The announcement this week that the state faces an additional $7.3 billion deficit, on top of the $8 billion already projected, is likely to kill any slight chance that the propositions on the May 19 special election ballot will pass.
The figures, which Gov. Schwarzenegger has been trumpeting around the state, apparently hoping they’ll convince voters to support the measures, could backfire on him, as Chronicle reporter John Wildermuth suggests in his blog.
I’m convinced they will.
The entire rationale behind these measures is that they are needed to put the state back on the road to fiscal health.
Now, even under the most optimistic scenario, the most they could accomplish is make the state less sick than it already is. If they don’t pass, the state will have to cope with a $21.3 billion deficit — as opposed to $15.3 billion if they do.
In other words, the ballot measures won’t eliminate more than two thirds of the projected deficit the state is now expected to rack up by June 2010 (that is, under this week’s estimates).
That’s not enough to motivate voters to get out of bed and get to the polls — let alone to vote affirmatively when they get inside the polling booth.
Just two weeks ago, Gov. Schwarzenegger complained to Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton that Skelton, and other media pundits, were being too negative about the measures. ”We should just simply describe 1A as a measure that will fix the broken budget system once and for all so that you never have to make those severe cuts again,” he scolded Skelton. ”And you never have to go back to the people for tax increases again.”
I know in the new media environment we’re in almost anything goes. But any journalist who reports, predicts or implies that Prop. 1A will “fix our broken budget system” or that lawmakers will “never have to go back to the people for tax increases again” should turn in his reporter’s notebook. Immediately.
Actually, 1A will have no impact on reducing the budget deficit during the coming year. The only measure that will have any significant impact on the 2010 budget deficit is Prop. C, which borrows $5 billion against future lottery earnings.
Details, details.
As I wrote in an earlier blog, I’m praying someone in Sacramento will come up with a workable Plan B. The figures that Keith Yamamura in the Sacramento Bee has come up with don’t come close to closing the gap.
We must be in even worse shape than I thought if the Schwarzenegger administration is serious about trying to sell San Quentin to raise cash, as the Los Angeles Times reports. Without a clear plan of where a new San Quentin would be built — no one else wants it — complicated by the huge cost of building a new one – it is a nonsensical ideal that is guaranteed to be dead on arrival.
In fact, it was dead before it arrived.
LOUIS FREEDBERG
