ShareThisThe California Capitol's political machinations have become increasingly convoluted as the state's fiscal crisis has deepened, with the latest deal, another melange of gimmicks aimed at once again postponing the day of reckoning, typifying the trend.
In the aftermath of last week's deal making, confusion, conflict and angst, politicians are chanting the mantra of reform.
"We will be tackling tax reform, to rid our system of its volatility and reliance on capital gains," Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said. "And we will take on pension reform to cut down on unfunded liabilities and save the state billions of dollars."
The president pro tem of the Senate, Darrell Steinberg, declared that "we will now pivot to a new chapter where we begin to fix what we know ails California and its system of public finance," echoing Schwarzenegger on taxes and adding "changing the relationship between state and local government, initiative reform (and) changing the two-thirds requirement (that) obviously isn't working."
There are, in the broadest sense, three aspects to the state's chronic fiscal dilemma -- societal, financial and political.
The first stems from California's immense geographic, economic and cultural diversity. It's nearly impossible to find consensus on anything, not just on the budget-related issues of taxes and services, but on water, education, transportation and many other long-unresolved matters. Californians want high levels of services, at least the services they and others in their socioeconomic strata use, but are leery of taxes, especially those they would pay.
The second aspect is that California, due to interlocking political and socioeconomic factors, has a lopsided revenue system, dependent on personal income taxes for more than half its general fund revenue and just 1 percent of taxpayers, whose incomes are tied to the stock market, for half of those income taxes. The state rides a roller coaster of revenue that soars when the economy jumps and plummets when it sours, leading to binges of spending and tax cuts, followed by deficit hangovers.
The final factor is a political system that shuns political moderates and sets up conflict between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, flavored by constitutional requirements for two-thirds legislative votes on the budget and raising taxes.
Much of last week's angst had to do with acquiring a handful of Republican votes, which not only affected the content -- no new taxes, for example -- but its form. Republicans insisted on bills that put the onus for unpopular actions on Democrats and gave GOP lawmakers political cover.
Under those circumstances, budgets can be nothing other than irrational and, ultimately, unworkable, which naturally poses the question of reform.
However, the tri-cornered conflicts that make the budget so difficult also are barriers to reform from within the political system, which is why it probably would take a constitutional convention to truly deal with California's crisis of governance.
(E-mail Dan Walters at dwalters(at)sacbee.com. Back columns, www.sacbee.com/walters. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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