Dan Walters: Time to end two-thirds vote on budget

The annual political impasse over the state budget raises this annual question: Is it time to get rid of California's almost unique requirement for a two-thirds legislative vote on the state budget?

Yep.

Minority Republicans contend that the two-thirds vote is a bulwark against runaway spending by the dominant Democrats, but that contention ignores history. Indeed, the almost perpetual budget deficit is the best evidence that the two-thirds vote does not, contrary to GOP assertions, promote fiscal responsibility.

A case in point is what happened in 2000, when the state received a $12 billion windfall of revenues from frenzied stock option trading as the dot-com bubble burst. The responsible thing would have been to either use the money for one-time appropriations, such as public works projects, or put them into a "rainy day" reserve.

In fact, however, then-Gov. Gray Davis and the Legislature squandered $8 billion on increases in education and health spending that Democrats wanted and on tax cuts, including the infamous car tax cut, that Republicans could demand for their votes. When revenues returned to normal a year later, the state had a deficit that's plagued the Capitol ever since.

In the absence of a two-thirds vote, would Democrats have simply spent the windfall? Perhaps, but if so they would have borne the political onus for the deficits that followed.

The two-thirds vote has been a fixture of the state constitution for about 70 years and obviously it was not a serious impediment to budgeting for most of that time, so what changed? Two things – a major expansion of the budget in the aftermath of Proposition 13, the 1978 ballot measure that slashed property taxes; and the rise of rank partisanship in the Legislature, which began about the same time.

As the state expanded its role in financing schools and local government services after Proposition 13's passage, took a larger role in health care, vastly expanded its prison system and in other ways became more fiscally centralized, budget politics heated up. With more big financial decisions being made in Sacramento, those with stakes in the outcome muscled up on lobbyists and other tools of political persuasion.

This syndrome was enhanced by the rise of pro-spending public employee unions as political powers after winning collective bargaining rights, by the professionalization of the Legislature and by increased partisanship, both because of rising ideological polarization among voters and of such factors as term limits and gerrymandered legislative districts.

Fashioning a state budget, once a fairly routine, almost ministerial, task, became a highly politicized process with the two-thirds vote a central factor. It's time to dump it and allow the majority party to have its way on spending while keeping the two-thirds vote on raising taxes. Budgets are only good for one year, after all, while taxes go on forever.

About the writer:

• Call The Bee's Dan Walters, (916) 321-1195. Back columns, www.sacbee.com/walters.