By DAN WALTERS, Sacramento Bee

When California voters overwhelmingly rejected a package of budget-related ballot measures touted by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders last week, they also guaranteed, perhaps unwittingly, that the state's budget crisis will continue for years.

California's political and financial vise tightened Thursday as the Legislature's budget analyst forecast bigger deficits, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared that he wouldn't increase taxes to cover them and gave up on borrowing $5.5 billion -- and the Obama administration refused to guarantee short-term loans to keep the state functioning as it runs out of cash in July.

Election eve e-mail from a reader in Oxnard perfectly captured the tone of Tuesday's voting in California, to wit:
"Schwarzenegger, Bass, Cogdill, Villines, Steinberg and the rest of those stinking, lying Sacramento bastards can go straight to hell. They're going to be whacked hard upside their heads tomorrow."

When the governor and legislators talk about balancing the California state budget, they're talking about closing the gap between revenues and required expenditures, either by increasing the former or reducing the latter. The task becomes more difficult by the minute.

For many decades, California maintained a strict dividing line -- a lock box, if you will -- between the state's general fund budget and special funds financed by single-purpose revenues.
A case in point was the state highway fund, into which gasoline taxes and other auto-related revenues flowed and out of which the state built and maintained its highways.

Has California's day of fiscal reckoning, postponed for years by political tricks and hide-the-pea financial schemes, finally arrived?

Jack O'Connell, California's superintendent of schools, released the new high school dropout rate Tuesday, declaring it to be "a very slight improvement" over the previous year.

The relationship among federal, state and the myriad local governments is a complex one, to say the least, and very often resembles a barnyard pecking order.

Few Californians have ever heard of the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, also called FCMAT, much less know what it does.

Two million Californians are unemployed, and about half of them are collecting federal-state unemployment insurance benefits averaging $272 a week. One of them soon may be the mayor of a small Southern California town -- and therein lies a tale.