GOP Blames Red Ink on Democrats’ ‘Waste’

In an anthology of outrageous California stories called the Red Ink Diaries, a typical item concerns $125,000 worth of teddy bears.

It’s a tale of fuzzy good intentions gone bad. The Department of Motor Vehicles is the culprit, buying the stuffed animals -- with no competitive bidding -- as prizes for people who filled out census forms. Later, officials defended the emergency purchase order citing a tight deadline.

“Apparently, the once-every-decade census caught DMV officials by surprise,” state Sen. Ross Johnson, author of the Red Ink Diaries entry, observed archly.

Johnson, the senior member of the Senate Republican caucus, has published 33 of the diaries. Each offers an example of the “massive waste, inefficiency and outright fraud in government” he sees as the cause of California’s mounting fiscal mess.

Collectively, the diaries speak for many Republicans who say heedless spending is the cause of California’s budget crisis. Free-spending Democrats, encouraged by the run-up in state revenue generated by the booming stock market of the 1990s, wasted taxpayer money and locked the state into long-term expenses, Republicans charge. Since 1998, they say, California’s population increased 21%, state revenues grew 28%, and spending vaulted past both at 36%.

Some of that spending was approved by Republicans, and much now is hard to undo.

Pension deals, for instance, are costing the state billions of dollars a year today, and cannot easily be taken away because once they are granted, employees acquire a right to those benefits.

Other programs have grown unwieldy and need to be cut way back, Republicans say, in order to close the $38-billion budget gap.

Disagreement over how to close the shortfall badly divides California’s major political parties. The Legislature already has missed its constitutional deadline for passing a budget and has pushed the state into the new fiscal year without a spending plan.

Until last week, Republicans railed against taxation, but offered no specific spending reduction proposal of their own. Sunday, however, the Assembly debated -- and rejected -- a Republican-sponsored budget proposal that the GOP says would strike a balanced budget without tax increases.

Collectively, those cuts represented a far different vision than the one advanced by Democrats, some of whom called the Republican cuts -- including elimination of money to pay for burying foster children and for poor people to be able to feed their guide dogs -- cruel.

In addition, the Republican cuts fall well short of $38 billion, the entirety of the shortfall. Instead, they have proposed borrowing upward of $10 billion to eliminate last year’s deficit and billions more to help make ends meet in the current year -- and to repay that money using existing taxes.

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Wielding the Knife

In their proposed budgets, Republicans would eliminate health programs for which the state receives no federal reimbursement, saving California $291 million a year. Assembly Republicans also have proposed delaying children’s enrollment in kindergarten for one year, which they say would save about $600 million, and also recommend eliminating the same amount from higher education funding.

In the area of prisons, Republicans propose decentralizing budgeting and letting wardens have more control of how money is spent. Republicans argue that the state could save $350 million that way, because they believe wardens would more aggressively find ways to save money if they could allocate the money they have for their own priorities.

On a smaller scale, Republicans agree on some specific cuts: $6 million to do away with the state’s Arts Council and $10 million to get rid of trade offices in foreign countries that haven’t produced much trade.

There is not an entirely unified GOP front on bigger-ticket items, however. Assembly Republicans, for instance, proposed $497 million in savings by reducing certain welfare grants, but Senate Republicans are still pondering whether to commit to such a cut.

Even as they complain about Democratic spending, many Republicans show little enthusiasm for ending services that, in most cases, required at least some Republican votes to enact.

Republicans, for instance, do not suggest rolling back pay hikes to teachers, corrections workers or California Highway Patrol officers -- three large groups of workers whose salaries make up a significant chunk of state spending.

“Obviously, we have a lot of hard-working state employees who deserve to be fairly compensated,” Johnson said. “I honestly don’t come at this with a bias that [this or] that program ought to be eliminated. I come at it from the point of view that it defies logic that everything we’re doing is a wise expenditure.”

Similarly, many Republicans backed the Healthy Start child-health insurance program, launched by Republican Gov. Pete Wilson and greatly expanded under Davis. Many Republicans also supported a $1.8-billion bonus to school districts in 2001 that largely was spent on teacher pay hikes.

And in some cases, Republicans acknowledge that regardless of how an increase came to be, it’s no longer possible to take it away. The state employee pension increases in recent years, for instance, force the state to spend billions more every year than it once did on those pensions.

Assemblyman Ray Haynes (R-Murrieta) called that “another example of how when things were good, we were splurging.” Now the state is stuck with those costs, which Haynes said come to $2.5 billion a year, because “once you build it into the pension, it becomes a vested property right. You can’t take it away.”

That theme -- of Democrats irresponsibly administering the government and locking in bad management practices -- runs throughout the GOP critique of state spending. Democrats, they say, wasted money and let departments be poorly run.

“The problem is the waste of resources is endemic throughout the bureaucracies,” said state Sen. Tom McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks), who presses for a radical change in the way the state spends, such as decentralizing health and education.

Rather than pick at individual programs, McClintock said in an interview, what’s needed is a reform of bureaucracies “down to the DNA level” to refocus them on the services they are supposed to provide.

“All programs are good or they wouldn’t have been adopted in the first place,” he said.

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Solutions Not So Easy

The stumbling block for Republicans in the current emergency, McClintock said, is that the deep reforms they desire cannot be written into a budget.

“There’s no line item in the state budget that says ‘waste,’ ” he said.

Although much of their complaint is directed at waste, many GOP leaders are annoyed by government spending that appears to them to support left-leaning causes.

An aide to state Sen. Thomas “Rico” Oller (R-San Andreas) supplied a short list of such programs, including a $12,000 poetry reading given by California’s electricity grid operator and a conference on revolutionary environmentalism at Fresno State University featuring an animal rights activist who had been convicted of a firebombing.

Haynes said the mentality of free-spending is most evident at the subcommittee level, where Republicans have little clout to block measures and instead are reduced to fuming at what they see as the excesses of their Democratic colleagues.

An issue paper posted on Haynes’ Web site in 2000 and mentioned by him again last week described one meeting in which then-Assemblywoman Hilda Solis, who is now in Congress, chided a representative of a children’s health program for coming to her committee and asking for too little. In that case, Haynes said, the program official asked for permission to hire nine new employees; Solis countered by raising the request to 12.

“I sat there saying, ‘I just can’t believe what is happening,’ ” Haynes said.

While Solis bolstered the program beyond what its backers were seeking, Haynes said he would have had no qualms cutting it altogether. According to Haynes, it duplicates services already provided by Medi-Cal but does not require those using it to complete an intake evaluation.

“People are more likely to defraud the system,” Haynes said, “if you don’t require them to fill out a form.”