California lawmakers personally will feel no pain from any multimillion-dollar cuts made to end this year's budget impasse: Nobody's targeting the $15 million increase for their offices. Even when state coffers are bare and legislators are fighting over funding for public services from transit to prisons, the Legislature's own budget rises, year after year -- automatically. The number of lawmakers -- 120 -- never changes, but their spending has jumped by 41 percent since 2000, a rate higher than the general fund's 32 percent increase since then. The state's average annual rate of inflation was 2.9 percent during the same...