LAO Budget Estimate: a Few Days Late and 25 Billion Short
Amid the shock over the Legislative Analyst’s Office announcement yesterday that California is staring down the barrel of a 25 billion dollar deficit, hangs the question: Wouldn’t it have been good for the voters to have had this information before the election?
Certainly, part of the deficit calculation made by the LAO was created by the voters with their decisions on ballot initiatives. The LAO reported, for instance, that passing Proposition 22 to protect local revenue opened an $800-million hole in the state budget.
However, there is plenty of budget analysis that was certain before the election and could have been reported before Election Day.
Like many in California, I hold the Legislative Analyst’s Office in the highest regard. And I understand that even if this report were made before the election it might have been lost in campaign rhetoric. But, the legislature is only one of the governing bodies at work in California. The voters making decisions on ballot measures are also policy makers.
Meg’s housekeeper would have been big story whenever it came out
For a journalist, there’s nothing quite like a really big disaster – the sinking of the Titanic, the explosion of the Hindenburg, the Meg Whitman campaign for governor. You can spend weeks or months or years sifting through the wreckage and pinning the blame. It’s a joyous exercise for reporters.
Let’s take the most recent of those historic calamities, Meg 2010. Now, this was a campaign with problems, including having too much money for its own good. Its strategic mistakes were numerous. The heavily staffed campaign offers many rich targets for balme.
But there is one specific criticism that should be re-examined before it becomes conventional wisdom: that Whitman could have escaped damage from the revelation that her housekeeper, Nicky Diaz Santillan, was an undocumented immigrant by putting the story out herself, shortly after she learned of the situation in June 2009. Handled this way, goes the media wisdom, it might have been a one-day story.
Nonsense. This would have been big news – and a serious problem for the Whitman campaign — whenever it was released.
Let’s imagine that Whitman had imbibed this media wisdom and had announced the news about the housekeeper on some August day in 2009. Let’s say that, in a speech on immigration, she would have mentioned that she had to fire herhousekeeper, whom she would not name, when she learned she was undocumented. Would the reaction really have been so different?
Mac Taylor does not mince words
In the course of explaining how and why California still has a daunting budget deficit – $25.4 billion for the current and next fiscal years – Legislative Analyst Mac Taylor delivered some numbers-free straight talk:
On patching over deficits:
“Too often, discussions of California’s budget situation are framed in extreme terms: the state about to go “bankrupt,” debt-service payments hypothetically poised to default, the state government on the verge of collapse. None of these scenarios is remotely likely to occur. History tells us that the state can find ways to temporarily “patch over” its annual budget problems in ways that prove sufficiently palatable to policy makers of both major parties. Periodically, large influxes of capital gains allow for temporary relief, and this too aids in patching over the state’s now-recurrent budget challenges. The Legislature and the new Governor will be tempted in the next few years to continue patching over the budget problems with temporary fixes. Unless plans are put in place to begin tackling the ongoing budget problem, it will continue to be difficult for the state to address fundamental public sector goals—such as rebuilding aging infrastructure, addressing massive retirement liabilities, maintaining service levels of high-priority government programs, and improving the state’s tax system. Accordingly, the state faces a basic choice: begin to address today’s huge, frustrating budget problems now…or defer the state’s budgetary and policy problems to future Californians.”
Leandro Soto and a More Tumultuous Job Training Era in California
Leandro Soto passed away last week in Marin at the age of 89. Though his passing attracted little attention in California’s media, Lee was an important figure in California’s community job training world. His career started in California’s tumultuous job training of the 1960s and continued to the more business-oriented training model of the 1990s and today.
Lee, as he was widely known, was born in Los Angeles in 1921. Lee often referred to the variety of jobs he held growing up in the California of the 1920s and 1930s, including as a shoe shiner and as a farm worker in the San Joaquin Valley. Lee graduated from Fresno State and worked for a time as a newspaperman for a series of small newspapers.
He was in his forties before he became involved in job training, starting as a job developer with the Urban League. On May 13, 1965, Lee, Herman Gallegos and James McAllister founded the Organization for Business, Education and Community Advancement in San Francisco’s Mission District, initially as a social services/job training agency for the Mission’s growing Latino population. The agency’s name was changed in 1967 to Arriba Juntos (Upward Together).