California budget beyond repair

June 19, 2008

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men…Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee sums up the chaos in Sacramento over the failure of the Legislature to meet the budget deadline (once again). He says: “Democratic leaders insist that they are being straightforward by proposing new taxes and eschewing the accounting gimmicks that have marked past budgets, but by plugging in multibillion-dollar revenue numbers without saying what taxes they want to raise or which loopholes they want to close, they’re still bobbing and weaving. Republican legislators are, however, being even less candid; they say they oppose new taxes but aren’t willing to say what they want to cut.” Walters concludes:

“Put it all together, and it’s a big, fat political mess. The contending ideological factions have been rolling toward this calamity for years, adopting budget after budget that evaded underlying conflicts of spending and revenues with gimmicks and wishful thinking, well aware that any economic downturn could put them into a hole too deep to ignore.

“It’s finally happened. No one – and that includes the governor and 120 legislators – has the slightest notion of how or when the mess will be cleaned up, or whether it will be.”

Written by admin · Filed Under POLITICS