By DAN WALTERS, Sacramento Bee

Arnold Schwarzenegger says "I don't like to use scare tactics," but that's what California's governor is doing by threatening to sharply reduce firefighters and close fire stations as the wildfire season begins unless voters approve a series of budget-related ballot measures this month.

"Unintended Consequences" would be the appropriate title for any history of California's fiscal politics in the latter half of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st.

Buoyed by Barack Obama's landslide win in California last year and continued declines in Republican voter registration, some Democratic strategists are seeing big gains in the state's congressional seats next year.

Prospects are rapidly diminishing for the five ballot measures that California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders say they need to keep the state budget from drowning in red ink.
So, one might ask, what's Plan B?

A sturdy axiom of California ballot-measure politics is that voters who are confused or uncertain about a proposition's effects will vote against it.

California's perpetual budget crisis and the appointment of a commission to recommend changes in the state-local tax system have re-ignited a debate over property taxes that seemingly ended 31 years ago with passage of Proposition 13.

The California state government's cash needs are roughly equal on a month-to-month basis, but its taxes tend to arrive unevenly in batches.

If California governors exhibit any regional biases, they usually reflect their hometowns. Recent history has offered two exceptions: Jerry Brown and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

California celebrates diversity and individualism as virtues, but oddly, when it comes to public education, we try to stuff 6 million students from countless ethnic, cultural, linguistic and economic backgrounds into rigidly constructed curricula and expect them to adhere uniformly to arbitrary "standards."

California's never-ending budget crisis has, if nothing else, solidified broader acceptance of what until recently had seemed to be a radical notion -- that the state's governance is deeply flawed and needs fundamental overhaul.