All the speculation about moving ballot measures has focused on the possible delay of the water bond. But what of the rain? There are good reasons to push the oft-delayed rainy day fund measure back up to November.
Politically, a real rainy day fund – the state already has such funds but they don’t work – makes a nice pairing with multiple tax measures. Yes, the initiative doesn’t fit together with those tax measures, but that’s the nature of the beast in California—ballot measures never fit with each other or the underlying budget reality.
But as a purely political matter, moving up the rainy day fund might create a better context in which to ask voters for more revenues. That could be particularly if pension changes don’t produce any real savings and if Brown and the Democrats continue to push to reduce school accountability measures – two trends that could lead voters to worry about how new revenues would be spent.
Now, this rainy day fund, while an improvement, isn’t big enough to help much. But it’s real enough to be a start of sorts. And on the policy front, a real rainy day fund – if it grew larger — could turn the volatility of the tax system – which could increase under Munger’s and Brown’s tax proposals – into an advantage, collecting more money in good years to ease the downside in bad ones.
The rainy day fund is a small band-aid, not a fix, for volatility. The real solution is for California to remake itself and return taxing power to the local governments, which rely on less volatile taxes. The centralization of taxing power in California, backed by the left (because it’s “fair”) and the right (because they hate taxes more than they trust the people), is at the heart of the volatility problem.
But even with all these caveats, the rainy day fund might be worth trying — as yet another short-term stopgap until Californians and California elites figure out that there’s no saving the current system – that we need a brand new one.