Dan Walters

As they struggle – so far in vain – to balance the state budget, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders have hoped that a bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission on taxation would show them how to mitigate future budget crises.

The state's budget travails, and those of local governments, have inevitably given rise to demands that Proposition 13, the landmark property tax limit measure enacted by voters 31 years ago, be altered.

The state's perpetual budget mess has certainly fueled interest in – and perhaps even passion for – fundamentally overhauling California's dysfunctional government.

Remember the Arnold Schwarzenegger who, exactly five years ago, denounced state legislators as "girlie men" beholden to unions because they failed to pass a state budget? He's back, sensing that time is running out on his 2003 campaign promise to stop "crazy deficit spending."

The Capitol's budget game has evolved into a predictable pattern of political moves, one of which is a late-blooming demand for something not directly tied to the budget as a price for its enactment.

While waiting for the state Senate to convene Monday, the California Channel, a public affairs television service, filled in by broadcasting a recent conference on the burgeoning movement to fundamentally overhaul California's dysfunctional state government.

California's cost of guarding, feeding, clothing, medicating and supposedly educating its nearly 170,000 prison inmates and supervising 110,000 parolees is about $10 billion a year. And it's very easily the fastest-growing segment of the deficit-ridden state budget over the past decade.

Perhaps the most enduring political debate in California – right up there with water – is whether the state's periodic plunges into economic recession are caused by circumstances beyond its control or a self- inflicted malady.

On June 10, the Public Policy Institute of California issued a report that was highly critical of California's "enterprise zone" program that gives tax breaks and other economic incentives for employers to establish new facilities in areas of high unemployment.

As the Legislature's Democratic leaders unveiled their new – and, they say, improved – version of the deficit- ridden state budget last week, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger sharply criticized its reliance on new taxes and "one-time solutions" that don't solve the fundamental imbalance.

When Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa took himself out of the running for governor Monday, he boosted – perhaps inadvertently – Jerry Brown's chances for a gubernatorial comeback.

A milestone on California's meandering journey toward fiscal insolvency occurred exactly a decade ago when the Legislature enacted a massive increase in state employee pensions on the expedient assumption that it would cost taxpayers nothing.

The politicians who are fashioning – or not fashioning – a new state budget often spout economic theories as the bases for their actions.

The most powerful – and destructive – nonpolitical factor in California's perpetual fiscal crisis is the volatility of its revenues.

Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax the fellow behind the tree.

A comprehensive dictionary offers a number of definitions of "drill," one being a device for making holes in something, and another being a rehearsed exercise.

The death of California labor leader Jack Henning this month generated, as one might expect, paeans to his longevity, his skills as a hellfire-and-brimstone orator and his remarkable forays into national and even international affairs, the latter as ambassador to New Zealand during the 1960s.

So what are the chances that the men and women we elected will close a huge – and ever- increasing – budget deficit in time to prevent a complete shutdown that would make the state an international laughingstock?