Washington, D.C. insider and anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist was recently quoted by conservative columnist Debra Saunders in the SF Chronicle as saying “I think golf and cocaine would be more constructive ways to spend one’s free time than negotiating with Democrats on spending restraint.”

I have always considered golf a good walk spoiled.  As a recovering cocaine addict, I am surprised that anyone would think that it is at all constructive to spend one’s free time using that drug.

One would think that Mr. Norquist made this comment with a straw in his hand bending over a mirror full of white powder.

This is the man the California Republican Party is taking its cues from when it comes to tackling our state’s budget crisis.

It’s no wonder California Republicans find themselves out of touch not only with California voters on the whole, but even with an increasingly smaller percentage of Californians who self-identify as Republican voters.

A recent Field Poll showed that 61% of California voters were in favor of holding a special election to vote on a package of spending cuts and temporary tax increases to balance our budget. Even 56% of California Republicans are in favor of the idea.

Instead Republican leaders in Sacramento are taking their lead from their de facto leader in Washington, D.C., Grover Norquist. This isn’t good for Californians, it isn’t good for our budget process and it isn’t even good for the Republican Party.

Californians must be trusted to exercise their right to vote – that’s how things work in a democracy. What remains of the sensible part of the Republican Party needs to speak loudly against out of touch, and out-to-lunch Republicans like Grover Norquist.

We have no budget, no money for child care centers and college students, and no hope that these problems will be solved anytime soon. But take heart California, what we do have is a state-of-the-art death chamber. And soon we will have the best and brightest death row housing facility. Can anyone in Sacramento say “priorities”?

On September 22, “Day 83 Without a Budget,” the Governor revealed a brand new execution chamber. This was his latest leap into the budgetary black hole that is the death penalty. While state employees have been furloughed, the inmates at San Quentin have been hard at work building the new facility to replace the rigged-up gas chamber they had been using. After a judge ruled it was too small and poorly lit to put people to death without risk of serious error, the new one boasts such improvements as a room with lights.

Its price-tag? A mere $853,000.

 A few weeks earlier, back on “Day 41 Without a Budget,” the Governor “borrowed” $64 million from the state’s general fund, to be paid out of our still non-existent state budget. That money will be used to begin construction of the new death row housing facility, which in the end will cost $400 million to build. That breaks down to about a half a million dollars per cell. The facility is being designed to hold 1,400 inmates—twice the number of people currently on death row. That’s because the government knows that almost everyone sentenced to death in California will not actually die in the shiny new execution chamber. In fact, almost all will die of natural causes, just like they do now.

The Attorney General’s office claims we will use San Quentin’s brand new, well-lit execution facility next week, on “Day 91 Without a Budget,” to execute Albert Brown. But with three on-going legal challenges to the lethal injection procedures, legal experts doubt the execution will actually take place.

Mr. Brown has been on death row for 28 years. Based on averages of the costs of death penalty trials, state-level appeals, and housing in San Quentin, the ACLU estimates his case has cost California $4,788,750 over and above the cost that would have been incurred if Mr. Brown was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

Many people hear that and reason we could reduce the cost by decreasing the time spent on death row – after all, if he wasn’t on death row for 28 years, he couldn’t have racked up that $4 million dollar bill, right? Unfortunately not. In fact the reverse is true: speeding up the system would only cost more money. The California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice concluded we would need to pay at least $95 million more per year to speed up the death penalty and increase its efficiency. That finding was agreed upon unanimously, by death penalty advocates and opponents alike.

Why? Because the bottle-neck in death penalty cases isn’t too many appeals or sympathy for death row inmates, it’s the same thing that bottle-necks every other bureaucratic enterprise on earth: money. Currently, a person sentenced to death waits an average of five years before an attorney is even appointed for appeal and 10 years before the first appeal is actually heard in court. Faster appointments and hearings can only be accomplished by hiring more attorneys and court staff. In short, by spending more money.

While state employees prepare for an execution in between their furlough days, millions of dollars are sucked into California’s machinery of death. Every state program is facing drastic budget cuts, from education to health care to law enforcement, but we can still scrape together more than $800,000 for a state-of-the-art, well-lit killing chamber and remain on track to spend $1 billion on the death penalty in the next five years.

 A safe and cost-effective alternative exists that can still salvage California from these absurd priorities. By cutting the death penalty and converting the sentences of more than 700 death row inmates to life without parole with work and restitution to the victims, we can save $1 billion in five years without releasing a single prisoner. Permanent imprisonment is swift and certain justice that keeps the public safe without sucking the budget dry.

(Excellent stuff from the Democratic candidate for AD-70 – promoted by Robert Cruickshank)

I was recently asked by the Orange County Register to give answers about how to fix the California budget in 75 words.

That is not possible, because it’s a complicated issue.

Of course, I could have pretended it was simple, like my opponent will do, by blaming California’s budget problems solely on government spending.

But that is not the case.

California has the second lowest ratio of state employees to population among all the states, with 103 full-time equivalent state employees per 10,000 residents. The national average is 143 state employees per 10,000 residents.

It isn’t excessive spending that is the real culprit causing our budget woes – it’s the reckless borrowing we’ve done to pay for unfair tax cuts to the rich and giant corporations.

The three main causes of California’s budget crisis are (1) the national recession, (2) the billions of dollars in tax cuts given to the wealthy and giant corporations, and (3) the billions of dollars in interest that California must pay for the money borrowed to cover these unfair tax cuts to special interests.

If you want to see why people get confused about the causes of our budget problems, break down this whopper from the website of Jerry Amante, one of the Republicans campaigning in the 70th Assembly District, where I’m running:

Over the last 20 years, the California Consumer Price Index has risen 44% and population has increased by 20%.  During the same period, state spending as (sic) increased by 262%, from about $40 billion to $145 billion.  This huge expansion in the size of state government is the root cause of our budget problems.  The solution is not to raise taxes so the government can keep growing – it is to rein in spending and limit government growth. I support a constitutional amendment to limit spending increases.

I don’t know where Amante gets his numbers.

The California Consumer Price Index has risen 72.1% from December 1989 to December 2009, not 44% as Amante claims.

Population has increased by 28% from 1990 to 2009, not by 20%.

(It’s pretty easy to Google this stuff.)

Factor those two numbers together (population and inflation), and you see that if spending had remained level per person, state spending adjusted for inflation would have had a natural increase of 220%.

Jerry Amante was either just plain wrong or intentionally dishonest in his numbers about population and prices, leading to a gross distortion of the growth of the California budget relative to population and cost of living.

How did he do on his spending numbers?

He got one number right: state general fund spending for 1989-1990 was $39.5 billion, very close to Amante’s $40 billion number.  But state general fund spending in 2009-2010 was $86.1 billion, not the $145 billion that Amante claims.

Maybe Amante meant total state spending, including special funds and bond funds, but then he should have used $48.8 billion as his number from twenty years ago and a current number of $124.7 billion.

But whatever numbers Amante uses, the fact remains that real general fund spending has increased less than half of one per cent per year over the last twenty years.

Total spending has increased by more, driven by reckless borrowing under GOP Governor Schwarzenegger, so that bond payments have increased more than 400% from what they averaged twenty years ago.

Much of that irresponsible borrowing has been to pay for tax cuts.  While general fund spending has been relatively level, the cost per year of the tax cuts enacted since 1993 has risen to $11.7 billion a year.  Just the 2008 and 2009 tax cuts for giant corporations will cost the state nearly $8 billion over the next eight years.

If you are asking, “What tax cuts?,” you’re not alone. You probably haven’t seen these tax cuts, since the constant shift has been from taxing corporations and the richest Californians to taxing the middle class, primarily in the form of increased sales and income taxes, but also through higher fees, much higher tuition and service cuts.

California also lost $1.2 billion dollars a year when Republicans irresponsibly took away the provision that allowed for a California estate tax that was fully deductible against federal estate taxes.

So does California primarily have a spending problem, or do we have an acute tax fairness problem and a reckless borrowing problem?

We do have a huge revenue problem as the recession has seriously cut into the state’s income and sales tax revenue.  California’s problem is worse than other states because we came into the recession already crippled by Arnold’s ill-considered tax cuts and the reckless borrowing needed to pay for them.

Most Californians agree that we need to restore the cuts made to education, continue to provide vital and cost-effective health services for our seniors so they can live with dignity in their own homes.

To protect our schools and our seniors, we need to stop the borrowing, roll back some of those corporate tax cuts and let the banks, oil companies, and giant corporations pay their fair share.

The California Budget Project has done some great work in analyzing the state budget issues, and bringing to light some of the myths that are constantly thrown around.  If you want to compare myths and facts, take a few minutes to read their great analysis.

Don’t believe the myths.

To fix the budget, we need the facts.

Melissa Fox

PS Remember that I’m hosting coffee at the CDP convention. See my over-caffeinated blogad on the right side of the page.

California enters 2010 facing a $20 billion hole in its budget. Does this sound like a familiar story? By all evidence not much has changed since last year when the governor and legislature took 144 days to solve this problem—and then apparently did not.

The Governor has floated creative ideas for saving and raising money to get the state out of its terminal financial doldrums from shipping undocumented immigrants off to Mexican prisons to mounting overhead electronic billboard displays on freeway bridges.

They received only the most tepid response from legislators in both parties who are in the grips of a political paralysis which many think unprecedented as they struggle to find any common ground. Democrats want to raise taxes which Republicans, including the Governor, fiercely resist preferring cuts in services.

Even some of the cuts previously approved for prisons and Medi-Cal rates were never enacted while $1 billion more than planned must be spent on public schools because of Proposition 98 guarantees.

These are just some of the balancing act choices, none of them popular, in a bitterly divided legislature.

With the job market still sluggish even after the infusion of millions in federal stimulus funds and with the state’s jobless rate holding at12.4%, the vague hopes for recovery that accompanied the cheery pronouncements from Sacramento after last year’s budget crisis have only solidified voter cynicism that anything can ever get done.

These sentiments are echoed across the nation where voter revolt has already cost the Democrats a Senate seat in Massachusetts, governorships in New Jersey and Virginia, and the likelihood with the announced retirement of Senator Evan Bayh, a popular Indiana Democrat, that the contagion is spreading and could engulf the Administration by the time of the November mid-term elections. Loss of their Senate majority is already a foregone conclusion.

In California, this is posing problems for Barbara Boxer, the former Marin resident now in her third term whose credentials as one of the most liberal members of the Senate has not hurt her in past campaigns but could be wearing thin as anti-incumbent fever stoked by Tea Party advocates and reinvigorated conservatives sweeps the country.  

While Boxer is still seen as the narrow favorite, the entry into the race of political moderate and former Peninsula Congressman, Tom Campbell, muddies the picture which showed Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett Packard chief, with the early lead and a vast fortune to back it up.

This creates an opening for Irvine Assemblyman, Chuck DeVore, who as the most conservative of the three may be positioned best to wrest the nomination. That would be welcome news for Boxer in a state which still leans heavily Democratic and who held off a charge by an ardent conservative to gain her seat in 1992.

But if California’s economy and the nation’s have not significantly rebounded before November which is still a good bet, no incumbents are safe.

Millions will be poured into the race to defeat Boxer, aided by the Supreme Court’s recent ruling allowing corporations to spend unlimited sums in federal elections. If this happens, California may become the bell weather state for the majority party’s fortunes in November and beyond.

But Republican incumbents in California and everywhere must also worry if they cannot deliver.

In the market for a prime piece of real estate? Governor Schwarzenegger has the deal for you! Facing a $21.3 Billion budget deficit in California, Schwarzenegger has offered to sell state-owned property to make up the difference. The crown jewel of the proposed fire sale is San Quentin State Prison, home to California’s death row and beautifully situated in the San Francisco Bay.

But before he can flip San Quentin for a profit, Gov. Schwarzenegger will have to figure out what to do with the 680 condemned inmates who currently call it home. Fortunately, there is a solution.  The best way to solve California’s budget woes would be to do away with the death penalty all together.  By eliminating the death penalty, the state will save $1 billion in five years. And that’s not even counting the profit from selling San Quentin.

California currently has the largest death row in the country and spends more than any other state on the death penalty. In the next five years, California can save $1 billion by getting rid of the death penalty. Here’s how:

• Save $125 million per year by cutting extra costs of the death penalty—costs not incurred through permanent imprisonment. According to the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, the annual cost of California’s death penalty to the state is $137 million. If the worst offenders were condemned to permanent imprisonment instead, the cost would be only $11 million and California would not be any less safe.
• Save $400 million in construction of a new housing facility for death row inmates. According to the State Auditor, this is how much it will cost to build a new facility at San Quentin, needed because the current facility is filled past capacity. And this is the state’s cost saving measure; building at any other site will be even more expensive.

Keep in mind that any attempt to “speed up” the death penalty will cost even more. The California Commission concluded that in order to reduce the time needed to review death penalty cases, the state would need to spend an additional $100 million each year.

These figures don’t even take into consideration the windfall profits from selling off San Quentin, if anyone even wants it. But before death row can go on the market, Gov. Schwarzenegger will have to come up with an effective alternative for the inmates already living there. Luckily, California has such an alternative already in place—permanent imprisonment—which is just as safe as and so much less expensive than capital punishment.   The money saved can be used to provide victims’ services or other crime prevention measures.  And there would still be money left to help dig California out of this economic hole.

Right now, Gov. Schwarzenegger can convert all of the current death sentences to sentences of permanent imprisonment, ensuring these inmates are kept off the streets forever and die in prison. Every guilty person sentenced to permanent imprisonment in California stays in prison until he or she dies, and it costs $175,000 less per inmate per year than a sentence of death by execution.

Before selling San Quentin, the Legislature will also need to temporarily suspend any new death sentences until the state recovers from the current fiscal crisis so we don’t recreate the current problem. As an added bonus, suspending new death penalty trials would also save county budgets, which are in no better condition than the state budget. Each death penalty trial costs the local counties at least $1.1 million more than a trial where the district attorney seeks a sentence of permanent imprisonment. California currently averages about 20 new death sentences a year, so stopping death penalty trials could save counties an additional $100 million in five years.

Of the many proposals Gov. Schwarzenegger has put before the voters and the legislature to rescue the state from financial meltdown—all of which have failed—none are quite as simple or reasonable as suspending the death penalty and saving $1 billion in five years. Since the Governor is now into real estate, he should know a “money pit” when he sees it. The longer he waits, the more money he wastes.

To learn more visit www.aclunc.org/deathpenalty.

Natasha Minsker is the Death Penalty Policy Director for the ACLU of Northern California.