The Budget That Everyone Still Hates

The $55.7-billion California state budget has hobbled across the finish line at last. It was bruised en route by partisan warfare and deprived of some of its boons for the needy. It cut a broad swath of new taxation to fuel its difficult passage. There is scarcely a soul in California who will not feel some pain.

There was political discomfort, too. The ink from Gov. Pete Wilson’s pen was hardly dry when his assessment that the budget “represents fair and wise compromises” drew a savage round of criticism from disaffected members of his own Republican Party who said they felt betrayed. But there were other Republicans who showed real political courage in dropping opposition to a plan that will raise income taxes on those earning more than $100,000 a year.

And Democrats in the Legislature found themselves swallowing hard as dollars for important constituencies evaporated before their eyes.

All this compromise was necessary to achieve billions in new revenue and billions in savings.

In light of all that effort, a budget crafted several weeks into the new fiscal year turns out to be an achievement worthy of national attention. For California to have closed a budget deficit of $14.3 billion--an amount bigger than the entire budgets of some other states--is something of a landmark in the testy politics of the uncertain 1990s now playing out in fiscally strapped states.

The governor and the Legislature, when measured against the prolonged agony of many other states, did their difficult work with relative dispatch.

Some who have watched the California wrangling may have thought the battle would go on forever. And the governor appeared to slow the progress with his last-minute bid to tack on workers’ compensation reform.

But consider the resolution in comparison to the bloodletting elsewhere: the public humiliation of then-Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, only months after being his party’s candidate for President; the bitterly short honeymoon for Connecticut Gov. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. and the deep fiscal anguish in New York, Texas, Maine and other states.

Of course, what the new California budget does to the needy, and what it extracts from others, is no cause for rejoicing. But at a time when the public wonders whether politicians can get anything done, the outcome is noteworthy.

In spreading the pain and in taking their lumps, the governor and Democratic leaders such as Senate President Pro Tem David Roberti (D-Los Angeles) have put a fresh new spin on the art of the deal for the 1990s .