Once again, the minority party in California's Legislature is the limpid linchpin of a budget deal.
Republicans make up only 37 percent of the members in the Senate, and 40 percent in the Assembly. But since two-thirds of lawmakers are needed to pass a budget, the GOP can block any plan the Democrats put forward, assuming they can enforce party discipline.
This year, there's a real threat California will run out of money if August passes without a budget deal. So it's long past time for both parties to stop playing games and to realize that this year's fiscal meltdown could turn into Chernobyl.
Last week, the Democrats who control the Senate- Assembly conference committee produced their latest version of the budget. It is flawed in many respects. It includes an extra $100 million above what the governor earmarked for prison guard salaries. It includes a suspect tax-amnesty program. It also relies largely on taxing higher-income earners, perpetuating a tax system that is far too volatile.
But while the conference committee plan is flawed, at least it is a clear statement of priorities. Democrats want to honor funding formulas for schools and avoid some of the governor's proposed cuts to health and social services. They don't trust the governor's plan to "securitize" the lottery and they think the economy can weather tax increases of the sort that Gov. Pete Wilson agreed upon in the early 1990s.
Republican says the proposed $8.2 billion tax increase is dead on arrival. They won't vote for it. They won't even talk about it. They also don't like the governor's lottery plans and other gimmicks, which on paper would have closed the shortfall by $7 billion.
The net effect? The Republicans want to somehow slash an extra $7 billion beyond what the governor has proposed in cuts to programs that help the poor, the disabled, children and senior citizens.
How would the GOP distribute those extra $7 billion in cuts? We don't know. We asked Senate Minority Leader Dave Cogdill for his proposed list last week, but he declined to provide one.
Cogdill and other GOP leaders have legitimate gripes about how this year's budget has been negotiated. Democrats keep upping the ante on extra funding for schools and won't engage in substantive talks about education reforms. The Dems, they say, reflexively support taxes, despite research suggesting that the Wilson-era tax hikes prevented the state's economy from quickly rebounding.
The trouble is, the research the GOP cites doesn't analyze how avoided budget cuts of the 1990s may have helped the state keep its universities intact and helped the economy in other ways. And since they won't detail their proposed cuts in this year of a $15.2 billion deficit, it's impossible to evaluate whether the Republican plan would make economic sense or simply be ruthless.
GOP lawmakers could detail their list of cuts and then ask the legislative analyst to do a cost-benefit analysis of them, in comparison to the Democratic plan. Any other course of action suggests they have no real confidence in their platform and are grandstanding only because this is the one time of year they can do so.
