Dan Walters

Mention "tax reform" to a liberal Democrat, and the talk immediately turns to raising more revenues. Mention it to a conservative Republican, and he or she sees it as a way to cut taxes.

Sacramento's city manager, John Shirey, delivered a sobering report to his City Council the other day, telling members that the capital city is nearly $2 billion in debt and that handling it will be an ongoing challenge.

It's now called the University of Phoenix, but originally it was an off-campus arm of California's Saint Mary's College – until it ran into accreditation problems 35 years ago.

When Capitol politicians and others talk or write about "the budget," they are referring to the "general fund," which Gov. Jerry Brown proposes to be a bit over $97 billion in the next fiscal year.

Former Catholic seminarian Jerry Brown is prone to including obscure theological references in his political pronouncements, often embellishing them with Latin phrases.

Elections, it's been said, have consequences, and a yearslong effort by Sacramento to secure federal funds for flood control in the imperiled Natomas basin could be a casualty of last year's voting.

The legislative session that reconvened this month faces no shortage of big issues, but underlying all of them is demographic change that is dramatically altering the face of California.

Proposition 30, the sales and income tax hike that Gov. Jerry Brown persuaded voters to pass last year, raised state revenue by billions a year.

Jerry Brown knows firsthand that crime is a political minefield.

Jerry Brown's major achievement in his first year as governor in 1975 was the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, creating a first-in-the-nation mechanism for the United Farm Workers union to seek contracts with growers.

The Legislature's Democratic leaders want to use their newly minted supermajorities to do things that they could not do before, but are leery of doing things that might alienate voters and jeopardize those supermajorities.

Democrats now control all the strings in the state Capitol.

This new year has an odd number, and traditionally that has meant it would be free of elections and campaigning.

Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink?

Fox News is the media outlet that Democrats love to hate, often calling it "Faux News."

The advent of Democratic supermajorities in both houses of the California Legislature has spawned much speculation, especially in the media, about what the majority party might do with its newly minted power.

When California's political historians look back on 2012, they might well conclude that it was one of those years that mark the end of one era and the beginning of another.

California's unemployment rate has been declining fractionally as its recession-battered economy slowly improves.

Thirteen years ago, the Legislature – spurred by then-Gov.Gray Davis – made one of its periodic forays into educational reform, or so we were told.

When Prohibition ended 79 years ago, California replaced the bootleg liquor trade with a legal monopoly – a series of laws that locked in industry marketing practices and enforced industry-established retail prices.

Sometime before Christmas, Gov. Jerry Brown will close the books on a proposed 2013-14 budget.

One of the debating points vis-à-vis Proposition 30, the tax hike that voters approved last month, was whether sharply increasing marginal income tax rates on a relative handful of high-income Californians would prove counterproductive by driving them out of the state.

Gov. Jerry Brown and legislative leaders tout an overhaul of the multi-billion-dollar system of compensating disabled workers for job- related illnesses and injuries as a major accomplishment this year.

San Francisco, it could be said, is the nation's capital of trendy environmentalism – as long as it affects someone else.

California's highly controversial bullet train project is headed for some kind of political collision.

When the Legislature reconvened last week and legislative leaders offered glowing accounts of what they had done in 2012 and lofty promises of future feats, no one mentioned Senate Bill 1530 – for good reason.

Is there light at the end of the dark tunnel that has been California in recent years – or is it merely another train wreck in the making?

Have California's Republicans finally learned a lesson that some of their leaders have been trying to drive home for years – that they cannot prosper, or even survive, as a party of aging white men in the Western Hemisphere's most culturally complex society?

It all depends, to paraphrase Bill Clinton's infamous line, on what your definition of "tax increase" may be.

What most historians regard as the golden era of the California Legislature ended with a bang three-plus decades ago when ideological and partisan polarization gripped the Capitol.

It's been 42 years since then-Gov. Ronald Reagan signed the landmark California Environmental Quality Act, an early victory for the nascent environmental protection movement that has since become a very powerful force in state and national politics.

Voter approval of sales and income taxes and the advent of Democratic supermajorities in both houses of the Legislature have generated new hope among liberals that Proposition 13, the 1978 property tax limit they consider their bête noire, might be changed.

This month's election not only bolstered Democrats' total control of California's politics but also tightened the grip of party leaders who will never see their 70th birthdays again.

Let's assume, for sake of argument or column-writing, that the fundamental task of any public school system is to maximize the number of students who graduate from high school and are ready to either enter the workforce or further their educations.

It's utterly amazing at times how brain-dead the East Coast political media, both partisan and independent, can be about California's politics.

So now we know. When the Legislature reconvenes next month for brief organizational sessions, it will have historic Democratic supermajorities – 54 Assembly members and 29 senators.

We Californians – or at least those of us with access to the media or political forums – make lots of celebratory noise about our diversity, as we should.

Back in the day, when California was a purple state whose major offices could be won by either party, Republicans loved "the fishhook."

The public employee pension reform plan enacted by the Legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown this year was minimalism.

Every California election is customarily followed by journalistic and academic seminars in which campaign strategies are dissected, pre-election polls are regurgitated, and pundits crow about successes and confess failures in predicting outcomes.

When Sacramento International Airport opened its lavish new terminal a year ago, it did so with a maximum of hoopla and hyperbole about a bright new era of air travel for California's capital.

About a quarter-century ago, I wrote a book about California's social, economic, demographic and political evolution and quoted a couple of academics as predicting "the possible emerging of a two-tier economy."

Gov. Jerry Brown's campaign for Proposition 30, his sales and income tax increase, more or less promised voters that it would solve the state's chronic budget problems.

It probably wasn't happenstance that California's historic – good or bad, it's historic – experiment in greenhouse gas regulation was delayed until after an election in which voters would be deciding on new taxes.

Proposition 30, Gov. Jerry Brown's sales and income tax hike, was easily the most contentious measure on last week's ballot.

This wasn't your father's electorate, much less your grandfather's.

Every poll of Californians' attitudes toward the Legislature and other pieces of state government find deep disdain.

Darrell Steinberg, the president pro tem of the state Senate, says he wants to use the Democrats' new supermajorities in the Legislature to reform the state's taxation system and the initiative process.

Democrats won it all in California this week – prevailing on new taxes and other major ballot measures and apparently achieving supermajorities in both legislative houses and, at least on paper, a free hand to do whatever they wish on anything.

Many of California's political contests were still in doubt late Tuesday, but long before the polls closed – months before, in fact – everyone knew that President Barack Obama would win the state's largest-in-the-nation bloc of 55 electoral votes.