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Funny Business
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AP |
There is a reason why Californians legislate through propositions. It's the only way things get done, for better or for worse. One unintended consequence, says public policy expert Joe Kotkin, is "it really is enabling irresponsibility" in Sacramento.
Kotkin, of Chapman University and www.newgeography.com, has harsh words for everyone involved, but especially for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose governing style he describes as "manic depressive."
In case you haven't heard, California's $11.2 billion deficit threatens to balloon to $28 billion in 18 months--though I never know how they come up with these forecasts because the economy never seems to behave according to their models. Governor Schwarzenegger has proposed billions in cuts and billions in tax hikes, but the lame duck legislature wouldn't agree to a fix. Now the Governor has invoked a law calling the new legislature (mostly made up of the former lame ducks) into emergency session to fix the budget within 45 days. That law he's invoking was, naturally, created by Proposition 58 (see above note dependence on props).
"Fundamentally the state cannot live beyond its means," says Kotkin. "Both parties live in some sort of weird cuckoo land which they refuse to leave, no matter what."
He says California increasingly depends on the capital gains of the very rich, which are taxed at 9.3 percent, like ordinary income. Those gains have evaporated, and the middle class is being pushed out of state by high prices and fewer jobs.
Even as Kotkin talks of hardcore factions within both parties here—"a Democratic party which seems to want to follow Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez and a Republican party which is sort of living somewhere in the mid-17th century"—he says California has the tools to survive this. It just lacks leadership.
Still, we're not alone. "The more you study other states, you realize they're dysfunctional, too, in their own way," Kotkin laughs. "Certainly I wouldn't hold up Illinois as a role model for anything...except larceny."
The video clip is more of Kotkin's colorful take on the "Funny Business" of funding California.
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