IOUs? Yes, you owe us

Editorial
IOUs? Yes, you owe us
As the governor and Legislature continue their fuss-budgeting, California enters its new fiscal year with no cash in hand.

10:23 AM PDT, July 1, 2009

The message of the failed May 19 special election appears to have been received by pretty much no one in Sacramento. Fuss-budgeting went on, deadlines notwithstanding, as if it were still August or December 2008. The result: California enters its new fiscal year today with no cash in hand and a growing multibillion-dollar deficit.

Democratic Assembly Speaker Karen Bass of Los Angeles and Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg of Sacramento ran through their drills, insisting on voting, and voting again, on deficit-closing plans they knew Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger would veto. We shrugged at the first vote; after all, the plan included tobacco and oil taxes that this page supported. But it quickly became clear that those taxes would go nowhere, so additional votes on doomed packages were simply part of what the governor is fond of calling "the kabuki."

So Schwarzenegger was being the grown-up? Hardly. He, too, played a tired Sacramento game: deadline policymaking. As the state government was counting down the final hours of budget dickering before running out of cash and preparing to issue costly IOUs in lieu of actual legal tender, and as California's budget hole was about to get $3 billion deeper (because missing the deadline meant a new school-funding mandate kicked in), he tossed this little nugget toward the Legislature: I'll sign a budget and put the state back on track if you ... uh, let me think ... I've got it -- if you reform the pension system.

Here's the thing: It's a badly needed reform, but in trotting it out as a brand-new, never-before-proposed ultimatum in the waning hours of the fiscal year, the governor didn't simply thumb his nose at Democrats. He thumbed his nose at the entire notion of public lawmaking. It's the exact same process that makes a mockery of democracy at the end of each session, when bills are gutted and new laws, which never were heard in committee or discussed in public, slink their way onto the books.

But, some veteran Sacramento-watchers object, even though this leads to throwing away money and blaming the other side for it, it is the only way to actually get things done. That's another way of saying that abusing Californians is the only way to serve them.

Democrats and the governor, and the Republican lawmakers who take pride in never voting in favor of any budget, are siblings in this dysfunction. They have set us on a road toward two possible cataclysms they seem to believe will never take place: A popular revolt that will further diminish the power of government as we know it; and ruinous default that keeps the recession alive for another decade and plunges Californians, and perhaps all Americans, into nearly unimaginable misery. Sacramento players should check their rearview mirrors. Both objects are closer than they appear.