Governor’s budget ‘reform’ equivalent to dictatorship

No one involved in any way with California government thinks the state budget process is ideal.

There’s the two-thirds vote requirement in each house of the Legislature that allows a relatively small minority to stymie the majority’s plain wishes. There’s the fact that once a budget is adopted, it can’t be changed easily when financial circumstances change.

But as June’s negotiations over next year’s state spending plan approach, only Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger offers any serious plan to change the system. The problem: His “reform” plan has one big weakness making this notion worse than the current lousy system.

Schwarzenegger essentially wants to set up himself and all his successors as fiscal dictators.

Yes, his plan calls for establishing a “rainy day” reserve that would be funded in good years by automatic deposits of all state revenues in excess of a “reasonable, long-term rate of growth.” The state’s Finance department would set that rate – and thus the amount of money to be put aside – each year. Since that department’s director is always an appointee of the governor, this means Schwarzenegger and all who follow him would have the power to decide on their own how much money goes into the new reserve fund and how much gets spent on the state’s needs.

No consultations with legislators or anyone else are required in this plan.

The Schwarzenegger plan also calls for automatic state spending cuts whenever the governor and his appointees predict a budget shortfall. These would not merely be a judicious set of cuts with priorities established to deem some spending on some things more critical than others. This would be an across-the-board system of chopping all programs from education to parks to road repairs and prisons.

Anyone who’s been looking knows how much protest Schwarzenegger’s attempts at across-the-board cuts this spring aroused, as parents and schoolchildren marched by the tens of thousands to fight that plan, which – among other things – would mean significantly larger class sizes.

Yet, none of this is the worst of the Schwarzenegger “reform” plan. That distinction is reserved for the provision mandating that whenever a governor – any governor – unilaterally declares a fiscal emergency, legislators must meet to make cuts. Whenever they don’t make them in a specified time period, or if their cuts aren’t big enough, that governor could step in and make cuts for them.

Says Schwarzenegger’s proposal, “the amendment allows the governor to waive state law and regulations in order to achieve the savings needed to bring California’s budget into balance.”

In short, governors would suddenly become budget dictators, able to declare fiscal emergencies at their whim, then force whatever cuts they like.

This plan, then, would abrogate the traditional American system summed up in the phrase: “The executive proposes and the legislature disposes.” At all levels of governments, mayors and governors and presidents propose budgets, then negotiate with city councils, legislatures and Congress. In California, no individual can alter any budget once it’s passed.

Schwarzenegger wants to change all that. His fellow Republican, President Bush, once famously observed that “Life would sure be easier if I was a dictator.” A dictatorship is precisely what Schwarzenegger would establish if his plan ever became law, at least where it comes to state spending, which itself dictates conditions of life for millions of Californians.

This is the plan Schwarzenegger calls “reform,” thus plainly demonstrating that reform doesn’t always equal improvement. He’s spent much of the spring plumping for it up and down the state, calling it the Budget Stabilization Act and claiming it would somehow protect schools and other programs from the kind of across-the-board cuts he proposes in the current spending plan.

The governor accurately notes that any such system would require a vote of the people. If they ever did actually vote for it, they’d be just plain crazy.

Thomas D. Elias writes on California politics and other issues.

His column appears Saturdays. E-mail him at tdelias@aol.com.