No One Actually Reads or Listens: More on the State Budget

At the moment, Controller John Chiang is being praised for blocking legislators from being paid because they did not produce a "balanced" budget by the June 15th constitutional deadline. But actually what he said is that the legislature made some mistakes in drafting up their budget so that the assumed "revenues" do not add up to assumed "expenditures." (The fact that the governor vetoed the budget was not relevant to his decision.)

The controller has been heralded on Fox News on the right (see http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/1013691636001/california-withholds-legislatures-pay/) and just about everywhere else along the political spectrum. If you actually watch the Fox News interview, you will see that he says that he is acting under Prop 25 which requires "balance" only in the sense that there be internal consistency. The budget doesn't have to be "honest," he notes. It only has to be consistent so that it adds up on paper.

You can find the same info in the document accompanying his press release: http://www.sco.ca.gov/Files-EO/Budget_Analysis_Sheet.pdf But no one seems to read or listen carefully. LA Times columnist George Skelton today devotes his column to lamenting that when voters gave the controller the authority to deny pay, it was bad public policy. But he concludes (sadly) that in this instance, it might be beneficial. "(Voters) are sick of Sacramento politicians mucking around in a perpetual budget hole. Perhaps the paycheck prod will pry them out." (http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-cap-controller-20110623,0,7214890,full.column) But prod them out to do what, exactly?

Basically, by the controller's calculation, the legislature was off by around $2 billion. If legislators had assumed a rosier economic scenario, one generating enough extra cash from taxes already on the books, the budget would have passed muster. That view opens the door to a budget deal, albeit one that wasn't slapped together at the last moment as the clock ticked towards the June 15 deadline.

The problem for UC is that a deal of that sort is likely to start from where the vetoed budget left off, i.e., with more cuts to UC than in the May revise. Legislators know that UC has a revenue source apart from the state, i.e., tuition, that other programs such as prisons do not.