balanced solution, Samuelson eschews taxes due to the “business climate,” even though many businesses cite the lack of investment in education and infrastructure that Samuelson is CALLING for as a reason for their concern about their future in the state.  In addition, the “businesses are leaving California” argument is a myth applied to all states by fiscal scolds as a means for them to race to the bottom and provide as many corporate tax breaks as possible.  Which California has done, to the tune of $2 billion a year, at a time when funding for state parks and domestic violence shelters and poison control units gets slashed.  Ezra adds:

Samuelson implies otherwise, but California isn’t a particularly high-taxing state. Total state and local taxes take up 11.73 percent of the average Californian’s income. The national average is 11.23 percent. And it’s been like that for many years […]

Nor is California’s spending on education somehow out of the ordinary. The state ranks 29th in the country on education spending (much lower per pupil; try 47th: ed.). And recent tax cuts haven’t been helping the Golden State out. This graph from the California Budget Project shows the contribution that decades of tax cuts have made to the state’s current fiscal crisis. It’s a pretty depressing story […] The budget deal that Arnold Schwarzenegger just accepted contained $15 billion in spending reductions. Absent the tax cuts of the last few decades, most of those reductions wouldn’t be needed (add the vehicle license fee increase and you’re talking about a surplus: ed.).

Samuelson is essentially making an argument about the kind of government he likes, using the California situation to illustrate it, the facts be damned.

Next up is Ross Douthat, who uses the California mess and contrasts it with Texas to create some notion of red states faring better in the recession, also at odds with the facts:

Consider Texas and California. In the Bush years, liberal polemicists turned the president’s home state – pious, lightly regulated, stingy with public services and mad for sprawl – into a symbol of everything that was barbaric about Republican America. Meanwhile, California, always liberalism’s favorite laboratory, was passing global-warming legislation, pouring billions into stem-cell research, and seemed to be negotiating its way toward universal health care.

But flash forward to the current recession, and suddenly Texas looks like a model citizen. The Lone Star kept growing well after the country had dipped into recession. Its unemployment rate and foreclosure rate are both well below the national average. It’s one of only six states that didn’t run budget deficits in 2009.

Meanwhile, California, long a paradise for regulators and public-sector unions, has become a fiscal disaster area.

Douthat also throws in the “rich businesses and rich people are fleeing California” canard, which as stated above is untrue about businesses and even less true about rich individuals.

Steve Benen deconstructs the argument about Texas being a great economic steward and California a basket case, and the reasons why.  As Benen says, Texas is the worst state in America for the uninsured and the second-worst state for poverty rates.  To conservatives who judge the progress of a state by the budgetary balance sheet and not the prosperity of the citizenry, I’m sure they are a model citizen.

Meanwhile, calling California a “liberal laboratory” and not recognizing the source of the crisis, namely the conservative veto on the budget process, speaks to Douthat’s complete ignorance about the nature of the state.  In addition, as Paul Krugman notes, there is no correlation between a state’s perceived ideology and their economic performance (two of the highest-unemployed states are South Carolina and Tennessee), nor is there any correlation between the level of taxation and the current unemployment rate.

I know that the dysfunction of what is seen on the national level as a blue state is an inviting target for conservative columnists to spin some wider tale about liberal failure and conservative ascendancy.  If only they had any knowledge of the actual facts involved.

You may have heard this by now, but we have a deal.  The #cabudget hashtag should get you your fix.  The topline stats:

$15 billion in cuts, no new taxes, $11 billion in gimmicks and borrowing

$4-5 billion in local government raids

only an $800 million reserve (initially the talks were for a $4 billion one)

$6 billion in reductions to public schools, but an $11 billion dollar payment somewhere down the road though not in writing

yes, there’s new offshore drilling in this deal, going around the Lands Commission, and without an oil severance tax for the producers

$1 billion assumed for the sale of the State Compensation Insurance Fund, which is not only unlikely but would really crush small businesses if sold

no suspension of Prop. 98

basically a reinvention of state government, more austere, and precisely when folks need the opposite.

Story here.

…three furlough days a month for some state employees still in place for the rest of the year

$500 million in cuts to Cal Works

smiles all around from Dem leg. leaders as they cheer that “we did not eliminate the safety net for California.”  Poking a big hole in it, apparently, qualifies as A-OK.

…we’re also cutting $1.2 billion to corrections without releasing any prisoners, as per the actual politics as usual.  The only way you can do that is by cutting every treatment or rehabilitation program in the prisons, or eliminating overtime for corrections officers.  In other words, we’re turning prisons into Public Storage units.

UPDATE by Robert: The main takeaways here:

• Arnold and the Republicans got everything they wanted – a cuts-only budget that protects their wealthy allies and the big corporations from having to pay their share and that makes everyone else suffer.

• California’s government is functioning as intended – producing right-wing outcomes despite large Democratic majorities. I will continue to blame specific legislators for agreeing to this shit, but lasting change will only happen when we press the reset button on state government.

UPDATE by Dave: Just to state the obvious, only the Republican leaders have agreed to this.  We still aren’t through the process where individual Yacht Party members have to be bribed for their votes.

Of course, we aren’t through the process where progressives just say “no we’re not voting for that, try again,” but I’ve never seen that process come into play.

UPDATE by Robert: More elements of the deal, from John Myers at KQED CapNotes:

• Background checks for IHSS providers

• Fingerprinting of workers and clients (so if you are disabled and cared for at home, you will be treated like a common criminal merely because you need assistance)

• “Some state parks will close” even though parks generate more tax revenue than they cost

• OC Fairgrounds to be sold

• Integrated Waste Management Board to be abolished, despite the fact that its annual cost is statistically negligible

The February deal was bad, but this is far worse.

…CalPERS reports $56 billion loss. Local governments are going to have to make up part of this shortfall – but with what money? The legislature has guaranteed mass bankruptcies for local governments with their raid on local funding, which was probably the point of Arnold’s insistence on such raids.

Hopes for a deal on the California budget faded last night as the Big Five could not agree over the big issue of whether and how to suspend Prop. 98, the mandate for education funding.

The education money discussion is not new; much of it dates back to the February budget negotiations, which resulted in a ballot measure asking voters to offer blessings upon a supplemental payment. Voters rejected that measure, Proposition 1B.

And as with most education financing debates, this one lands squarely back at the maze of formulas and calculations that embody the 21-year old funding guarantee enshrined into the state constitution by voters, Proposition 98.

In a nutshell, the current debate focuses on whether schools are owed money in the future to make up for some of the recent spending reductions, and whether that obligation (the so-called “maintenance factor”) should be codified in law as part of the current $26.3 billion deficit deal.

“The Prop 98 law is so confusing,” said Senate President pro Tem Darrell Streinberg to a throng of reporters outside the governor’s office, “that we want to make sure that there is clarity.”

My belief is that education leaders will win this money in the courts, no matter how long Arnold and the gang put it off.  The lawsuit has already been filed.  The Democratic leadership want to just deal with the $11 billion dollars in essentially stolen money from schools inside the budget agreement by promising the money in the out years, while the Republicans and Arnold don’t.

So if you wanted a 2010 campaign slogan, you have the source material.

It looks to me like Arnold is holding out simply so he can prove a point.  His effort to insert privatizing social services eligibility at the last minute is flawed enough that even the Yacht Party might have trouble stomaching it.  The proposed cuts in the deal are really intolerable but not what the Governor promised at the outset.  It’s unclear whether the Governor will get his anti-fraud provisions, also inserted late into the process.  And it’s completely unclear, given the deal likely to come out, why we had to wait two weeks for virtually the same deal.

Whatever budget deal ultimately is passed — and in this economy it’ll only be a temporary fix, at best — virtually the same agreement could have been reached weeks ago […]

Democrats produced a stop-gap plan supported by Assembly Republicans that would have staved off IOUs. They proposed $3.3 billion in cuts to education and other programs that would have kept the cash flowing, at least for a few weeks. It would give them time to negotiate more cuts. Schwarzenegger rejected the idea and persuaded Senate Republicans to follow.

That’s where the governor began bobbling the ball, although his coaches figured he was playing to his fan base, what’s left of it.

Issuing IOUs will cost the state roughly $26 million in interest for July, the state controller’s office estimates. The IOUs also prompted Wall Street bond rating agencies to lower California’s credit to near junk status. That potentially could cost the state $7.5 billion over 30 years, according to the treasurer’s office.

Schwarzenegger, aides say, calculated that Democrats wouldn’t negotiate seriously without facing a deadline, such as the latest: most banks refusing to accept IOUs. Negotiating piecemeal would get nowhere, the governor believed.

But he might have dodged IOUs completely. Guess it doesn’t rankle much that the state he has governed for nearly six years must now pay bills with scrip.

Schwarzenegger’s clumsy attempt at the Shock Doctrine, when the deal Democrats were willing to agree to was painful enough, was about as irresponsible as a chief executive could be.

…just one more thing on this that the LAT article makes clear.  Schwarzenegger AGREES that education should be paid the money borrowed from them in the out years.  But Democrats suspect that his fingers are crossed and they want it in writing.  That’s the argument now.

Peter Schrag is one of the few columnists left in this state who consistently makes sense, and today he attacks that silly NYTimes article about California, in particular the elements of conventional wisdom:

In his passing references to California’s serious issues, many of which have major implications for the nation as a whole, Leibovich collects pieces of the conventional wisdom, even when, as in his facile summary of the causes of gridlock in Sacramento, it’s wrong. Since Democrats have again and again agreed to multi-billion dollar cuts, it is not, as he thinks, just a matter of “‘no more taxes’ (Republicans) and ‘no more cuts’ (Democrats).”

And while Jerry Brown, in his prior tenure as governor was indeed labeled “Governor Moonbeam” (by a Chicago columnist) for his space proposals, as Leibovich says, the label applied much more broadly to his inattention to the daily duties of his office and, most particularly to his dithering while the forces that produced Proposition 13 began to roll.

Brown later acknowledged that he didn’t have the attention span to focus on the property tax reforms that were then so urgently needed to avert the revolt of 1978. But to this day, almost no one has said much of Brown’s role in creating the anti-government climate and resentments that helped fuel the Proposition 13 drive.

It was the Brown, echoing much of the 1970s counter-culture, who, as much as anyone, was poor-mouthing the schools and universities as failing their students and who threatened to cut their funding if they didn’t shape up. It is Brown who spent most of his political career savaging politics and politicians, even as he ran for yet another office. Now this is the guy who wants to be governor again. But Leibovich doesn’t tell his readers that long history. Maybe he doesn’t know it.

The line about how those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it can be inserted here.  But Schrag hits on the most important failing of the article, and indeed of a good chunk of the political media here in California – they airbrush out the people who suffer for the failures of the politicians.

Where are California and the people who are feeling the pain – the school kids and teachers in hopelessly underfunded schools, the children who are losing their health care, the minimum-wage working mothers struggling to pay their child care, the students who are losing their university grants? Is all this really about nothing?

To far too many, the answer is yes.  It’s politics as theater, as a sporting event, where winners and losers are checked on a board, and whether or not a leader will keep their position is made the story rather than the principles he or she represents.  And yet it’s not Governor Hot Tubs and Stogies who will feel the pain of an economic downturn and massive budget cuts, nor well-heeled consultants or columnists who make up the scorecards.  It’s people.

People like the students in the Cal State system who may see their fees raised 20%, just months after a 10% hike approved in May.  This will effectively block higher education for a non-trivial number of students, as will proposed enrollment reductions of 32,000 students.

People like LA County homeowners who have defaulted at twice the rate in May as they have in the previous month, as a foreclosure backlog builds up due to various moratoriums and an increase in repossessed homes entering the market.

People like IOU holders who may have to turn to check-cashing stores to get less-than-full value for their registered warrants after Friday, when most major banks (who have all been bailed out by the federal government, by the way) stop the exchange of the notes.

And people like the elderly, disabled and blind, who rely on the in-home support services that the Governor is trying to illegally cut in contravention of a contempt-of-court citation, at least in Fresno.

These are the great unmentioned in this California crisis, the people who Dan Walters tries to smear in his column today by turning every Democratic concern for the impacts of policy as a sellout to “public employee unions.”  Behind those unions are workers, and the people they serve need the help the provide, in many cases, simply to survive.  But it would be too dangerous to Walters’ beautiful mind to consider those faces, so he chooses to make political hay out of the violation of people.

This is the point of the People’s Day of Reckoning Coalition.  They refuse to have their existence denied any longer.

…THE Jerry Brown commented in Schrag’s post:

Mr. Schrag’s latest screed is a good example of why politics in Sacramento is so dis-functional. Instead of trying to find the truth in the Leibovich article, he mocks both the writer and each of the subjects. In recent years, Schrag has become increasingly bitter. That’s very sad because he once was an open-minded person with real insight into the predicaments of modern society. Finally, his memory is not serving him well regarding Propistion 13 and the factors that constituted the ethos of that period. In fact, there was a long and hard fought battle to get property tax relief that got all the way to the state Senate but foundered just short of the necessary two thirds vote. There is much to say about government, schools and taxation in California. But to get anywhere it requires a degree of empathy and engagement with opposing perspectives that no longer seems congenial to Mr. Schrag.

Posted by: Jerry Brown at July 8, 2009 08:41 AM

Wow.

You can almost set your watch by it.  The state budget picture is a mess, Democrats ask for a balanced solution, Republicans hold their ground and say no, Democrats don’t have the vote so they let it go.  It happens practically every single year, and it’s happening again, according to CapAlert:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg said separately Thursday that they are optimistic a budget deal can be struck within several days.

The tone of their comments marked a stark contrast to Capitol fighting over the last few weeks between Democrats and Republicans over bridging the state’s $26.3 billion budget gap.

Steinberg also said Democrats had given up any attempt to increase taxes on tobacco or establish an oil severance tax […]

The Senate president said that Democrats no longer are pushing for a 9.9 percent tax on oil extraction or for hiking the state’s tobacco tax by $1.50 per pack.

“We would like to see an increase in the tobacco tax and the oil severance tax as a solution, but in this chapter that’s not realistic and it’s not what we’re holding out for,” Steinberg said.

It’s never going to be realistic in ANY CHAPTER.  Republicans know exactly how to play this game.  Their votes are needed for tax increases, so if they hang together they cannot lose.  The Democrats haven’t figured out how to shame the Yacht Party or make them pay for their votes, giving them no reason to do anything but hijack the process.  You’ll notice that as a result of this horrific experiment in governance, California is operating worse than practically every other state in the union.  

We’ve seen this kind of “it’s almost over” trial balloon on many occasions, so I wouldn’t put on the party hats just yet.  But somehow at the end of this process, somebody will step up to a microphone and claim how reaching agreement is a sign of success.  No.  It’s a sign of failure.  A failure to responsibly manage the state’s finances, reflected by the worst economy in 70 years.  The only lesson that can be learned from this process is that it’s fundamentally broken.

P.S. You’ll be thrilled to know that Schwarzenegger still sleeps well at night.

Schwarzenegger and I then repaired to a tent that he had put up in a courtyard next to his office, which allows him to smoke cigars legally at work (no smoking is allowed inside the Capitol). The tent is about 15 square feet, carpeted with artificial turf and outfitted with stylish furniture, an iPod, a video-conferencing terminal, trays of almonds, a chess table, a refrigerator and a large photo of the governor. Schwarzenegger reclined deeply in his chair, lighted an eight-inch cigar and declared himself “perfectly fine,” despite the fiscal debacle and personal heartsickness all around him. “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.”

This is the guy who dares to chide others for not doing their job.

According to Mike Genest, the Governor’s Director of Finance, the $24.3 billion dollar problem expanded by $2 billion dollars last night.  He’s not taking into account the interest on IOUs, of course, or the expanded borrowing costs.  But he’s factoring in the education spending that now cannot be cut below a certain level because of “maintenance of effort laws.”  Genest said that higher education has agreed to keep their books open an extra month, until July 31, meaning that the $1 billion in higher education cuts to the 2008-09 budget year could still be enacted.  This is basically fuzzy math, since the additional expenditures due to the Governor’s stubbornness do not get addressed.  

What the Governor wants to do now, to recoup those cuts under Prop. 98, is to suspend the law.  Once again, the reckless lawlessness of the Governor and his allies, out of an unwillingness to deal with budget reality, exposes itself.  In addition, the Governor has backed off on the outsized budget reserve as well as eliminating vital programs like welfare, state park closures, children’s health care and student grants.  Of course, this has been replaced by unrelated items like cutting public employee pensions and social services fraud inspections, both of which would do nothing to the deficit in the near term.

The Governor has declared a state of emergency, under Prop. 58 rules.  This means that the legislature has 45 days to come up with a solution on the budget, and if they fail to do so, they cannot adjourn or act on other bills.  This is a moot point, since the Governor has vowed already to veto any non budget-related bill until a solution is reached.  This just brings the legislature into special session (the fourth since December, I believe).

In addition, the Governor announced three furlough days a month for state employees to save cash, which amounts to a 15% pay cut.  And IOUs will get issued tomorrow.  They will have an interest rate for the banks which accept them of between 2-5%.

Here was my favorite part of his press conference:

Guv gets booed by some who watch him leave press conf and walk back to his office.

By the way, there’s a new hashtag to find all budget news on Twitter: #cabudget.

UPDATE: John Myers has a story up about this, and he includes the Governor’s latest revise, the centerpiece of which is the suspension of Prop. 98.