At stake was nearly $890 million in funds to be allocated through the end of next year, according to the Associated Press. Although much of that sum was expected to flow into the coffers of the eventual Republican candidate for president, a potent irony pervaded the proceedings, relating to Jeb Bush. “The Kochs began their donor gatherings in 2003, a reaction to what they saw as out-of-control government growth when his brother George W. Bush was president,” as AP noted.

The confab took place at a scenic and secluded oceanfront hotel in Dana Point. A certain amount of privacy has long been standard operating procedure, with the Kochs themselves playing more of a behind-the-scenes role. “The Koch operation is not expected to formally back any candidate in the GOP primary,” as Kenneth Vogel observed at Politico. “But the Koch brothers and many of their donors can still play kingmaker roles. In addition to the massive checks many are expected to write to the super PACs aligned with specific candidates, they also serve as bellwethers for other donors.”

Jockeying candidates

Even before the event, scuttlebutt surrounded the field of Republican candidates. Not all were present. Rand Paul, who “underwhelmed donors” at a prior event, declined this time around, as Eliana Johnson reported for National Review. One Koch official told Johnson “that Chris Christie wasn’t invited because the powers that be in Koch world think he has a crummy fiscal record in New Jersey.”

Nor did Donald Trump receive an invitation. (Trump would later mock the meeting on Twitter as an assemblage of would-be “puppets” lacking his own money muscle.)

That left the Koch brothers to sit down with Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Marco Rubio and Scott Walker.

Although the attendees each had their chance to speak, few were out to make headlines. Marco Rubio, known for his hawkish approach to foreign policy, did use California’s sometimes idyllic isolation from the east coast political establishment to sharpen his rhetoric on Iran’s nuclear program. “Iran will be not just a nuclear weapon power, but will have the capability to deliver that weapon to the continental United States in less than a decade,” he said, according to Time. “I don’t think any of us wants to live in a country where a radical Shiite cleric in Tehran can have a nuclear weapon and an ICBM that can hit where we are sitting right now.”

Policy over politics

But the weekend was not restricted to presidential politics. “Koch network leaders briefed some 450 donors, who pledge six-figure sums to become members of the Freedom Partners organization, on their policy and philanthropic goals for the 2016 cycle,” CNN reported.

The itinerary reflected an agenda more variegated than the Koch organization is often given credit for. “While the network has become arguably the most powerful force in Republican politics today, Charles Koch, in his welcoming speech, called out both parties for big spending, reckless foreign policy and corporate welfare,” Politico noted.

Sessions were varied. One, drawing hundreds, “focused on legislation that would limit mandatory minimum sentencing, as well as other forms of criminal justice reform,” according to CNN. “At an evening reception, the featured speaker was Dr. Michael Lomax, president of the United Negro College Fund.”

In fact, some present at the meeting suggested that too much attention had been paid to the relatively glitzy and competitive race for the GOP nomination. Longtime donor Art Pope told Politico that the spotlight belonged a bit deeper in the weeds. “The main point of this weekend’s seminar is not the elected officials or the candidates. In fact, it’s not about candidates at all. It is more about policies and issues,” he said.

In recent years, California’s roadways have fallen into what analysts often agree is terrible shape. “Our streets and highways are in horrible condition and need at least $296 billion during the next five years for already ignored construction and repair projects,” the OC Weekly complained, noting that “a reported 87 percent of road pavement is rated as ‘at risk’ or ‘poor'” according to current estimates.

Republican relevance

“To the chagrin of Republicans,” the Weekly continued, “the Democrat-controlled Legislature has proposed an upcoming $168 billion budget with a measly $2 billion for roads when experts say the state should be spending at least $8 billion annually.”

But to the delight of Republicans, that gap — and California’s budgeting rules — has granted them a fresh round of political relevance.

The Golden State GOP cultivated a very public interest in California’s roads. In addition to providing the party with a coveted way to connect with voters, the stance has supplied Republicans with an unaccustomed degree of political muscle in Sacramento. To grease the wheels for the state budget, Gov. Jerry Brown hived off the state’s nearly $60 billion in road troubles for a special legislative session. But “additional revenue is impossible without support from Republicans because it requires a two-thirds vote in the Legislature,” as the Los Angeles Times noted.

A rush of plans

Although Assembly Republicans have offered billions more than those in the state Senate, both proposals adopted several similar paths to get there. On the chopping block, the Times reported, was cap-and-trade revenue, “recently expanded to include transportation fuel. In addition, they want to tap existing fees on truck drivers, which were redirected to the general fund during the state’s budget crises.”

“Republicans in the Assembly also want to eliminate 3,500 jobs at Caltrans, the state transportation agency, that legislative analysts identified as unnecessary. Thousands more vacant positions across state government would be cut as well, and all of the savings would be put toward roads.”

According to U-T San Diego’s Steven Greenhut, Assembly Republicans would pull $1 billion directly from cap-and-trade monies, estimating that an additional $1 billion in infrastructure spending could be saved from the better fuel efficiency that could result from better roads.

The Assembly GOP would also strip the California Transportation Commission from the Executive Branch, according to Capital Public Radio. Earlier, Assembly Republican Leader Kristin Olsen, R-Modesto, had telegraphed her caucus’s plan, urging that high-speed rail money be reallocated to correct the state’s problems with existing infrastructure.

Dueling agendas

The party hasn’t remained fully united on the issue of revenue neutrality. For some, the special session hasn’t turned out to be quite the boon the party imagined. “Many Republicans argue that the governor and Democratic leaders put together a balanced budget that doesn’t raise taxes – and then offloaded this big missing piece to a special session as a way to build support for tax increases,” as Greenhut recounted.

The behavior of some in the party gave ammunition to Republican critics. “Senate Republican leader Bob Huff of San Dimas expressed interest in a proposal from Sen. Jim Beall, D-San Jose, that includes a new annual $100 fee to owners of electric cars, making up for the fact that they don’t pay any gas tax,” as the Times noted.

Along with a host of co-authors, Huff has also introduced legislation that would constitutionally require transportation taxes to be allocated toward transportation expenses. Nevertheless, his willingness to raise additional revenues raised the ire of influential state conservatives.

That could be the watchword for Sacramento this week, as leading Democrats in the Assembly and the Senate labored on a spending plan that could survive the governor’s scrutiny.

Equipped with a line-item veto, which allows him to knock out provisions after they’re passed without scrapping a budget in its entirety, Gov. Jerry Brown has once again taken a more cautious stance on spending than his colleagues in the state Legislature, with far less allocated for state-subsidized child care, Medi-Cal and welfare recipients.

But many Republicans agreed once again that Brown’s circumspection didn’t go far enough.

Although profligate Democrats have been frustrated before, Brown’s political position has become unshakable. As he has headed into his fourth term, he has maintained a high public approval within his party — despite growing anxiety over the drought — to stave off a rebellion on spending. Democrats haven’t unified enough to override Brown with a two-thirds vote, Bloomberg Politics noted.

Dueling projections

Democrats have pushed to hike California’s budget even higher than the $115.3 billion Brown offered in his revised plan last month — a sum which “was already $7.3 billion larger than the budget enacted in June for the current fiscal year,” according to the Los Angeles Daily News. “And it reflected a $6.7 billion increase in projected general-fund revenues compared to the proposal he released in January.”

Democrats blamed overly cautious revenue estimates for Brown’s unwillingness to loosen the purse strings. “As in previous years, the disagreement revolves around the question of how much money is available for spending,” the Los Angeles Times observed. “The lawmakers’ budget plans are built with numbers from nonpartisan legislative analysts, whose revenue estimates are higher than the Brown administration’s. Even though revenue has routinely outpaced the governor’s expectations, Brown has continued to insist on the lower figures.”

That brought a swift rebuke from Brown’s camp. “H.D. Palmer, spokesman for Brown’s Department of Finance, confirmed that the governor has not reached a deal on spending with lawmakers,” the Times reported. “The Legislature is aware of our concerns with their higher revenue numbers, which is built on the most volatile revenue source there is, which is capital gains,” he told the Times.

Republican resistance

Over the past decade, income taxes have risen and fallen by the billions, as California has experienced unexpected twists and turns, including the global financial crisis and the latest Silicon Valley boom. In a recent speech, Gov. Brown argued against the kind of social psychology that could exacerbate the impact of adverse events. “The longer you’re away from a recession, the less you remember it and all you see is money coming in,” he said. “Usually at the point when the recession is right around the corner and people are feeling the best ever and they want to just spend, we crash.”

But Republicans cautioned that Brown’s tilt toward thrift did not go far enough. Former Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, R-Irvine — now vice president for policy at the Texas Public Policy Foundation — warned that the Golden State’s financial position couldn’t withstand another downturn. “California’s heavy reliance on a highly progressive income tax, with the nation’s highest top marginal rate at 13.3 percent, makes the state subject to massive swings in revenue as wealthy taxpayers realize capital gains or receive bonuses or stock options,” he wrote. “The challenge is in tempering budget growth in the face of historically wild swings in the state’s income tax revenue.”

Republicans faced their own challenge, however, centered around how else to structure California’s tax code. As the Los Angeles Times editorial board conceded, the state’s highest-in-the-nation income tax rate discouraged economic growth. “But reformers face a problem too,” it concluded: “Any move to stabilize revenue by de-emphasizing income taxes would appear to shift the burden from the wealthy onto everyone else. In a blue state acutely sensitive to income inequality, that’s a non-starter.”

California’s state and local spending, in total, has risen to nearly $400 billion a year.

That is, if anyone can actually compile accurate financial information. The state controller hasn’t produced a consolidated financial report for K-12 school districts and community colleges since 2000. The most recent data available from the state controller’s office, “Consolidated Annual Financial Reports,” for cities, counties, special districts and redevelopment agencies, concern the fiscal year ended June 30, 2011, more than two years ago. And if you want to match revenue coming from funding agencies — such as the federal and state government to local cities and counties — don’t expect the reported disbursements on the reports from the funding agencies to match the reported receipts from the receiving agencies.

These are among the findings of a new study released yesterday by the California Public Policy Center, where I am executive director, after several months of wading through virtually every official source of consolidated financial data produced by state agencies, and after talking with dozens of financial professionals working in those agencies.

If you read the study, “How Big Are California’s State and Local Governments Combined?,” you will note the extensively footnoted calculations put California’s total state and local government spending at $365 billion per year. You will see that, in the fiscal year ended June 30, 2011, California’s taxpayers paid an estimated:

* $48.7 billion for direct state operations, including higher education;

* $67.4 billion for K-12 public schools and community colleges;

* $57.4 billion for the county governments;

* $55.8 billion for the city governments;

* $40.5 billion for special districts;

* $8.9 billion for redevelopment agencies;

* $86.3 billion for medicaid, welfare, and unemployment compensation.

How much?

Who knows how much we spent in the fiscal year just ended, on June 30, 2013? The informational website, USGovernmentSpending.com, reports, “California State & Local 2013 Spending by Function” at $477.8 billion!

The only takeaways here are:

(1) Evidently, the CPPC did not make any extrapolations that might invite accusations of trying to inflate the numbers to make a point;

(2) The data are so fragmented, so contradictory, so overwhelming in volume and so abundantly lacking in clarity, that it should come as no surprise that a separate independent study might produce a number so much higher. Or perhaps California’s state and local government spending has actually increased 30 percent in two years.

Not easily found in any official report, not even in the many individual city and county financials that the CPPC team spot-checked, was any attempt to produce tables showing personnel costs as a percent of the total budget. It’s an interesting exercise — perhaps too revealing to find its way into the practices and procedures of public agency financial accounting staff.

Workers

For example, according to U.S. Census Bureau data for California’s state and local governments, in 2011 there were 335,971 full time state workers, and 1,158,327 full-time local government workers. Their average pay, before employer paid benefits, was reportedly $70,351 and $73,928, respectively.

From CPPC studies of local government payrolls in California, we know that the average overhead for employer-paid benefits is as follows (please note the CPPC hasn’t yet officially released their payroll analyses for Newport Beach and Fullerton):

* San Jose = 55 percent;

* Anaheim = 51 percent;

* Costa Mesa = 35 percent;

* Irvine = 50 percent;

* Newport Beach = 49 percent;

* Fullerton = 42 percent.

Based on this evidence, it is safe to assume the average state or local government worker in California enjoys employer-paid benefits equivalent to 45 percent of their average base salary, plus overtime. This would mean the average state government worker in California earns total compensation of $102,000 per year, and the average local government worker in California earns total compensation of $107,000 per year.

In other words, if you take out of that $365 billion the $86 billion passed through in the form of medicaid, welfare and unemployment compensation, and if you include as compensation the additional $12 billion spent for part-time government workers (no benefits), a whopping 60 percent, or $166 billion, went to pay personnel costs. And remember, these are direct costs — actual pay and benefit costs — and don’t include the cost for a desk, a chair, an office, etc.

It’s hard to get these numbers. That’s the big story. Because in the private sector these days, instant access by management to data like this is taken for granted. In any major corporation, financial performance data is perpetually updated and can be rapidly formatted to highlight any significant category of spending, certainly including personnel costs. Why are state and local governments still catching up?

Cuts

The other big story is just how significant personnel costs are as a percentage of total government spending. Rather than raising taxes, why not implement cuts to total compensation of 20 percent, and total headcount reductions of 20 percent? The furlough era, when state and local employees all had to take a day per week off without pay, proved the government could still run with a 20 percent reduction in headcount, and it proved that government employees could survive with 20 percent reductions to their compensation.

The impact of a 20 percent reduction in headcount would be to reduce the $166 billion that California’s taxpayers spent on their public servants by $33 billion, to $134 billion.

To then impose a 20 percent reduction to the total compensation on the 80 percent of employees who remained would save an additional $26 billion.

In all, Californians would save $59 billion per year. With these savings, California’s state and local governments could begin to pay down debt instead of continuing to borrow. They could begin to invest in rebuilding infrastructure. They might even be able to lower taxes and amass rainy day funds.

And if government employees made less, maybe they’d use their influence to push for prosperity oriented government policies that would break up monopolies to facilitate competition, encourage land and energy development, welcome emerging new businesses, and lower the cost of living.

But to know these options, we must first have good data.

*   *   *

Ed Ring is the executive director of the California Public Policy Center and the editor of UnionWatch.org.

By Calwatchdog.com Editors

Dr. Ben Carson, joined by author Eric Metaxas, spoke at the Conservative Political Action Convention (CPAC) on the importance of developing and maintaining an educated populace — one with common sense. Being proactive and strategizing, he said, rather than being purely reactive, is how to protect the conservative vision for the future. He also added that it was essential for Americans to take care of their own, not depend on the federal government and think wisely about how to spend our money. Watch the full speech below:

March 16, 2013

By Josephine Djuhana

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—Some conservatives believe a federal balanced budget amendment is an essential reform for fiscal management in Congress. That was the topic of discussion during a panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the National Harbor in Maryland.

Grover Norquist, the founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, moderated the discussion and began with a simple two-part plan for Washington to balance the budget—by “never raising taxes” and “not spending so much of other people’s money.” He also highlighted Paul Ryan’s recently unveiled budget, which rolls back entitlements and federal power, and balances the budget without raising taxes. The budget, according to Norquist, was not only a way to reduce the size of the federal government by reforming, but also a “step in the right direction to enact tax reform.”

Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., said in reference to the Senate, “They don’t believe that the spending is the problem, and they don’t believe the debt or the deficit is a problem.” Anyone who has read Paul Krugman would know that to be the case. And even President Obama recently charged that he was not interested in a “balanced budget just for the sake of balance.” With much concern mounting over the nation’s ever-growing $16 trillion deficit, it’s no wonder that conservatives are now looking for ways to force Congress to create a balanced budget. But Democrats in Washington don’t seem to seem to agree on the need to halt spending, as the budget proposal from Senate Democrats, according to Norquist, “raises taxes and never balances the budget.” The budget plan includes $1 trillion in tax increases and a new $100 billion stimulus plan. It also increases spending by 60 percent over the next ten years, leaving an additional deficit of $500 billion ten years from now.

“That’s why you need a balanced budget amendment, because in the end, [Washington] can’t restrain itself,” Rep. Harris said. “And we certainly can’t guarantee that future Congresses will restrain themselves.”

The panelist consensus was that outside intervention is needed in order to limit spending by Congress. “Unlimited debt is the fairy dust that makes unlimited government function,” said Nick Dranias, a director at the Goldwater Institute.

There are two methods to ratify a constitutional amendment, but the path through Congress does not seem promising, as it requires a two-thirds majority approval in both houses of Congress. The state method is the alternative.

“In the state method, there is a critical check and balance on federal government,” said Derrick Khanna; he’s a former professional staff member for the Republican Study Committee. “It is unfortunate that this method has never been used as our Founders intended.”

All that is needed is a three-fourths majority of states to ratify a constitutional amendment. “States across the country are pushing for a federal balanced budget. First it was Florida, in 2010, and then it was New Hampshire, last year,” said Khanna.

Effects of a balanced budget amendment

There are certain fears that with a balanced budget amendment, members of Congress could force a tax increase in order to ensure that revenues keep up with expenditures.

But Arizona, which has a balanced budget requirement, has used this obligation to its benefit by rejecting Obamacare. When Governor Jan Brewer attempted to raise taxes in order to fund Obamacare in the state, the state legislature shot the proposal down, as state tax increases require a two-thirds majority in order to be ratified.

The balanced budget requirement also seems to be working for the state of Texas.

Texas Governor Rick Perry was also present at CPAC, and delivered short remarks on his state in comparison with the federal government.

“Texas has a balanced budget and a surplus, and is creating more jobs than any other state in the Union, and we’re doing this with a part-time legislature that meets for only 140 days every other year,” said Gov. Perry. “Our legislature—they come in and they pass laws, and then they go home and live under those laws.”

He then emphasized that states should be “the laboratories of reform.”

But instead, we have a federal government that mandates and dictates regulations to states, what with Obamacare and the expansion of Medicaid, the proposed increase in the minimum wage and more. Many conservative allies have fallen to money from the federal government and special interest groups, and we have reached a point where it seems that nothing can stop Washington from continuing on its taxing and spending binge.

“Washington doesn’t worry about how to pay its bills; they just charge it to our grandchildren’s accounts,” said Gov. Perry. “But in Texas, our constitution requires a balanced budget.”

Gov. Perry emphasized that Texas’ “number one ranking when it comes to job creation” is directly correlated to having “balanced budgets and one of the lowest tax and spending rates in the nation.”

Framework for a balanced budget amendment

During the panel, Nick Dranias highlighted the Compact for America, which is a formal amendment to balance the budget and has additional inclusions that work to prevent outright taxation by Congress in order to balance the budget.

But the path to Congressional discipline on the fiscal matters will be an uphill battle, yet many activists would like to see Congress reexamine itself and its practices when it comes to balancing the budget. As government expands, liberties decrease, and the best way to curb government intervention is to take away its ability to spend recklessly.

By Chris Reed

Last night, when President Obama repeatedly described government spending as “investments,” no one batted an eyelash. This is how Democrats now talk. But few are aware of the California roots of this linguistic gambit.

Flash back to a decade ago. Not many remember this now, but back in the early 2000s, Republicans’ success in national politics led many Democrats to believe there had to be some other reason for their failure than their policies. One academic ended up convincing them that much of their problem was language and marketing.

It was UC Berkeley’s George Lakoff. Four years ago, on my late, lamented America’s Finest Blog, I noted how Lakoff had tried to sell his theories to California Democrats. But his first apostle was an L.A. Times reporter. Strange but true!

Here’s some of what I wrote on Oct. 21, 2008:

Now I happened to tape a “Which Way, L.A.?” segment with Halper and others that will air today, and he was gracious with me, so I don’t want to pile on him in any way.

But I do wish at some point, the “fact checkers” would contemplate the honesty of depicting generic government spending as an “investment.” It will take some gymnastics to make it seem reasonable.

By Wayne Lusvardi

Has California’s legendary structural budget deficit evolved into an overworked and obsolescent cliche?

This is a question to be asked of Gov. Jerry Brown announcement yesterday that the state general fund budget deficit has ballooned to $16 billion from the previously reported $9 to $10 billion.

However, the website for the independent state Legislative Analyst’s Office indicates the state ran a $3.3 billion surplus in 2011 and is running a $2.5 billion surplus for 2012.  What gives?

Moreover, the LAO indicates that the cumulative net budget deficit amassed over the past 5 years is only about $3 billion. This reflects only a 3.3 percent deficit that could soon disappear if the $90 billion growth in state Gross Domestic Product for 2011 reported by Gov. Brown in March starts showing up in greater tax revenues.

Here’s the summarized data from the State Legislative Analyst’s Office:

Is Brown, like the proverbial Chicken Little, crying that the sky is falling to get his tax increase proposition passed when in reality the clear sky is peeking out from the clouds?  Who knows?  And who is to be believed? Or more importantly, should we be informed only by cliches in making voting decisions about his proposed tax increases on the November 2012 ballot?

Apparently what Brown is angling for is a restoration of the $9.2 billion in taxation lost from the expiration of the temporary 1 percent sales tax surcharge on July 1, 2011.

But is the governor’s deficit number real?  Is it a deficit that needs to be fixed or a spending addiction that needs to be stopped cold turkey without any substitute stimulus?   Has Gov. Jerry Brown’s so-called $16 billion budget deficit become a worn-out cliche?

Cliches Avoid Facts and Arguments

Jonah Goldberg, in his new book “The Tryanny of Cliches” says cliches are “ways to avoid arguments, not make them.”  Dutch sociologist Anton Zijderveld, in his book “On Cliches,” says that journalists, political pundits and comedians fill voids created by the absence of early knowledge of uncertain situations with cliches.  Most dictionaries define a cliche as a trite and over-simplified expression that has become obsolescent.  A clue to detecting a cliche is that it often functions to arouse hate toward some outgroup.

Let’s take California’s K-12 school line item in the state operating budget, for example.  It comprises the largest part of the state operating budget — about 43 percent — as mandated by Proposition 98.

School districts and the newspaper media around the state have been hysterical about teacher layoff notices over the past five years.   The state K-12 budget has been cut $8 billion, or about 19 percent, over the past five years.  But it has mostly resulted in cutting “fluff” and “earmarks” out of the education budget.  Hardly a core teacher around the state was laid off.  Ending some earmarks saved California’s schools.  The state LAO even suggested that there was nearly $7.4 billion more in “categorical” programs — make-work jobs — that still could be cut back beyond what already has been cut.

One Democratic legislator called for rolling “categorical” funding into a block grant.  Block grants would leave it up to each school district, instead of Sacramento, flexibly to decide what would be funded or cut.  But this wouldn’t allow state legislators to buy votes from unions by doling out “categorical” jobs, so it was dropped.

Parcel taxes

From 2010 to 2012, wealthy school districts around the state put a double school property tax on the ballot — called a parcel tax — to add more local tax revenues to their schools to avoid so-called budget deficits.

But there was no need to save core teacher jobs, despite claims that teachers would be laid off.   School districts without added funding from parcel taxes ended up not having to cut core teachers.  Why would those with added parcel tax revenue have to lay off teachers?

What the parcel taxes paid for was mostly ancillary make-work jobs programs — called “categorical positions” — and luxury services such as school busing or more school librarians.  The people who voted for parcel taxes were mostly snookered into believing there was a state budget deficit crisis that would result in core teacher layoffs.

Those school districts that voted for parcel taxes merely freed up state funding to allow poorer school districts to retain “categorical” jobs programs like school busing, dental checkups, extra librarians, physical education teachers, American Indian education centers, etc.  One man’s public school deficit is another’s luxury public school service or make work jobs program.   Budget deficits are relative to who is in power to define them as such.

Deficit or spending problem?

Once again, we must ask: Were the schools actually running budget deficits or did they have a spending problem?  Was the budget cup half full or half empty?  Or has the state and local budget deficit crisis become a cliche meant to stifle opposition?

One Man’s Budget Deficit is Another’s Spending Problem

Once it is established in the minds of a group of people, it is very difficult to dislodge a cliche even by clear empirical evidence.  It becomes a taken-for-granted truth.  As sociologist W.I. Thomas once said, “A situation that is defined as real is real in its consequences.”

People do not like to be confronted with what social psychologists call “cognitive dissonance.” When later confronted by contrary evidence, one’s early emotional perceptions of a situation are bolstered by resistance.  In fact, one’s emotional perceptions become stronger, not weaker, as evidence of the true situation becomes known. As the saying goes: “I have made up my mind, don’t bother me with the facts.”

Cliches are made plausible and convincing not by the amount or quality of evidence for them but by the way they meet the social and psychological needs of a particular situation.

Who benefits?

We have to ask, “Who benefits from the ideological distortions of cliches about the state and public school budget deficits?” My guess is that unions and state legislators desiring to protect political earmarks and political pork that buy votes are the main beneficiaries of the state budget deficit cliche.

Sometimes even conservative writers consume the same cliche by claiming the state is going bankrupt due to huge budget deficits.  But it is mainly cities, counties and special enterprise districts that are more prone to bankruptcy.

State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, recently said that funding for health and welfare programs was going to have to be cut due to continuing tax shortfalls.  Steinberg added that, unless health and welfare programs were funded, $1.5 billion in affordable housing funds lefto ver from defunct redevelopment agencies would have to be tapped.  Should people’s health and welfare suffer so that luxury affordable housing programs can continue?   In other words, money is available to plug the funding gap for health and welfare programs.  So is this to be construed as part of Brown’s $16 billion “budget deficit”?

If the above data from the state LAO are reliable, perhaps the cliche about the state budget deficit more accurately reflected the early reality the state wanted us to believe from 2007 to 2010.  There wasn’t much information available during that period from which to define what the state meant by a “budget deficit.”  Cliches plugged that information gap.

But are we now running deficits, or avoiding cuts to luxury goods, programs and services from the state budget? If wages, both public and private, were allowed to adjust to their market levels instead of propping them up with stimulus programs and prolonged unemployment benefits the state’s pension liability might become more manageable and not require a tax increase.

How can California have a budget deficit crisis?  It has spent $18.7 billion on five “waterless” water bonds since 2000 that mostly went for acquiring open space without any substantial new water supplies to show for it?

How can it have a health and welfare budget deficit crisis when it is spending $3 billion on mostly redundant stem cell research that has now been found to be obsolescent science?

The lesson to be learned from California’s infamous budget deficit is to beware of relying on cliches early on about ambiguous situations to be dealt with by public policies or programs.

In informing oneself on how to vote in the upcoming election on tax increase proposals, one should not rely on cliches but on facts and disinterested opinion wherever possible.

As such, the old saying to “avoid cliches like the plague” may offer the best advice in informing oneself how to vote on tax increase proposals to plug the so-called state budget “deficit” in November 2012.