The latest Big Five meeting is underway, and we could see a yay deal as soon as tonight. Digby, who I’m lucky enough to call a colleague over at Hullabaloo, has a great post about the budget debacle and the collective lack of perspective in politics.  She references the 2003 special election freak show and how the media became seduced by marketing and reality-show gamesmanship into cheering on the “Who Wants To Be Governor Of California” spectacle (side note – I actually almost worked on the actual “Who Wants To Be Governor Of California” TV show produced at the time by Game Show Network).  And while turning the recall into a game, everyone forgot about the insanity of the associated issue:

The “issue” that supposedly precipitated this little tantrum was the required restoration to earlier higher rates for car registration, brought about by a weakening of the economy. The media went wild, even friends of mine who know absolutely nothing about politics pretended to be enraged that they would be forced to pay $30.00 more a year and they all went out and voted to recall the Governor and replace him with The Terminator.

That recall was a political sideshow of epic proportions, featuring porn stars, Gary Coleman and even Arianna. It was great fun. Standing in line to vote that day — the longest line I’d ever experienced at the ballot box — was like being at an American Idol party.

But check it out. In an otherwise terrible George Skelton column, he does make one interesting observation:

Schwarzenegger had campaigned full throttle against Gov. Gray Davis’ “outrageous” raising of the vehicle license fee. His favorite stunt was using a wrecking ball to smash an old jalopy that symbolized the tax.

Davis really had only bumped the fee back to its historic level: to 2% of a vehicle’s value, rather than a recently enacted 0.65%.

Schwarzenegger’s canceling of the fee hike actually amounted to the single biggest spending increase of his reign. That’s because all the revenue from the vehicle license fee had gone to local governments, and Schwarzenegger generously agreed to make up their losses by shipping them money from the state general fund.

The annual drain on the state treasury was $6.3 billion until February. Then the governor and Legislature raised the fee to 1.15% of vehicle value, saving the state $1.7 billion. But it will revert to its lower level in two years.

Cutting the car tax plunged the state deeper into debt just as Schwarzenegger was taking the wheel. To cover it — at least temporarily — the new governor went on a borrowing binge. It didn’t take much to persuade the Legislature and voters to authorize $15 billion in “economic recovery bonds.”

Passing those bonds and a companion spending “reform,” the governor promised, would mean “no more deficit financing.” They’d live within their means. Sacramento would “tear up the credit card and throw it away.”

The only thing thrown away was all the bond money, spent long ago on daily expenses — the equivalent of borrowing to buy groceries.

I’m not saying the car fee issue is the reason the state is currently in chaos. It’s far deeper and more complicated than that. But I do believe that the simplistic, downright silly approach Americans take to politics is largely to blame. It long ago became more about marketing and entertainment — and preening, shallow self-gratification — than serious consideration of responsible governance.

I would be remiss if I didn’t total up the $6.3 billion a year in lost revenue from the vehicle license fee, along with the interest on those needless economic recovery bonds, and note that the total is surely more than the current budget deficit or even the last two combined.

But Digby’s main point is correct.  When the media in this state bothers to pay attention to politics, it’s as a freak show, and they ascribe the same kind of reporting available in the sports section rather than give anyone the information they need to make serious choices about what kind of state they’d like to live in.  The so-called “car tax” was the kind of populist pitchfork-fest that was perfect for Schwarzenegger, and he repeated enough movie quotes and manipulated enough emotions to prevail.  Along the way, almost nobody challenged the thesis, nobody provided the truth about the VLF, nobody slid the debate from the zaniness of the recall – porn stars! – into the serious business of a government that works.

Digby thinks that “we are going to have to reform more than the state constitution to fix things. We need to reform politics itself somehow, convince people that it isn’t American Idol or the World Series, or the ruling class will always be able to afford to put on a show whenever they need to manipulate the folks and the folks will probably fall for it.”  And I agree with that to an extent: for one, the system cannot be reformed without a responsible citizenry understanding the reasons why.  But I’m enough of a goo-goo to believe that enough people can become energized by taking back their government so that the seriousness and the structure will be injected back into California’s system.  That’s why I believe sweeping constitutional reform is in the end the only option – because a status quo system will only empower the types of shenanigans that brought us both the Governator and hundreds of thousands if not millions of residents left with no help and no hope.  To get the circus out of town, we must offer an alternative to the sideshow that is our government.  If enough of us wish to be a laughingstock no more, it can be done.

Arnold Schwarzenegger will not support a Democrat.  He never has since he became Governor, and he never will.  He said he could support Dianne Feinstein for Senate in 2006, and didn’t.  He said he could support Jerry Brown for Attorney General in 2006, and didn’t.  He markets an image of post-partisanship that the national media swallows whole.  Republicans hate him, because they believe that crap, but Democrats are too smart to buy it, so they hate him too.

Please stop this.

Thanks.

In both the Friday and Saturday editions of the Los Angeles Times, right on page A1 above the fold, there was a graphic of a “tax calculator,” which projected the additional taxes an individual would pay based on certain factors like income, number of dependents and values of vehicles.  They have a corresponding tax calculator on their website where users can type in the data and get the precise tax hit coming to them.  The Sacramento Bee has the same thing.  Talk radio was having a field day with these calculators over the past couple days, getting people to call in and disclose their statistics and telling them how much money they will owe.  This led to perverse complaints like the lady making $126,000 a year ranting about an $800 tax increase.

In my life, I have never seen a “spending cut calculator,” where someone good plug in the services they rely on, like how many school-age children they have, or how many roads they take to work, or how many police officers and firefighters serve their community, or what social services they or their families rely on, and how much they stand to lose in THAT equation.  Tax calculators show bias toward the gated community screamers on the right who see their money being piled away for nothing.  A spending cut calculator would actually show the impact to a much larger cross-section of society, putting far more people at risk than a below 1% hit to their bottom line.

But of course, people who are perceived to depend on state services probably don’t log on to the LA Times and the Sacramento Bee websites very often to calculate their tax burden.  In reality, we all depend on the state for roads and law enforcement and libraries and schools and county hospitals and on and on.  And in Los Angeles County, one in five residents – almost 2.2 million people – receive some form of public aid.  So wouldn’t it make sense to portray the real cost of spending cuts in the same way that tax increases are portrayed?

Contra Dan Walters, it is completely untrue that “liberal Web sites” are unilaterally condemning cuts to education and health & welfare spending.  We fully understand that a $42 billion dollar hole cannot be filled by revenue alone.  We certainly condemn corporate tax cuts at a time of massive deficits, or counter-productive actions like selling the lottery, which will produce net losses in the long-term.  But there is no question that the media mentality is to highlight the tax side of the equation over the spending side, and dramatically portray the tax increases – splashed across the front page – while relegating the spending cuts to further down the page.  It feeds the tax revolt and distorts the debate.  And it’s completely irresponsible.

Just a thought or two on this whole mess while we wait for the Senate to reconvene.  While I didn’t think it was the best strategy to announce a deal and start voting on it before there was an actual deal in place (although the rumor that Dave Cox reneged on a handshake deal changes my perspective a bit), Darrell Steinberg seems to have backed into a strategy of playing Yacht Party obstruction out very publicly, so that the essential insanity of their anti-tax, sink-the-state agenda can be well-described by what’s left of political state media.  So George Skelton does the math and refutes the Yacht Party assertion that cutting spending alone can solve the budget crisis, and Dan Walters manages to describe the situation accurately.

And we all sit at our computers and type out our “even Dan Walters and George Skelton believe” articles, eternally hopeful that this is the corner-turning event, that the public will find the right people to blame for the sorry state of affairs, and punish them repeatedly forever more.  Only it’s wishful thinking.  First of all, I hate to break it, but nobody reads George Skelton and Dan Walters.  They are opinion leaders to about .001% of the electorate.  Second, there was another audience watching Sacramento this weekend, and they were the bondholders, who would be crazy to allow California to borrow one more red cent from them given the political fracturing (and this budget calls for 1.1 trillion red cents, or $11 billion dollars, to be borrowed).  Even if this passed tomorrow there would need to be lots of short-term debt floated to manage the cash crisis until new revenues actually reached state coffers, and with the bond rating the lowest in the country and the dysfunction being played out, I don’t see it happening.

The other point is that this is, let’s face it, a bad deal for Californians.  Among the sweeteners thrown in the deal to attract that elusive third Republican vote are a $10,000 tax break for home buyers to re-inflate the bubble and set the state economy up for an even bigger crash; weakened anti-pollution laws that will cost the state additional public health and environmental cleanup spending in the long-term; a potential budget cap that will make it impossible for public schools and social services to meet demand; and much more.  The tax changes, which are short-term except for a huge break to multinationals, tax things that we want to encourage in a downturn, work and consumption.  What the federal government is offering to spur demand and get the economy moving again is exactly what the state government will be cutting to balance the budget.  That’s not an argument to kill it, but it’s a reflection of reality.

So there will be at best a kind of zero-growth stasis, and at worst a further crumbling of the local economy, with shrunken revenues likely to require another round of this by summer.  Ultimately, the media cannot help the Democratic Party solve this problem.  The bill is coming due for 30 years of anti-tax zealotry and the belief that we can provide whatever citizens need without paying for it.  There isn’t a light at the end of the tunnel.  That some opinion leaders are coming around about 20 years to late doesn’t wash the blood from their hands.  And that the Democratic Party is finally thinking that they should maybe fight against the 2/3 requirement that has relegated them to a functional minority in Sacramento since is was instituted doesn’t absolve them for 30 years of inattention.

It gives me no pleasure to bear the bad news, but there’s no wake-up call on the horizon.  Even all 38 million Californians coming to the same “Hey, GOP is suxxor” conclusion at the same time doesn’t change structural realities.  Those must be fought for over years if not decades, and it is not defeatist to wonder whether it’s too late.

…I think Joe Matthews says it fairly well.

Not sure where the LA Times is pulling this figure from.

A $5-million plan to replace 78 wood piles that support the pier is among the hundreds of California projects that stand to benefit from the federal stimulus measure. In fact, the first major initiative of the Obama administration could deliver as much as $63 billion to the state.

Some of the money would help ease California’s budget crisis, although officials in Sacramento say it would cover only one-quarter of the nearly $42-billion deficit […]

The $63-billion projection for California — provided by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank with ties to President Obama — includes about $44 billion to help pay for things such as infrastructure projects, healthcare for the poor and increased unemployment benefits.

The remaining $19 billion would cover the cost of the individual tax cuts to Californians.

To be fair, the story does make clear that state and local government relief would only directly impact about 1/4 of the budget hole.  But I think it’s dangerous to throw around $63 billion when there’s still going to be a need for tough solutions on revenues and cuts in the budget.  That number throws in the kitchen sink – it includes tax cuts to individuals and businesses, unemployment insurance extension, food stamp benefits, everything.  The fact that more people have money to spend may positively impact the bottom line if California catches some of that cash in sales taxes, but the story – and really the projection by CAP – makes it sound like California will be handed a $63 billion dollar oversized novelty check.  This will only serve to aid the radical Yacht Party agenda, allowing them to say that California just got a bailout so there’s no need for tax increases.  Every sane person knows that the federal windfall will help but not fix the budget, and talk of $63 billion like it’s a sugar plum fairy really hurts the ability to make that fix happen.

For example, when citizens all over the state don’t get their tax refunds in the coming months, with taxpayers on the low end of the income scale feeling the greatest effect, and they read stories about $63 billion flowing to the state, who do you think they’re going to blame?  And I’m sure the Yacht Party will be around to direct that blame, too.

It’s fairly irresponsible to headline “$63 BILLION!” when we know only $10 billion of that will directly hit the budget.