By Tim Redmond
Calitics, which has done an outstanding job covering the state budget mess from the beginning, has the best line on the rotten deal that the Big Five reached yesterday:
Whoever cares the least about the outcome wins.
If you don’t care whether children get health care, whether the elderly, blind and disabled die in their homes, whether prisoners rot in modified Public Storage units, whether students get educated… you have a very good chance of getting a budget that reflects that.
If on the other hand you claim to care, you will concede and concede and concede so you can at least play the responsible part and say at the end that you didn’t completely eliminate the social safety net, though what you did get in return will be totally unclear.
And you will do it every single time.
On Forum this morning, the talk of course was all about the budget, and of course some of the callers were curious about the prospects for a state Constitutional Convention to rewrite the rules for approving a budget. The California Democratic Party is already on board with eliminating the two-thirds requirement, which is a fine thing and may wind up on the ballot soon. The Constitutional Convention is a bit more tricky.
See, the problem is how you decide who gets to be in the room; who will be the delegates to this convention? And one of the very bad ideas out there is to choose the delegates more or less at random, the same way we choose jurors.
What you will wind up with, I guarantee, is a majority of people who don’t want to raise taxes.
A large part of what has to happen in California is the education of the population, and that’s where the Democratic Party and the other stakeholders ought to be taking the lead. Perhaps the candidates for governor and the senior elected officials can all help raise money for a major statewide campaign explaining to people how the cut of the vehicle license fee, the lack of an oil-severance tax, the corporate loopholes and Prop. 13 have led directly to the cuts that are preventing qualified kids from getting a college education, preventing sick people from getting care, destroying public schools and the like.
Ever few years the Dems, the unions and the other activists have to raise big chunks of money to fight some ballot measure or another. How about, say, $50 million now to try to show the voters what’s really going on, so we don’t have to keep doing this dance over and over and over?