To Win the Budget Shell Game, Keep an Eye on the Fee

Did the earth move for you?

Me neither.

I speak of the new governor’s State of the State speech and his budget press conference. I did love his stunt with the graph: Schwarzenegger the former bodybuilder hefting a $99-billion budget on a poster-board chart. Very low-tech. Very Ross Perot.

I loved the question from the Austrian reporter, likening the campaign to a honeymoon and the budget to “a serious marriage,” and asking, “What can the partner expect from this marriage?” And I just know that John Burton, the funny, wild-eyed liberal president of the state Senate, leaped to his feet yelling at his TV, “The shaft, that’s what!”

If TV entertainment reporters were there as they were at the inaugural, they probably weren’t disappointed. There were jokes, there were movie references, there were the governor’s two-time-zone smiles.

But there aren’t, Schwarzenegger said, any “gimmicks” in his budget, but of course there are, just as in every other governor’s budget. As he also said, “there are certain things that will always happen the way they did in the past.”

Little tricks like waiting an extra week to send out checks to Medi-Cal providers, thus saving $143 million -- by nudging the cost into the next fiscal year. Sliding a billion dollars specifically for transportation programs into the general fund.

I put out a call to the smoke and mirror experts, magicians, to find out how it’s done. None called me back. I’m not surprised; they don’t want everyone knowing how the trick is done. Neither do politicians. Even their vocabulary conceals rather than reveals. Democrats like the word “revenues” instead of taxes -- it makes them sound almost like profits. Schwarzenegger calls them “savings” instead of “cuts.” Now he’s got to sell his “savings” plan to the Legislature. He’s said if he can sell tickets to some of his bombs, like “Last Action Hero,” he can sell anything. When he was selling “Last Action Hero,” on the “Today” show, Bryant Gumbel’s opening gambit was, “This film has an awful lot of negative buzz about it.” Schwarzenegger blamed some of it on “jealous people,” and assured Gumbel the movie is “creatively written and extremely entertaining, and it also has a serious message.... It is an exceptional movie.”

Now, just put in the words “budget” instead of “film” and “movie.” Can it sell? Will Wall Street be impressed? Will the Democrats be moved? This ought to be good.

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The budget isn’t all cuts -- sorry, savings. Some of it is new fees: a couple hundred million in college fees, $18 million in park fees. It’s not a bad idea, a fee, in part because it isn’t a tax, so it only takes a legislative majority vote to pass it, not two-thirds, and in part because it can have redeeming social value, like the $6 to $10 fee tacked onto every new computer monitor and TV because the old ones wind up in landfills leaching killer chemicals into the dirt.

Here are some fee ideas for the governor’s consideration:

* For every billion dollars the budget goes into deficit, levy a fee of one day’s per diem on each legislator (this tax-free dough rose from $125 a day last year to $140 this year).

* A buck-a-pill fee on Viagra and all its knockoffs.

* Fees for rescuing idiots from their own ridiculous sense of daring that gets them lost in mountains or snow or deserts. I’ve advocated this for a long time, and an article in the Sacramento Bee reminded me of it again. Some rescuers came up with shorthand for their missions to find the foolhardy -- INS, Interfering with Natural Selection. Californians should have to pay for the privilege of being restored to the gene pool.

* Recalculate the car-licensing fee on a sliding scale -- the worse the gas mileage, the more expensive the license tag. Business trucks exempted. Call it the Humvee Fee.

* Want plastic bags at the market? Pay a nickel extra. Pay another nickel fee for that plastic yoke on six-packs -- it kills sea creatures. And a nickel on every order of fast food above two bucks, including those Starbucksian venti lattes.

* A $10 fee from every professional athlete, broadcaster or elected official who says, on television, radio or in print, “I mean” or “You know.” Twenty-five dollars if they say “You know what I mean?”

* A dollar-a-bullet user fee. (Oh, stop squawking; in China the government executes you, then bills your family for the cost of the bullet.)

* Hunting licenses on a sliding scale geared to the population size of the animals in the crosshairs and their comparable cuteness on the panda-to-sun-spider scale.

* A dollar-a-drink premium on every drink served poolside, Jacuzzi-side or poured from golf carts.

* A $20 fee on each new noisy smelly leaf blower, a $5 rebate on a broom, even a $3 broom.

* For an extra $20, the DMV will take a really nice picture of you for your driver’s license.

* Not only towing but a $100 nuisance fee on cars whose alarms go on more than 20 minutes -- the Darrell Issa fee.

* A fee of a dollar per lap dance. Call it my “G-String for the Governor” fundraising campaign.

There’s no end to the revenue-stream possibilities. A $10 nuisance fee to restaurant patrons talking loudly about their Atkins diets, to cinema patrons talking, period. Charge political campaigns $100 for every 10,000 mailers they send out, and $10 for every week a campaign sign is left up after the election.

E-mail me your fee ideas. And mail them to the guv, c/o State Capitol, First Floor, Sacramento 95814. As a couple of legislators have already done with their constituents’ ideas for new laws, Schwarzenegger ought to take the 10 best fee ideas and make them so.

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Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com. Her earlier columns can be found at latimes.com/morrison.