COLUMN RIGHT : Next, Try a Tax on Snake Oil : The state budget was ‘balanced’ by illusionary tricks, while ideas for real savings went begging.

You wouldn’t know it from all the backslapping and self-congratulations emanating from Sacramento, but the state budget is not balanced. What’s more, it will require another tax increase next year to stay afloat.

The state will spend more money than it takes in this year, even taking into account the $8-billion tax increase.

The number-crunchers pretended that the budget was balanced by changing accounting methods and by using gimmicks to “create” $2.8 billion in one-time income to the state, most of it on paper.

To enhance the illusion of a balanced budget, they projected that our economy will grow by 3.6% this year, 10.1% the following year and 8.9% the year after that--a 22% increase over the next three years, at a time when California’s economy is shrinking by an annual rate of 1%!

These fanciful growth projections allowed them to avoid making the cuts that are needed to have a truly balanced budget. But next year, when the economy doesn’t expand at their projected rate, where will they make up the difference? You guessed it, they’ll be back to raise your taxes again.

Let me give you a few facts that I’ll bet you never heard during the budget battle.

-- General-fund spending will increase by 7% this year, growing from $40.51 billion to $43.4 billion.

-- Our state government is more than twice as big now as it was eight years ago; the budget has jumped 106%, while our population has gone up by only 24%.

-- Between June, 1990, and June, 1991, California had a net loss of 91,000 manufacturing jobs, 50,100 construction jobs and 28,700 wholesale and retail jobs. But state and local governments added 42,000 jobs.

Isn’t it ironic that California’s government is driving productive jobs out of state and replacing them with public employees while the rest of the world is throwing off the dead hand of centralized, socialist governments?

The $8 billion in increased taxes won’t be spent to rebuild our roads, educate our children better or help our economy. No, the $8 billion will be spent just to continue the status quo. Our socialist welfare state, which is collapsing in on itself, has succeeded at only one thing: bankrupting the state of California.

What makes me particularly angry is that there are alternatives to the expanded bureaucracy and destructive taxes of this year’s budget. Assemblyman Tom McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks) prepared a list of more than $20 billion in potential cuts compiled from proposals from the Department of Finance, the Legislative Analyst and the Senate and Assembly fiscal committee staffs.

These are just a few of the suggested money-savers:

-- Use federal income-tax returns to collect the state income tax; eliminating the Franchise Tax Board would save $100 million a year.

-- Conform California’s prevailing wage to the federal standard. The $8-per-hour saving on all public-works projects would add up to hundreds of millions of dollars for state and local governments each year.

-- Install lethal electrified fences at our prisons and eliminate manned guard towers, which cost us $25 million per year.

-- Reduce state employees’ paid holidays from 13 to 10 (the high end of this benefit in the private sector) and save $24 million per year.

Each of these ideas would have saved the taxpayers millions of dollars without cutting services or protection.

It baffles me to think that the liberal elite chose to raise taxes rather than enact the type of measures we suggested. Yet the media made light of our proposed cuts, and most of the legislative leadership was too busy celebrating the perceived death of the anti-tax movement to seriously consider them. What few reforms we got are almost all temporary, but the tax increases are almost all permanent.

The sad reality is that this out-of-balance budget is already coming apart. The Assembly has just passed a bill eliminating the ridiculous tax on free newspapers and is considering proposals to alter or eliminate several other aspects of our just-passed tax increases. In truth, this year’s budget battle never really ended, because the budget wasn’t ever really balanced.

My hunch is that next year when the politicians run out of money again and try to raise taxes, they’ll get the same lesson in people power that the hard-liners in the Kremlin got. High taxes are revolting, and next year the people will be, too.