By DAN WALTERS, Sacramento Bee

This is a tale best told -- or at least best understood -- sequentially, a story of how political decisions separated by decades interacted to create unforeseen, multibillion-dollar consequences.

Officially, California works on a one-year budget cycle, coinciding with a fiscal year that begins on July 1 and ends on June 30.

One of the more insidious and corrosive aspects of California's perpetual budget crisis is the inclination of politicians to enact major policy changes on the fly.
Desperate to "score" revenues or savings on paper and claim to have balanced the chronically imbalanced budget, they often draft decrees that are slammed into law without any thought of long-term consequences.

Were California a corporation, rather than a state, its officers would be playing tiddlywinks with Bernie Madoff in the federal slammer, having engaged in years of hide-the-pea accounting tricks, under-the-table loans and other gimmicks to cover up the state's perpetual operating deficits.

When the Legislature reconfigured California's congressional districts after the 2000 census, it ratified a bipartisan political deal aimed at preserving the numerical status quo -- and in Ellen Tauscher's case it meant preserving her re-election prospects while making her life a little more difficult.

The volatility of California's tax revenue -- booming one year, plummeting the next -- plagues the state budget.
The volatility, born of the state's reliance on personal income taxes from a relative handful of high-income Californians, is the underlying factor in revising the current state budget to close a whopping deficit.

When Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa took himself out of the running for California governor Monday, he boosted -- perhaps inadvertently -- Jerry Brown's chances for a gubernatorial comeback.

The politicians who are fashioning -- or not fashioning -- a new state budget often spout economic theories as the bases for their actions.

The most powerful -- and destructive -- nonpolitical factor in California's perpetual fiscal crisis is the volatility of its revenues.
The state's economy has been on a boom-and-bust cycle over the last few decades. Its tax system, heavily weighted toward income taxes on high-income Californians, is even more prone to roller-coaster swings.

Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax the fellow behind the tree.
Mark DiCamillo and Mark Baldassare, California's top two pollsters, conducted an attitudinal autopsy Tuesday on the May 19 special election in which voters overwhelmingly rejected budget-related ballot measures.