You may have heard that California has a budget deficit of $15.2 billion. Our illustrious governor Schwarzenegger’s proposed solution:  to borrow from future state lottery earnings. Of course, this means gambling on the lottery’s future success.

I can’t help noting that the guy proposing this is the same person who railed against Governor Gray Davis’ budget deficit — which was almost to the penny the same amount — and who said he was going to “cut the California credit cards in half.” Five years later we’re so far deeper into debt that nobody would issue California another credit card.

Today I emceed a Democratic club picnic hosted by the Burbank Democratic Club, the Glendale Democratic Club, and the Northeast Democratic Club. Our assemblyman shared a story with me. In the budget committee on which he sits, after legislators had agreed to one spending cut after another on health and welfare issues, the Democrats proposed one last item in the budget:  closing the “sloophole” on the yacht tax.

(About this particular tax loophole, for those not in California:  If you take delivery of a yacht, airplane, or recreational vehicle out of state and keep it out of state for 90 days, you can avoid paying the sales tax. Ipso facto, this saving never applies to anyone you see working a checkout counter, emptying fast-food trays, or helping people try on shoes. It is, in effect, a regressive tax (a discount given to a few, creating a budget gap paid for by the many). Here’s an LA Times editorial summing up the sloophole — and why it’s especially shameful to preserve it at the same time  you’re cutting Medi-Cal payments.)

So the Assembly is in these budget deliberations. Bear in mind, these are mid-year cuts to a budget that municipalities and schools and non-profits and various agencies had already  banked on. Imagine finding out halfway through the year that your own income, on which you   had already budgeted, was now cut by half. Or eliminated.  The Democrats on the budget committee bring up the sloophole, and surprisingly, the senior Republican on the committee agrees:  Given the budget crisis, and given the nature of the other cuts, closing the tax loophole on yachts is the decent thing to do. The proposal makes it out of committee.  Two days later, it fails in the Legislature, where not one Republican — not even the one who spoke up supporting it and who voted for it — votes for it. In the intervening 48 hours, the Republican leadership hammered him and the couple of other Republicans who agreed with him, and they caved.

I don’t believe in magic wands. But if there’s one thing that would go a long way toward fixing our utterly broken state government here in California, it would be this:  real redistricting. Politicians choose their voters by gerrymandering these districts.  Most of the elected people in this state who take the no-new-taxes pledge and who refuse to cut subsidies to yacht owners can do so with the full support of their carefully carved little districts back home. That wouldn’t be the case with a redistricting plan that took electoral mapmaking out of legislators’ hands. Suddenly, they might find themselves facing a broad swath of the public — and find themselves moving toward the middle.

A few years ago, the Atlantic Monthly ran a persuasive piece of journalism with an accompanying color-coded map that showed that 70% of Americans agree on most issues. I don’t doubt it; that’s because most issues revolve around common sense. So who are those other 30%? All too often, those people on the margin are the people who wind up elected.

—————-
Now playing: Flogging Molly – What’s Left Of The Flag
via FoxyTunes

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 17th, 2008 at 10:02 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.