Author: Patrick Dorinson

Before the budget process swings into high gear and Sacramento becomes consumed by the back and forth haggling between the Governor and the Legislature, Big 5 meetings and press conferences decrying the coming catastrophe if we cut too much and the competing ones saying we need to cut more, I want to take a moment to talk about something that in my mind is every bit as important.

It is something that has been sticking in my craw for years, and I just have to spit it out. It has to do with not just "what" we are doing in politics, business and government, but "how" we are doing it. Because the "how" is every bit as important as the" what".

Now stay with me on this one and I hope it will make sense.

The other day I heard yet another jack-legged East Coast political pundit talk about President Bush and his "cowboy diplomacy" symbolized by his "reckless" foreign policy. What this person knows about real cowboys you could fit in a thimble. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton also have this phrase in embedded into their political lexicon.

The budget theater continues on the grounds of the State Capitol with high school students protesting the Governor’s budget cuts and being exhorted on by the Superintendent of Schools Jack O’Connell. Watching this spectacle two things came to mind.

First, why weren’t these kids in school? And second, although we have been going through this exercise about education spending and proposed cuts during every budget season for I don’t know how many years, the problem never seems to get resolved. We keep spending more money with not much to show for it in turning out the kind of educated workforce our economy needs now and into the future. Although California kids should rank high nationally in how to skip school and protest since they get a lot of practice.

With the preliminaries now over, the annual California Budget Goat Rodeo will kick-off this week with the unveiling of the fabled and eagerly awaited Governor’s May Revise. I don’t know about you but I’m as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs in anticipation of what the new deficit number will be. $10 billion? $15 billion? $20 billion?

We will soon hear the cries against cuts to programs grow louder from one side of the Building and the line in the sand statements of "no new taxes" from the other side.

But the one thing you probably won’t hear is "how about eliminating some programs?" That is a concept that seems to be foreign to the Legislature.

I don’t mean indiscriminately taking the budget ax to a particular program or agency, but review the program to see if it is still effective and necessary. You can’t tell me there are not things we are currently funding that don’t need close scrutiny and could be eliminated.
Enter the Sunset Commission.