Time For A Budget - No Gimmicks (Dan Walters: Time To Reform California's Budget IS NOW Alert)

Sacramento Bee ^ | 08/03/2007 | Dan Walters

[goldstategop]

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger described the state budget impasse Thursday as "very damaging" and added: "California deserves much better than that."

He's right, but probably not as he intended. The fact that the budget is more than a month overdue is not the most shameful aspect. It is that he and most legislators are willing to enact another deficit budget at a moment when revenues are flattening and the gap is destined to widen.

Schwarzenegger and others who want the current version of the budget enacted -- which it would be if one more Republican senator would vote for it -- are trotting out the hoary rhetorical ploy that they'd work on more fundamental fiscal change after the budget is enacted. But anyone who's been around the Capitol knows it doesn't work that way. Once a budget is passed, the pressure to reform vanishes.

Schwarzenegger and Democrats are roasting Republican senators for using the budget as leverage on non-budgetary demands, such as reining in Attorney General Jerry Brown's penchant for suing local governments. But their demands are no more extraneous than what the Democrats stuffed into the trailer bills, such as a hit on expansion of charter schools on behalf of school unions.

The stalemate is an opportunity to make the budget an honest and balanced spending plan, not only prioritizing expenditures but facing the possibility that the state may need more revenues -- while cleaning up the trailer bills that have become ornament-laden Christmas trees for special interests.

Just passing a budget doesn't get us anywhere. It's time to do it right, no matter how politically painful that may be.

[goldstategop]

Republicans in California want two things: 1) a BALANCED budget and 2) an end to budget gimmicks and loading the budget trailer bills with unrelated pork. Neither of them is rocket science. NOW is the time to reform the budget in California and we hope CAGOP Senators stand fast, no matter how much the Democrats and Red Arnold lambaste them. The people of California deserve a government that respects its constitutional requirement to pass a balanced budget and that lives within its means. That issue is not going to go away just because the Democrats and Governor would like to ignore it for reasons of political convenience.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

[nyyankeefan]

simple concept to balance the budget....

cut spending to the amount that is taken in!!!

oh wait...the lib/dems are in charge....

raise taxes to the limit of spending!!!!