Some Day We'll Say Go Away

Jeff Stone, a Riverside County supervisor, is basking a moment in the media sun by resurrecting that hoariest of notions, that California be split in two. He wants to free his constituents of their bonds to the high-taxing, big-spending, business-regulating, gay-marrying folks of the Bay Area, northern California, and Los Angeles and break off a new state of South California, comprising 13 inland counties from Mariposa and Mono on the north to Imperial and San Diego on the south. His proposal will quickly go the way of all such gimmicks. And for that the people of his proposed South California should be very glad. Because one of these days the rest of California might very well take them up on the offer of divorce.

Like other recent would-be state splitters, Stone seems unaware of the big fact of California’s political-economic geography. In California, water flows south and west from the mountains to the valley and coast, but money flows west to east, from the coast toward inland areas. The big money in California is earned and the big ideas are hatched within reach of the summertime Pacific fog. Hollywood, Silicon Valley, the premium vineyards, the most productive marijuana plantings, and seven of ten University of California campuses: All are within 40 miles of the surf. And a disproportionate share of the taxes paid by the robust economy on the coast ends up financing public services for people living in the less affluent interior.

The chart below shows how Stone’s proposed SouthCal would stack up on spending and taxes compared to California as a whole.

Out of Balance

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State government educates, medicates, and incarcerates. Public education, health care, and criminal justice account for more than 80 percent of the state budget. The counties that Stone would turn into SouthCal receive at or above their proportional share of those key three functions. (And an even higher share of social welfare benefits.) But as the table shows, they fall far below their share in generating income or revenue. As it’s now constituted, state government is a machine that raises money on the coast and ships a lot of it inland to Stone and his fellow South Californians. His proposal would break that conveyor belt and leave SouthCal (which already has an unemployment rate higher than the state as a whole) much worse off.

But notice that Stone doesn’t propose to divorce the entire coast. Like former Assemblyman Bill Maze, who proposed a similar split a few years back, he wants to include Orange and San Diego counties in his new paradise. He didn’t ask their permission to include them in his breakaway state, and if you look at the third column of the table, which shows how SouthCal would fare without Orange and San Diego, you can see why. Even more than the current state, SouthCal would be dependent on its coastal higher earners to pay for services for people in the inland areas. It is hard to understand why Orange and San Diego residents would want to sign up for that duty.

In fact, they and the rest of the California that Stone wants to divorce may begin to see some merit in his offer to walk away from the rest of us. Shorn of SouthCal, the remainder of California would find itself without a budget deficit. There would be many more places for California children at UC and CSU campuses, where the sons and daughters of Fresno and Riverside would now be paying out-of-state tuition. And there would be a lot fewer elected Republicans screaming about high taxes but then complaining when the Legislature cuts spending for their redevelopment agencies, cities, and local schools. Right about now, a lot of Californians might see that as a very good outcome.

Defining Failure Down

One of the consequences of having the least functional governing system in the world is that the bar for determining what constitutes success gets set very low. Even the most ordinary and trivial things in California get counted as a victory.

A case in point is George Skelton’s column in the Los Angeles Times, triumphantly announcing “that Proposition 25 [the majority-vote budget measure] worked. California’s Capitol has become less dysfunctional.”

Yes, the Legislature and governor have enacted a budget before the July 1 start of the fiscal year, a rare event in Sacramento over the last quarter of a century. It’s good to have a budget in place as the fiscal year begins. It lets the state borrow the operating cash it needs and avoids the messy business of delaying payments to vendors and local governments that happens when a budget isn’t enacted before the fiscal year begins.

But as nice as it is to have a timely budget, it’s more critical to have a good one, and to have political accountability for the result. Looked at in that light, California’s first experience with the Prop 25 system has been a rocky ride:

• As you might expect in cases where it takes a majority to pass a spending plan but a two-thirds supermajority to pass the taxes to fund that spending, the budget is dubiously balanced. It depends on school funding provisions that probably do not meet the state’s Prop 98 constitutional minimum but won’t be challenged because the California Teachers Association (CTA), the group most likely to sue, was in on the deal. It assumes $4 billion in revenue that the state in all likelihood will not collect. This assumption is offset by provisions that will trigger additional mid-year cuts, largely to higher education and schools. But the budget also contains language that prevent school districts from taking steps to reduce staff to meet these anticipated trigger cuts. To the extent the state budget is balanced, it is at the cost of driving many school districts into insolvency through payment deferrals and restraints on their ability to reduce costs.

• Prop 25’s debut was marked by the Controller John Chiang’s unconstitutional announcement that it somehow gave him the power to withhold legislators pay even though they had met the measure’s requirement that they pass a budget by June 15. Chiang contended that he had the authority, nowhere present in the constitution, to check the Legislature’s arithmetic to determine whether the budget was balanced. By the criteria he used on June 21 in withholding pay, the arithmetic is still dicey. But Chiang will now resume legislators’ pay. Why? Maybe the budget is only unbalanced when CTA doesn’t like it.

• Once again, California has a budget for which no one is clearly accountable. Democrats passed it, but none of the Democratic lawmakers who voted for it, nor the governor who signed it, wanted this budget. It was the best they could do without extending the 2009 temporary taxes, for which there were no Republican votes. But neither did GOP legislators want this budget; they all voted against it. Some of them are already complaining of cuts that harm pet projects in their own districts. So who do we now hold accountable? The people who voted for the budget they didn’t want, or the people who made inevitable the budget they didn’t vote for and claim not to like?

• And if there is any budget for which we Californians would want to hold accountable, it is this one. It is disastrous for California’s future. It hacks $1.75 billion out of higher education. It will most likely slash the length of the school year, already the shortest in the world. It will take away services from hundreds of thousands of the blind, disabled, elderly, developmentally disabled, and the working poor.

If that is what the media now count as California getting “less dysfunctional,” we’re in much deeper doo-doo than I ever imagined.

Want to Read, Kid? Buy a Kindle

On a recent Saturday afternoon I visited César E. Chávez Library in the Fruitvale neighborhood of Oakland. The library, a bright and inviting space, was bustling: kids of all hues loading up on books to read over the summer break; other kids hovering over chess boards or computer terminals. Downstairs, in the lobby, the visitor learned that the scene was in danger. The walls were plastered with the kids’ hand-drawn pleas to their elders to keep their oasis alive:

Seeing the signs brought back to mind a passage from Second Wind, the memoirs of Bill Russell, the Hall of Fame center for the Boston Celtics, who moved to Oakland from Louisiana as a young child. Soon afterward, his mother died, and Russell recounts how, feeling empty and abandoned, he turned to books:

During this time of withdrawal in junior high I had my own private world, and my most prized possession was my library card from the Oakland Public Library. I went there almost every day, and it was not long after my thirteenth birthday when I read two passages that focused the grief I felt over my mother’s death and the forces that I’ve had to contend with ever since. The first passage was in a book on early American history. I was breezing along through a chapter on the American Revolution when I did a double take on one sentence. It was as if somebody had stuck a foot out there on the page and tripped my mind as it went by. I looked again, and this sentence jumped out at me: Despite the hardships they suffered, most slaves enjoyed a higher standard of living and a better life in America than they had in their primitive African homeland.

I had to get up and walk out of the library. For weeks afterward I went around in a fog. The sentence stunned me. There it was, written plainly, that people were better off here as slaves than they had been as free people at home. I couldn’t believe anyone had the nerve to say something like that, especially in a history book. My brother and I had always had a special reverence for history books; if something was written down in one, we believed it meant you could rely on it without question. History was the final referee of what was true. We had one in the house, and we used to settle arguments by saying, “Let’s look it up in the book.” And now, here in a history book was an attack on my very essence as a person.

That day in the library is still vivid to me. I remember that I was sitting at a long table, with my right forearm across the top of the open book and my left forefinger running down the page, the way I used to read. I remember being so taken aback by the sentence that I couldn’t swallow. I thought of “darkest Africa” pretty much the way young white boys must’ve thought of it, as a place where Tarzan ran around among animals and witch doctors. I didn’t know or care what slavery or Africa was really like, but I was repulsed by the idea that life could be better without freedom. To me, being a slave meant you had to buckle under.

As far as I can remember, this was the first time I was ever enraged. I’ve been scared before, like once when a white man chased me across the field in Louisiana threatening to “hang” me for throwing a pebble at his car. I also had been afraid or hurt when my mother died. But I hadn’t been angry, because such occasions were too big and I was too small. They were simply things I discovered as the world revealed itself to me—no different from discovering comic books, schoolrooms or crocodiles, except that they hurt. But there in the library, with another hurt, it was if I could say no. For the first time I felt grounded in anger, and it would last for years to come.

But Russell didn’t just discover anger at the library. He also found, in reading about Henri Christophe, one of the leaders of the slave revolt that made Haiti an independent country, a sense of dignity and power that transcended race.

As a thirteen-year-old kid in the Oakland Public Library, I never dreamed, of course, that I would ever see the Citadel [the fortress Christophe built]. But at a time in my life when I was meek and shy, I would thrill every time I read about how Christophe outfoxed another general, or how he drove people to accomplish the impossible. Part of me identified with him even after I grew old enough to be revolted by his cruelty and tyranny over his own people. I know better than to admire him, but part of me still does so.

Henri Christophe was my first hero after my mother. To me, he was just the opposite of the slave: he would not be one. He was indomitable. I think his life brought home to me for the first time that being black was not just a limiting feeling.

Just imagine. After ten years of the Great Depression and four years of total war, with rationing of meat and gasoline and top marginal income tax rates of 90 percent, that California still felt it could afford a place where a skinny black kid just out of Louisiana could read his way into the world and find his way from loss and anger to pride and dignity.

Maybe the kids at César Chávez Library can find a time machine to take them back there.

It's Too Late

Just to remind everyone what's at stake, the students and staff at Roy Romer Middle School in North Hollywood weigh in on the budget debate.

The Budget That Wasn't Phony Enough

Some readers seem to have concluded that my critique of Controller John Chiang’s power grab means I favor a gimmicky budget. Those readers haven’t been reading very closely. So let me spell it out again.

Yes, as I’ve written, the budget passed June 15 is full of gimmicks. That’s a bad thing. It’s also an inevitable thing, given the constitutional whips and chains that prevent a legislative majority from taking the actions, like raising taxes, suspending the Prop 98 school funding guarantee, and moving spending and revenue from programs imposed by initiatives, needed to balance the budget. In California, what is constitutionally required (that the Legislature pass a balanced budget) is not constitutionally permitted.

But as I’ve also written, there is a constitutionally approved and timed-honored way of bringing a gimmicky legislative budget into balance: The governor uses his line-item veto to reduce the appropriations in the budget to a level that can be funded with anticipated revenues. Jerry Brown, to no one’s surprise, did not have the political courage to do that. Far from favoring a gimmicky budget, I’ve been pretty much alone in arguing that Brown failed to do what is necessary to have a balanced one.

Those readers seem also to believe that Chiang is standing against budget gimmicks. Again, they have failed to read very closely.

In moving illegally to withhold legislators’ pay, Chiang explicitly denied he was acting against the gimmicks in the budget. “While the vetoed budget contains solutions of questionable achievability and some to which I am personally opposed, current law provides no authority for my office to second-guess them,” he said. He instead relied on an invented authority to check the budget’s internal arithmetic.

Let’s be clear what that means: Chiang would not have taken away lawmakers' pay had they set the revenue estimate high enough to cover his re-estimate of the budget’s spending. In other words, Chiang has punished the Legislature because the budget wasn’t phony enough.

Thanks to Chiang, you can be sure lawmakers will never make that mistake again.

California, State of the Absurd

Just when you think California governance can’t get more bizarre, Controller John Chiang, using constitutional authority he admits he doesn’t have, has decided to withhold pay from legislators for having passed a gimmicky budget, which is the only kind of budget that California’s current constitutional and political balance permits them to pass.

I won’t belabor the legal and constitutional issue, which I analyzed previously, except to note that Chiang himself, in his internally self-contradictory statement, provides no evidence to justify what is, on its face, an abuse of his office and violation of the constitution.

Instead, in the interest of appreciating the utter absurdity of the moment, let’s step back and look at the larger picture.

Let’s assume for a moment that Chiang has the power he has asserted. Let’s also assume, which almost no one disputes, that the budget passed June 15 by the Legislature contained gimmicks to paper over deficits, just as most budgets have for the last decade.

And then let’s ask a question: How could have the majority party in the Legislature passed a budget that would have spared legislators from Chiang’s wrath?

As a matter of normal arithmetic, the easy answer is that the Democrats could have raised taxes to make the budget balance. As a matter of constitutional and political arithmetic, that answer wasn’t available to the legislative majority.

Under California’s system of minority rule on most matters fiscal, it takes a two-thirds vote to raise any tax or fee. And the minority Republicans have been adamant in refusing to do that. You can say that they should compromise (Republicans would say surrender) on taxes in the interests of the greater good. However, that would require those Republicans to do precisely what their own voters sent them to Sacramento not to do. (And what a majority of voters statewide seem to oppose, according to the most recent PPIC poll.)

With taxes constitutionally taken off the table, the normal arithmetic dictates spending cuts. And since the largest share of the state budget goes to schools, that means cuts in school spending.

But again, as a matter of constitutional and political arithmetic, that answer wasn’t available to the legislative majority either. The constitution dictates a minimum level of school funding, which can be reduced only by suspending Prop 98. That also requires a two-thirds supermajority, which is nowhere in sight, in large part because polling shows that Californians overwhelmingly oppose cuts to school funding.

So how could the majority party in the Legislature have passed a budget that would have met Chiang’s approval? They couldn’t have. Under our current constitution and current politics, passing an honest budget is not something within the power of the legislative majority.

And yet John Chiang presumes to punish lawmakers for not doing what we, the voters, have prevented them from doing. With apologies to Gary Shteyngart, welcome to the new Absurdistan.

The Case for More Representation→

Feeling unrepresented by the Legislature? Writing at Townhall, Paul Jacob says there is a good reason you feel that way: you are in fact underrepresented. He makes the case for smaller legislative districts.

California Crackup Gets Ruled

It's always nice when someone thinks your work is useful, so Joe Mathews and I were honored on Saturday when Californians for Electoral Reform, at their annual meeting in Oakland, gave us the 2011 Wilma Rule Award for California Crackup. CFER is a model of the kind of reform group California needs: grassroots, composed of people from across the political spectrum, committed to thinking deeply about how we can bring modern electoral and governing ideas into our creaky institutions. You can learn more about CFER at its website.

Redistricting: Did the Earth Move for You?

As we point out in California Crackup and as political scientist Jennifer A. Steen lucidly explains at Zócalo Public Square, redistricting reform had the heartbreak built in. Given how Californians have sorted themselves into communities of the like-minded and given the requirements of law, the best we can hope is that the Citizens Redistricting Commission created in 2008 by Prop 11 will produce a handful of competitive legislative districts.

And that is just what it has delivered in its draft maps. The open question is: How big is a handful?

Phillip Reese of the Sacramento Bee projects the new maps would increase the number of legislative swing districts from 3 to 7 (out of 120). Political scientist Vladimir Kogan estimates the maps will increase the number of “competitive” seats from 9 to 20. Democrat activist and writer David Dayen scorches PPIC political scientist Eric McGee for counting as competitive any district where Democrats’ voter registration advantage over Republicans is less than 10 percentage points but greater than -5 points. Using that standard, McGee projects the number of competitive legislative seats as growing from 12 to 25.

The problem here is that the word “competitive” means different things to different people.

To political scientists, a “competitive” district is one that has attributes like those of districts that have been observed in the past to swing from one party to another. The attribute Kogan uses—”a 0% to 3% Republican advantage in voter registration or a 0% to 10% Democratic advantage”—is one created at UC Berkeley because it was the range in which districts were most likely in the 1990s to swing from one party to the other.

And if you look at elections conducted over the last decade under the 2001 redistricting, what was true in 1990s was still true: every election that resulted in a party turnover fell into that range of voter registration. All seven of them.

To normal people who don’t talk PolySci, “competitive” means something more.

Here again, a look at the Assembly elections of the last decade (Senate and House elections had so little competition they aren’t worth remembering) is useful. After the 2001 redistricting, there were six Assembly seats meeting the test of competitiveness that Kogan uses. Of the 30 subsequent general elections held in those districts, only 11 were “competitive” in the sense that both major parties offered credible candidates backed with enough money to reach voters. Only two of those elections resulted in swings from one party to the other.

In other words, to be “competitive” in the normal-people sense of the word, a district needs not just to be the kind of place where real elections have sometimes been observed to break out. It needs to be a place where strong candidates are ready to jump in and big-money donors and groups are ready to invest scarce dollars. And to be a swing district, it’s almost always necessary that there not be an incumbent. Of the 400 Assembly general elections conducted under the 2001 districts, only six resulted in a party turnover and none of those unseated an incumbent.

So how big is a handful? Big enough that we will see additional “competitive” elections in the coming decade, in both the PolySci and normal senses of the word. But only because there couldn’t be fewer. And so small a handful that Californians will feel no happier with their legislature or their ability to influence California’s future.

The View from Mount Diablo

I’ll be celebrating the June 15 arrival of the budget deadline by speaking to the Diablo Valley Democratic Club in Walnut Creek. Full information about the event is available on the club’s site. Join us!

Budget and Redistricting: If They Had a Hammer

Kevin Yamamura and Jim Sanders have a story over at the Sacramento Bee that says Democrats are hoping that the maps to be released by the redistricting commission will free up some Republicans votes for a budget deal.

The story is remarkably thin. Yamamura and Sanders don’t quote a single Democrat as expressing such hopes. They do quote several people, all of them reasonably smart, as suggesting the release of the redistricting maps will have no effect or even the opposite effect. (Alas, the Capitol bureau of my old paper is well known for not letting complicating evidence get in the way of a good story angle or the conventional wisdom.) 

But what’s most remarkable about the story is that it fails to tell readers the big news this year about redistricting and the budget: that California voter approval in 2008 and 2010 of initiatives that removed the redistricting power from the Legislature and governor and handed it to a citizens commission has robbed leaders in the Capitol of a powerful tool for reaching budget agreement.

If voters had not passed the measure, Democrats would not be “hoping” that somebody else’s redistricting maps will change budget votes. It seems reasonably certain that they would be brandishing their redistricting power as a carrot and/or stick against recalcitrant legislators.

So far, Democratic attempts to leverage Republicans to vote for the budget have come to naught. Rounding up business support; threatening to concentrate spending cuts in GOP districts; scaring business by proposing to expand the taxing power of local governments: no tactic has worked.

But redistricting would have been a much bigger cudgel. The redistricting power touches on something Republicans care about even more than taxes: their own skins, and their party’s hold on the U.S. House of Representatives. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how Gov. Jerry Brown and legislative leaders might have used control over the shape of districts to win over enough votes to break the minority veto on the 2011-12 budget.

Instead, because voters listened to the siren call of “good government” “reformers” who believe that democracy can be improved by taking the politics out of politics, the state’s elected leaders this year have one tool fewer for rounding up a budget consensus. If the result is even deeper cuts in higher education and schools, the goo-goos will have a lot to answer for.

State of the Dimming Dream→

The San Francisco Chronicle asked me to write about whether California’s ongoing crisis has changed state government as we know it. My answer, in this Sunday Insight article, has been released from behind the Chron’s pay wall. Check it out.

Big Pensions, Badges, and Bugles

The number of California public worker retirees collecting pensions of more than $100,000 a year has quadrupled since 2005, Phillip Reese reports in the Sacramento Bee. Unfortunately, his story buries the lede. What's most significant is how many of those big pensions are going to those who wore badges and bugles. A lot of what is seen as a pension problem is really a problem of public safety pay.

Reese is reporting about the number of $100,000-a-year pensions only because the $100,000 pension has been transformed into a political symbol. The California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility and other groups campaigning to eliminate or modify defined benefit pensions for public employees use $100,000 as a proxy for excess.

What does a pension of $100,000 a year mean? Well, it certainly tells us something about California’s pension system. But it tells us more about the overall pay for particular worker or group of them.

An annual pension is the product of three factors: years worked, a benefit factor (the percentage of wage credited for each year worked), and the salary against which the benefit factor is applied. (To simplify, we’ll leave aside the question of normal retirement age and the size of the reduction for early retirement.) In this equation, you’ll notice, only one of those variables—the benefit factor—is solely determined by the pension system.

If you are a Nobel Prize-winning physician who spends your career teaching at a University of California medical school, you will likely retire with a pension in excess of $100,000 even under a modest pension system with a low benefit factor. That’s because, as the top person in the world in your field, you can command a high salary in the market. You might even earn as much as the minimum for a rookie utility player in major league baseball ($414,500 in 2011). And when you retire, any reasonable retirement plan will deliver a benefit that reflects your lifetime earnings. Certainly few people would find anything excessive about a $100,000 pension in your case.

In other words, to assess $100,000 pensions, we have to know who is on the list and what put them there.

Not surprisingly, California’s list of big pensions is sprinkled with Nobel Prize winners, retired university presidents, and former city managers and other executives at the largest public organizations in the state. Their presence on the list is is mostly a function of the salaries they commanded in the marketplace while they were working.

But a lot of the $100,000 pensions (Reese says “big chunk” but doesn’t give an exact percentage) go to public safety retirees, most of whom worked for local government.

Why? Because California is off the scale when it comes to compensating people with badges and bugles. Police, firefighters, and prison guards come up big on all the variables in the pension equation. They have the most generous pension formula, which allows many of them to retire with 3 percent of salary for each year worked. And they have the highest pay in the country. California prison guards earn 50 percent more than the national average. California police and firefighters earn 33 percent and 22 percent more, respectively, than the national average.

The irony here is that politicians who talk about reforming pensions routinely exempt public safety workers. Meg Whitman, for example, proposed to leave safety employees out from her plan to shift public workers to 401(k) plans. Her plan would have meant less retirement security for teachers, who make up the single largest segment of public employees and whose current retirement benefits “are only modestly higher than the private sector,” according to a recent report from the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility, the pension reform group. But it would have left the $100,000 pension club open to police, firefighters, and prison guards.

People in uniform do hard and important work. But their work is not a third or more harder in California than it is elsewhere in the country. In the way it conducts its politics and structures its government, California has let public safety compensation get out of hand.

As Reese’s reporting underlines, that is why the the $100,000-pension club is growing so fast. No pension reform plan can be judged serious if it doesn’t bring that public safety compensation back to earth.

Redistricting for Togetherness

Over at California Progress Report, Peter Schrag notes that the hearings of the Citizens Redistricting Commission are swinging to a different tune than the one sung by sponsors of redistricting reform. Instead of political competition, the voters want this:

The Captain & Tenille sing "Love Will Keep Us Together" (Neil Sedaka-Howard Greenfield) ________________________________________ Neil Sedaka fans believe it's high time for Neil to get inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame. http://www.sedaka.be/neil_sedaka_petition/entry.htm CLICK HERE to sign the petition, started by Neil Sedaka fans!

The Phony Shame Over Arnold's Love Child

You’d think Jon Fleischman, guru of Flash Report and former consigliere to convicted Orange County Sheriff Mike Carona, would have a stronger stomach. But the delicate Fleischman reports himself sick over news of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s love child. “I mean, the fact that that I voted for him twice makes me nauseous,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Sorry, I’m not buying it, not from Jon and from any of the others who once supported the former governor and now claim to feel soiled by him.

The news may add a previously invisible branch to the Schwarzenegger family tree and a detail to Arnold’s biography. But it doesn’t say anything new about his character.

The full Arnold Schwarzenegger was on display, naked and oiled, before anybody ever cast a vote for him. The narcissism of a life lived in front of movie cameras and the mirrors of body-building gyms. The hunger to hear the roar of the crowds. The appetite for pleasure and sensation. The delight in bullying and humiliating opponents. The chameleon politics. The sense of entitlement of someone who believes he is above others and doesn’t have to live by the rules. And, of a piece with everything else, the abuse of women and particularly, as we learned through the 2003 reporting of the Los Angeles Times, of female underlings powerless to fend off or report his advances.

Californians knew all that in 2003, or could have. And nothing they knew was inconsistent with the possibility of secret love children. They voted for Schwarzenegger anyway.

Indeed, as Joe Mathews reports in The People’s Machine, the Times’ reporting of Schwarzenegger’s sexual misconduct validated his standing among conservative voters and led many to give him their votes in the 2003 recall. In other words, some people voted for him not in spite of his character flaws but because they saw the revelation of those flaws as a signal that Schwarzenegger was one of them. And among those voters was Fleischman, who went with Schwarzenegger, an abuser of women and a Republican “squish,” over the principled and upright (but less electable) conservative Tom McClintock.

The transaction was clear from the start. Republican political pros were using a celebrity of dubious character for their purposes even as Schwarzenegger was using them for his. It’s politics as usual. What’s strange here is for a journalist to cooperate in the charade that the transaction made them queasy. If that were so, there would not be enough marijuana in all of Humboldt County to quell the nausea or priests enough to take the confessions.

California's Unserious Elite

Every once in a while California’s business leaders rouse themselves to opine on the state’s problems. Their latest effort, a letter to the governor and Legislature on how to solve the budget crisis, makes you wonder why they bother.

Let’s look at their letter point by point:

They begin by saying we need to fix the “underlying conditions” that got California in trouble. And who would quarrel with that? But they fail to identify those underlying conditions. Most people agree that the budget crisis is partly economic and temporary—the loss of revenues from the Great Recession—and partly structural. Where they disagree is over which structural factors to stress. The big tax cuts in the years of the Internet bubble? Unfunded increases in pensions and retiree health benefits for public workers? Three Strikes and other unfunded “something for nothing” initiative measures? Unprecedented amounts of borrowing for infrastructure and to cover deficits? Which of these would they fix? The business leaders don’t say.

Yes, they do call for a “workout” plan. The word immediately sends up warning flags. We’ve been here before. In 2004, in the wake of the recall, business leaders similarly called for a workout plan. They joined Arnold Schwarzenegger in promoting a ballot measure that involved borrowing $15 billion and putting new budget discipline language in the state Constitution. How did that work out? Seven years later we’re still paying off the debt from the last “workout.” The lesson? Beware of business leaders bearing workout plans.

There are more warning flags in this section. It is not true that “since 1998, every annual budget has spent more than it received in tax revenue.” In the go-go years of the late 1990s–how could our business leaders forget that wonderful moment?–the state ran large surpluses even after heeding the advice of business leaders to cut taxes and increase spending on infrastructure and education. The state ran an operating surplus again briefly at the height of the housing bubble. This may seem like quibbling. But it doesn’t inspire confidence when you’re would-be leaders haven’t read the budget documents, or can’t.

However, here’s where they go off the rails: “Constitutional spending controls must be put place to ensure fiscal discipline.” This is doubly wrong.

It’s wrong, first, because California right now is in no danger of spending too much, as they themselves seem to understand in their criticism of the Republicans who seek “an all-cuts budget that will scar California’s future.” The share of California’s resources spent by state government will fall next year to either a 40-or 45-year low.

It’s wrong, second, because California’s constitution is already chock-full of budget whips and chains imposing budget discipline in various ways. Among these is the constitutional spending limit on the state and local governments.

California’s business leaders ought to know about the spending limit. They wrote it. In the late 1980s, after business leaders realized that the Gann spending limit adopted by voters in 1979 was preventing the state and local governments from making needed improvements in schools and infrastructure, they joined in writing Proposition 111. That measure revised the state spending limit so public investment could keep pace with the growth of California’s economy. Today, state government is $18 billion below that limit.

You can see the confusion here. Business leaders don’t want the state to spend too little; business needs public investment. They don’t want a budget with deep cuts. Yet they still worry about too much spending even though the state is far below spending limit they themselves wrote. And they think the right response is to create even more constitutional whips and chains. Among them would be “performance metrics” against which to benchmark programs and a requirement that legislators spend more time judging the “effectiveness” of the laws. Yet it is hard to find a single California happy about the operation of all the constitutional shackles we’ve already imposed on ourselves. Why are business leaders, if they care about “effectiveness,” prescribing more of the medicine that has already proven to be poison?

The confusion deepens in the second point of the plan. If there are any programs that have proven to be ineffective in creating jobs, they are redevelopment and enterprise zones. This year, the governor and lawmakers have done what business leaders say government ought to do–sort out and eliminate what doesn’t work. And what’s the business response? To ignore the evidence of “the metrics” and pimp for preserving their own handouts. It is hard to take unserious people seriously.

Many pundits say that California can’t hope to overcome its governing crisis unless ordinary Californians get better informed and engaged. That’s asking a lot. I’d settle just for having better informed and engaged elites.

Pension Debate: Think Big Instead→

Over at Fox and Hounds, Joe Mathews complains, rightly, that the California pension debate is “small and boring.” We ought to be thinking about what adequate retirement security looks like for all workers, not just public employees.

In a paper published last year, Micah Weinberg and I did some of that thinking. You can check it out here.

Teachers, Go Home

Joe Mathews has been hammering the teachers and others who’ve been protesting budget cuts at the state Capitol for wasting their energy in the wrong place. (Especially when, as he notes, the protestors didn’t even recognize Assembly Republican leader Connie Conway when she walked right past them. Comedy writers couldn’t make this stuff up.)

So where’s the right place? How about back home, where teachers have the chance to teach the voters a thing or two?

The last time I looked, the California Teachers Association was supposed to be a labor union. And what labor unions used to understand, at least before they became full-time political action committee/lobbyists, was that direct action was their most powerful tool. The advice that teachers give to their writing students—don’t tell me, show me—applies equally in writing a political story.

Don’t tell me that failure to extend the temporary taxes will result in big cuts in schools, including a shorter school year. Show me. Announce that, beginning Monday, every teacher in every school in the district of every Republican legislator who has failed to vote for the Governor’s budget plan will be out sick. So will every other school employee. There will be no janitors to unlock the school doors, no bus drivers to pick up the kids, no principals to shuffle the papers. Everyone will be laid up with an epidemic of heartsickness over what will happen to the schools if the current temporary taxes aren’t extended. And the epidemic, they can make clear, is sure to last through the remainder of the school year.

This direct action is sure to cause some hardship. Students will miss some lessons. Seniors who had counted on receiving a diploma next month will not get one, and many will find themselves, as a result, unable to go college. Teachers will risk losing some pay (although their fellow union members in the Democratic districts will surely be willing to share some of their own money in solidarity).

But these hardships are no different than the hardships that will come from further budget cuts. Without the tax extensions, the school year will be shorter and students will learn less. Fewer California students will be admitted to the University of California and California State University, and there will be fewer classes at community college.

The hardships that would come from a school sickout would be different in only one way: those affected will only be in the parts of the state represented by Republican legislators. Direct action will treat voters in those districts as adults, who must be assumed to intend the consequences of their own acts. And that is far more likely to trigger a response than more Kabuki protest in Sacramento.