ShareThisWhen 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.
Or to put it another way, when Schwarzenegger departs 19 months hence, his successor will inherit a big stinking mess, which makes one wonder why anyone would want the job. Yet, there are about a half-dozen serious candidates for governor next year who, like Schwarzenegger six years ago, believe they can fix tortured state finances -- or pretend they can.
The potential Democratic candidates, such as Attorney General (and former Gov.) Jerry Brown, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, haven't said much about our fiscal fiasco, although Brown has said he doesn't think more taxes are the solution.
The Republicans -- Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, former eBay honcho Meg Whitman and former Congressman Tom Campbell -- have been more specific, but all three focus on reducing the state bureaucracy, which is at most a tiny portion of the budget problem.
Campbell talks about renegotiating state employee contracts, Poizner about streamlining and modernizing public agencies and Whitman about whacking the state payroll by 10 percent.
"There will always be dislocation," Whitman said recently. "But the most important thing is we have to get a government that the citizens of California can afford. And as badly as I feel about the 30,000 or 40,000 people that will lose their jobs, I feel even more badly for the millions of Californians who are paying higher taxes, who are looking at a state that is not working."
That would be a 10 percent cut, but most state employees don't work for agencies financed by the state's deficit-plagued general fund. They work for special fund agencies such as Caltrans or the Department of Motor Vehicles, which are financed from dedicated revenues such as the gas tax. Or they work for the two state university systems.
The general fund payroll is roughly 100,000 civil servants, most of whom work in the prisons, and a 10 percent reduction in that work force would save only a billion dollars, a tiny fraction of the state's deficit, estimated to be at least $24 billion next year.
It illustrates the difficulty of balancing a budget that's mostly aid to schools and colleges, prisons, and health and welfare programs administered by counties. Matching income and outgo without new taxes requires cutting those categories, not merely taking a symbolic swipe at the state bureaucracy.
We haven't heard from any of the gubernatorial hopefuls about how they'd do that. So far, they're emulating, at least in its superficial tone, Schwarzenegger's 2003 campaign for governor in which he promised to both cut taxes and balance the budget -- which, to anyone who knows anything, is impossible.
(E-mail Dan Walters at dwalters(at)sacbee.com)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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