Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has figured out a way to jumpstart the budget debate by pumping out the fiscal smoke and setting up the financial mirrors at the beginning of the process instead of at the end.
As state law requires, the governor produced a balanced budget last Friday. But to make those numbers work, Schwarzenegger and his financial team were forced to work more magic than the faculty of Hogwarts School.
Let’s take the big stuff first. After the governor added in some new revenue and subtracted some cuts, the budget was still out of balance.
But if you just figure that the federal government owes the state some $6.9 billion –and will actually pay it – then abracadabra, the budget’s in balance.
Never mind that California has:
1. been arguing with Washington over many of those “unfair federal mandates” since Pete Wilson was governor.
2. seen absolutely no sign the feds are planning to cave and write the state a multi-billion-dollar check.
3. seemingly worked overtime to piss off the state’s congressional delegation.
Here’s a tip for the governor: if you want draw generally cranky politicians to your side of an argument, it’s probably not a good idea to diss them on national television, as Schwarzenegger did Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Talking about the money he believes the feds owe California, Schwarzenegger promised to push the state’s congressional delegation hard “because they’re not representing us really well in this case.”
Which, not surprising, led a spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to respond that “the federal government is not responsible for the state of California’s budget.”
When you add that to similarly huffy comments from California senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, that federal money seems less guaranteed than the budget suggests.
The prison system is another place where the governor unilaterally declared victory in a losing fight.
Arguing that the California pays too much in medical care for prisoners, the new budget cuts that spending almost in half, instantly saving the state $811 million.
But the federal courts took control of the state’s prison medical system since 2005, arguing that the care provided inmates was unconstitutionally lousy. The state has since lost every attempt to remove the court-appointed receiver, who wants the state to spend more, not less, on prison health care.
While the budget reports a $291 million cut by sending more state prison inmates to county jails, that’s nothing more than a cost shift, since the same California taxpayers will still be paying that $291 million, only to the 58 counties instead of to the state.
Then there’s the $1 billion the state will get by raiding 1998’s Prop. 10 and 2004’s Prop. 63 for cash to run children’s programs and mental health efforts.
That’s the same plan Schwarzenegger had last year, when he put Prop. 1D and Prop. 1E on the May special election ballot. Both measures lost by nearly 2-to-1 margins and if the governor has detected a cataclysmic shift in voters’ attitudes in the past eight months, he’s not sharing it.
And while Schwarzenegger vowed that education would not take a cut this year, a fancy bit of fiddling with the transportation budget, killing the gasoline sales tax and replacing most of it with a higher excise tax, managed to slash about $800 million from the money state schools would have received under the Prop. 98 guarantees.
None of this even touches Schwarzenegger’s proposals for deep cuts in social service spending. Democrats could blow a huge hole in the budget if they vote down those cuts, which they have vowed to do.
That’s a fight worth picking, though, both for Schwarzenegger and California. Those arguments over programs are a necessary part of any budget discussion. In tough economic times the state needs a public debate over priorities in state spending and Californians and their representatives have to decide how much government California needs – and can afford.
But that debate won’t be helped by a spending plan based on blue-sky budget projections that ignore the gray clouds of reality.
John Wildermuth is a longtime writer on California politics.