Wishing, not budgeting

Two special sessions into the latest iteration of California’s budget crisis, Republican legislators presented their own plan for closing the $41.8-billion gap. But they didn’t really come to the table.

Coming to the negotiating table means coming ready to deal, but Assembly GOP leader Michael Villines (R-Clovis) made clear last week, as reported in the Sacramento Bee, that Democrats must make concessions before Republicans would even talk about any plan that includes a tax increase. That’s not negotiating, that’s bullying. In floating its own proposal Monday, the state’s minority party didn’t bother with anything the Legislature could actually pass or even that Californians could swallow.

Some needed focus came from the little-known but vitally important state Pooled Money Investment Board, which is to decide today whether to delay or cut off funding for nearly 2,000 infrastructure projects, and the thousands of people working on them, and pumping their pay back into the economy because the state’s cash has dried up. That helped motivate both parties to work into the night to seek an agreement they could live with.

The problem with the $22-billion GOP plan as a starting point is that it doesn’t bring the state the cash it needs today. Instead, it’s in some sense a shopping list of things the party’s lawmakers wish hadn’t happened over the last 10 years. They may wish Californians had not passed Proposition 10, the 1998 ballot measure that taxes tobacco and directs the proceeds to early childhood development and anti-tobacco education. They may wish Californians had not passed Proposition 63, the 2004 “millionaire tax” that funds mental health service programs and, by extension, programs for the homeless and drug addicted. The Republican plan calls on voters to change their minds, perhaps in June, and permit the money from those two taxes to be spent on balancing the state budget rather than the particular needs that voters saw fit to meet.

This page has shown no love for ballot-box budgeting and has not been shy about telling voters when they’re making a big mistake, and Proposition 63, at least, was one such instance. But that doesn’t make alternate-universe budgeting a useful act. Voters may now regret at leisure many initiative votes they cast in haste, and eventually, reconsidering those votes may be one way out of the state’s long-term fiscal mess. But the state needs cash now, not the mere possibility of cash sometime after June, to stave off default -- to keep Californians working on the road and water projects they already have funded with bond measures, and to keep the next generation in school.