Politically, California's great debate over how to close a whopping state budget deficit boils down to an exchange of simple – and probably simplistic – slogans.

To Democrats, California has a "revenue problem" – a tax system that doesn't produce enough dollars to meet the state's legitimate needs – and should solve it by raising taxes by $8-plus billion a year, primarily income taxes on business and high-income families.

Democrat Darrell Steinberg, the soon-to-be president pro tem of the state Senate, put it this way in a recent Sacramento Bee interview: "We have a very complex state, with a growing population and with significant unmet needs, and so I think we have both a revenue problem, and we have a major structural problem. … We're misaligned, for example. Local government has significant responsibility to provide services and little authority over the revenue side of the equation."

But to Republicans, the deficit is the symptom of a "spending problem" and reducing spending should be the first step, although they are not being specific on what should be cut.

Steinberg's fellow Sacramentan, Republican Sen. Dave Cox, summarizes the issue this way: "Since I have been in the Legislature, in 1998, general fund revenue was about $50 billion. Some 10 years later, it's more than $100 billion. It's a situation of where we don't have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem."

The GOP leader of the Senate, Dave Cogdill, uses even stronger language, to wit: "This state has a spending addiction, and we need to treat it. We need to find a way to move forward with our budgeting processing in this state so … we don't have to face the prospect of either increasing taxes or slashing services."

Whether the state's fiscal problem is too much spending or too little revenue, of course, is much like beauty or art, largely dependent on the eye of the beholder. The only semi-objective way to approach the issue is to compare California with other states, even if such comparisons, either in the aggregate or in specific categories, cannot account for this state's unique factors, which are, because this is California, copious.

There was a time when California was, in comparison with other states, high-taxing and high-spending. We routinely held the No. 5 to No. 7 spot in the Tax Foundation's annual calculation of tax burden data from the federal government. In 1970, for instance, Californians carried the nation's seventh-highest state and local tax load at 11.1 percent of personal income. By 1977, the burden had climbed to 12 percent, and California was in fifth place.

Two years later, in 1979, California dropped to 25th place at 9.2 percent. Why? In 1978, voters passed Proposition 13, which slashed local property taxes, and panicky state legislators cut state taxes as well.

We resided in that general area of relative tax burden for the next two decades, but as revenue from a steeply progressive personal income tax mushroomed in the late 1990s, California's tax burden began to creep back up to 11-plus percent. It's generally been there for the past decade, hitting 11.5 percent last year.

In other words, Californians in the aggregate are now paying almost as much of their personal income in taxes now as they were before Proposition 13 was passed. And our relative ranking has also climbed upward to No. 12 in 2007, a half-percent higher than the national average.

That half-percent translates into about $8 billion, which happens to be just about what Democrats want in new taxes. Or to put it another way, were they successful, Californians would once again be paying 12 percent of their incomes, on average, to state and local governments, exactly what it was before passage of Proposition 13 in 1978.

What goes around, comes around, as political veterans are wont to say.

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