IOU

Hi, everybody. We're fucked. Just wanted you all to know that.

OTOH, it really is beautiful weather outside. And if you're inclined to want to get out into it and skip reading a longish blog post, then I recommend just scrolling to the bottom and marking the five numbered posts, which I didn't write, for reading later.

I have been not-blogging the CA budget crisis because really, what is there to say? The state is generally agreed to be ungovernable, so much so that I'm ashamed to say I've done basically nothing calling-representatives-wise about any of it. It sucks that the parks are going to be closed,* and I understand the damage that'll do, but I also know that the money situation is acute and it's gotta give somewhere. Ditto cuts to education funding, health insurance for the poor, broader social services, and all the rest of it. So I haven't bothered to do anything other than shrug my shoulders and wonder what the long-term effects are going to be.

My uninformed predictions are that as state workers continue to take huge pay cuts (currently at 14%; 8%, I understand, for University of CA faculty), teachers don't get re-hired (including, I predict, the teacher Pseudonymous Kid was to have next year, which is a pity because she has a ton of energy and did some awesome stuff with her class this year and because I like her a lot), and state contractors have to start laying people off, we'll see more people being unable to pay their mortgages, hence foreclosures, hence an even further drop in real estate prices, hence more people ending up underwater and more businesses shutting their doors, hence even further drops in state revenue. Catch-22.

And of course, even if state workers continue working for free because there is already too much work and not enough staffing, the demand for state services will only increase. It's not hyperbolic to say that there will certainly be people who will die because of all this: nearly one million children will lose health coverage (.pdf), 10% of the state's spending on child welfare will go (.pdf),** the elderly are losing health care services.

So, given that I believe all this but haven't gone up to Sacramento this summer to protest or lobby, am I part of the problem? You know, I'm really not buying that I, or that "Californians" as a group, are responsible for this bullshit. Yes, the voters have passed a lot of bullshit propositions without clearly understanding their impact on budgeting and running the state--but come on, you can't honestly expect individual voters to be experts in state funding.

Yes, we passed (among other things) Prop 13, which has crippled our revenue stream for the past forty years, and people continue to resist the idea of repealing it because we feel that our property taxes are too high. But ironically (and almost certainly intentionally on Jarvis's part) we're right: the biggest effect of Prop 13 is that corporate real estate taxes are astonishingly low and individual homeowners' property taxes are actually higher, because corporations hold onto property much longer than individuals do. But again, it's not really reasonable to expect individuals to think about that sort of thing, since the property taxes the voters have to deal with are the ones on their homes. (Which by the way, the lower real estate prices get, the lower the property tax rate that gets locked in by anyone buying now--whether homeowners or corporations--another hidden effect of the crisis that's going to have repercussions for years to come.)

And yes, an even worse problem is that we--or rather our legislators--can't pass a budget without a 2/3rds majority, *and* they're required to balance the budget. Both of which, again, sound like good ideas if you don't know a lot about state funding issues: after all, a 2/3rds majority suggests that any budget that gets passed will be broadly acceptable to the majority of the voters who elected the legislators, right? And a balanced budget always sounds like a good, responsible idea. Or so one would imagine.

But we have these budget crises over and over and over again. It's not surprising, then, that the voters feel like "the government" is broken (it is) and that somehow the legislators are to blame (they're not, really, despite the fact that the Republicans are being intransigent assholes). Or that this feeling leads to our voting for even *more* propositions that tie the legislature's hands, or voting against necessary suspensions of mandates, even though passing them might have helped. Or that it buttresses both anti-government reactionaries and passive bystanders.

It's some catch, that Catch-22.

The only solution that will work, some say, is a constitutional convention to rewrite some of those rules. I think this is probably right. Not that there's any guarantee that a new constitution would be better, and god knows the fear that it might be worse is terrifying.

If you're still reading, and have any interest in understanding how CA's legislature works and what the entrenched problems are, I strongly recommend the CA budget-related posts over at the Edge of the American West. Which I provide here in chronological order (that is, reverse blog order) for your reading . . . pleasure.

1. Decline and Fall
2. "This State is Days Away from a Budget Collapse" (note that this was written back in February)
3. Partisanship and Budget Crises (This might be the most interesting for those who are interested in partisanship and governance. It also makes a good case that Prop 13, which most of us like to say is *the* biggest problem in CA, isn't.)
4. How We Got Here: Thoughts on the State of California
5. California's Crisis and the Collapse of the Republican Party (I found this one really interesting by way of understanding what the hell has happened since the days of my grandparents' Eisenhower Republicanism.)



*Though maybe not.

**Both pdfs taken from the California Budget Project, which is a pretty good site for the wonkily-inclined.