I haven't written much here about the budget mess in my state, mainly because there's not much more to say than that it's a mess. Not that long ago, we ousted a governor named Gray Davis and replaced him with one named Schwarzenegger because, among other reasons, we were afraid that if we didn't, this kind of thing would happen. Well, guess what.
I concur with my pal Robert Elisberg about the root of the problem. The root is that we have this daffy system here of grass roots propositions. It sounds oh so democratic in theory but in practice, it ain't working so well. Everyone wants the roads paved, the schools improved, the infrastructure upgraded…but nobody wants their taxes to go up to pay for any of that. The system makes it easy to vote to spend without any connection with how to pay for those expenditures.
Bob correctly fingers one of the architects of my state's current woes — the late Howard Jarvis, who in '78 spearheaded Proposition 13, the aptly-numbered initiative that froze property taxes and other fees. I thought Mr. Jarvis was a horrible man even before that. He spent a lot of time 'n' money trying to ram through bills that said, in essence, that if I'm your landlord, I can do any damn thing I want to you, including tearing up contracts and raising your rent or evicting you whenever I feel like it. He never achieved most of the items on his wishlist but just Prop 13 has been pretty devastating. It basically turned into an invite for the state to spend money it didn't have and couldn't get.
So now the whole of California is one big Ponzi scheme and it's living off credit cards. I seem to remember that in 1978, there was a ballot initiative that was offered as an alternative to 13 by our then-governor, Jerry Brown. There was this sentiment up and down the state that property taxes were too high and were being raised too capriciously. In the hope of heading off 13 and the disasters it could bring, Brown and some others offered a bill that would have limited property taxes but allowed for them to be raised under certain circumstances, mainly if the public thought a given expenditure was worth it.
Jarvis and his group steamrollered over that proposition…which was a shame. I suspect it would have given them most of what they wanted but in a way that would have prevented what we're now facing. It's interesting that Jerry Brown intends to run again for the governorship in 2010. Yeah, I know he acts a little weird and he seems to have the sense of humor of a dead marmoset. But California never had better financial discipline than during his terms of office and that's what we need now.