Jerry Brown didn’t lay down a whole lot of specifics for his budget plan during the campaign. His basic tack was that a) he’ll work with the legislature, because he knows how this is done and b) he won’t raise taxes without a vote. Now, that isn’t to say that Whitman had anything more detailed or in any way better, but she did have many glossy magazines. So, that’s fun.<\/p>\n
But, now that Jerry Brown is back in Sacramento doing the less general, and much nastier work of trying to come up with budget solutions, he’s seeing just how bad this mess really is. And, when you strip away all the budget games, you get a real mess. George Skelton says that is exactly Jerry’s plan: show them what we have wrought with our conflicting legislative measures, ballot measures and our desire for high services but low taxes. You can’t have them all:<\/p>\n
“He wants to force the Legislature and the public to really confront how bad the situation is,” says Brown spokesman Sterling Clifford. “But he won’t be talking solutions yet.”<\/p>\n
As part of the education effort, Brown intends to demonstrate exactly what living within our means without a tax increase is all about. He’ll do that when he sends the Legislature his first budget proposal in early January.<\/p>\n
“The plan is to produce a budget without smoke and mirrors,” Clifford says.<\/p>\n
Without the usual masquerade of smoke and mirrors, the document will be too glaringly ugly for most people, based on polls.<\/p>\n
Of those who voted in the Nov. 2 election, 65% believe that the state government “wastes a lot” of tax money, according to a survey reported Wednesday by the Public Policy Institute of California. Presumably they blame the old bugaboo “waste, fraud and abuse” for the perpetual deficit.<\/p>\n