Talk, even when it comes to California’s budget, is cheap. Making good on that talk, however, is a great deal pricier, not to mention a whole lot more politically problematic.
When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger gave his final State of the State address Wednesday morning, he had a whole list of things he wants to add to California’s already rickety budget, including a $500 million jobs program and another $200 million or so for homebuyer credits.
Although the governor said that the words were bitter in his mouth, he admitted "we face additional cuts … we know the pain it entails. I mean, what can we say at this point except the truth, that we have no choice?"
Yet Schwarzenegger spent more time talking about what wasn’t going to get cut than suggesting any places where the budget ax would fall. Education funding would be protected, he said, and "we can no longer afford to cut higher education."
He even wants to guarantee that the state will always spend more on higher education than on prisons, which means either pumping a lot more money into the UC and state college systems or whacking the prison budget, which didn’t turn out so well last year.
The governor also is calling for a bill that would exempt green-tech manufacturing equipment from the state sales tax, which may be good news for the environment, but is bad news for California’s tax revenues.
With the state facing a $20 billion deficit, where’s the money going to come from? Well, Schwarzenegger complained that California gets shortchanged by the feds when it comes to money, both in payments to the state and in reimbursement for the state’s cost of illegal immigration to California.
That’s a mighty convenient argument for a governor who, by law, will have to have a balanced budget when he officially unveils the 2010-11 spending plan this morning. You make the cuts you want, add the programs you like and then pick a number for "anticipated federal money that we just know Washington is anxious to hand us" to close whatever deficit’s left.
"We are not looking for a federal bailout, just for federal fairness," Schwarzenegger argued.
Couple of problems, though. First, there’s not a lot that can be done https://www.foxandhoundsdaily.com/blog/john-wildermuth/6175-donor-state-problem-not-easy-solve with much of that "donor state" money the governor wants returned. As for the immigration funds, California’s been fighting that battle since the 1990s, with what politely could be called mixed results, and there’s no indication that anything’s going to change in a hurry.
Times are tough everywhere in the nation and once you move east of Lake Tahoe, there’s no groundswell of public opinion begging the federal government to solve California’s budget problems.
The budget Schwarzenegger is going to present today is just the first step of a delicate dance that’s likely to continue deep into the summer as the governor joins with Democrats and Republicans in the Legislature to come up with a spending plan they all hate the least. There will be plenty in that first draft of the budget that will quickly disappear and other cuts and revisions that won’t show up until just before the final vote.
Realism, though, is a good thing to have at the start of any negotiation. Schwarzenegger should have learned his lesson from the current budget, which included plenty of cash and cuts that never showed up – and were never likely to. The result is responsible for at least part of the $6.6 billion shortfall California’s facing for the current budget year.
The governor is talking about adding new programs and costs to the state budget and declaring that certain other programs are untouchable. That’s fine and there’s plenty to like about those choices he’s made.
But the state’s bills will still have to be paid and the plan to find that cash needs to be something more than a hope that the federal money fairy will come down and shower riches upon California.
John Wildermuth is a longtime writer on California politics.