California Politics: Closing the $ Gap

The headline writer called it "Mississippification". But Alabama is the only other state Peter Schrag's column mentions.

Alabama, Mississippi, one of those Southern states. Yankees get confused about these things sometimes. :) You have to be patient with them.

But Schrag's column is a good one. He talks about how the recently-defeated tax referendum in Alabama was actively supported by Bob Riley, the conservative Republican Governor. Riley was criticized by Grover Norquist, an antitax zealot who currently has a lot of influence on the national Republican Party. He said, "Every Republican governor who thinks of raising taxes next year will walk past Traitors Gate and see Bob Riley's head on a pike."

Schrag uses Alabama's story as a lead-in to talking about the possible option For Schwarzenegger of using a large bond issue in California to close the current state deficit, coupled with "some sort of tight cap that would allow state spending to increase by no more than population and the rate of inflation."

The fact that such a measure is being seriously discussed is another sign of how common the idea has become in California that we could find some magic formula to put government on auto-pilot and solve the state's problems that way.
Schrag's analysis in part, is that, even with a $20 billion bond issue:

However it's done, it would, in the absence of any significant revenue increase, drive the state's battered public services further toward the bottom. If Schwarzenegger, as promised, were really to protect spending for K-12 education (spending that even now is woefully unequal to the state's own standards) the failure to increase revenues would almost necessarily suck more out of higher education and health programs for the poor, whose budgets have already been severely cut, and, very possibly, support for local governments as well. ...

Which is to say that the possibility of making California's school resources commensurate with the high standards we've set, or increasing access to the state's colleges and universities for the hundreds of thousands of additional students who'll be seeking places, is almost nil.

Tags: california politics, peter schrag, schwarzenegger