2009: In Like a Lion, and Bound to Stay That Way
If you thought 2008 was an interesting year in California politics consider what 2009 may offer.
Something is bound to break in the battle over the budget. And one action will undoubtedly lead to a reaction raising the stakes. In fact, it will be like those long paragraphs in the bible when the term “begat” is used over and over.
Will the governor and the Democratic majority agree to a budget solution that will use creative definitions on taxes and fees to raise revenue with a simple majority vote? The guess here is they will.
Signing the revenue legislation will begat both a referendum on the fee increase portion of the package, as well as a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the revenue bill.
If courts find the revenue raising mechanism legal, that will probably begat an initiative requiring future fee increases to pass with a two-thirds vote.
Two Initiatives Take On Two-Thirds
There are two things you already know for certain about California in 2009: the state will have terrible budget problems. And the state’s requirements of a two-thirds vote to raise taxes or pass a budget will face a serious challenge.
You’ve undoubtedly heard about the legislative side: a Democratic plan, with backing from Schwarzenegger, to raise taxes to reduce the budget deficit in a complicated way that, Democratic lawyers believe, does not require a two-thirds vote of the legislature.
Now comes the initiative side of the attack on two-thirds. A Democratic law firm filed two versions of an initiative shortly before Christmas with the California attorney general’s office. As Democratic leaders have promised, the initiative effectively would eliminate California’s requirement of a two-thirds vote to pass a budget. For political purposes, however, the two-thirds requirement would remain in the constitution–new language would merely exempt all appropriations from the two-thirds requirement for approving appropriations. Look for advocates of the initiative to say, over and over, that it doesn’t remove the two-thirds requirement from the constitution. Because technically, it doesn’t.
Cruisin’ The Depression
(Dateline Dec. 27, 2008, aboard the Carnival Pride, somewhere off Baja, 100 nautical miles north of Cabo) My wife and I booked this cruise for us and our grown son and daughter as a family, over-the-year-end-holidays vacation to the Mexican Riviera, last August, before all the dramatic economic events unfolded this past Fall.
As the date approached and the economic news grew dimmer and more like a B-movie film script, I truly had mixed feelings about the Marie Antionette-ish aspects of going on a family cruise while what may yet prove to be the next Great Depression was ravaging the world’s economies. But, the date came, I badly needed a break from the current gloom and doom of the commercial real estate world, so, a’cruisin’ we went anyway.
We are on our last day at sea. Overnight, we went from the calm, balmy, humid tropical mid-80’s, to the 40’s and 50’s with a 20 mph headwind, moving at a very fast 22 knots, bouncing wildly, and even skipping at times, across the dark, white-capped waves, all 88,500 tons, 2200 passengers and 950 crew of us, with many bundled up now with peeling tans, some huddled in their rooms with a bucket close by. For those who need it, this is an All-The-Bonine-You-Can-Gulp day at sea – too windy for the upper sundecks where even SnowBird passengers from the MidWest, Canada and other snowy places now fear to tread.