Avoiding Reality, Avoiding Blame on the California Budget Deficit and Our Country’s Economic Crisis

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Robert Cruickshank

The best way to sum up the conservative Republican reaction to both the state's budget deficit and our economic crisis is "avoiding reality." From elected Republicans to their media outlets to their fanatic base, California's right-wing is finding itself having to become more and more extreme and divisive in avoiding the inevitable - higher taxes and more government spending as a solution to both our structural revenue shortfall and our worsening economic crisis.

And in the process, they're also having to rewrite history to avoid blame for those problems. Faced with widespread public outrage over the 10,000 layoff notices sent to teachers this week, among other concerns, Republicans have now decided to accuse Democrats of causing the crisis - even though it was Republican policies that created both the budget deficit AND the economic downturn.

As always, one of the best examples of lashing oneself to the Yacht Party and its anti-tax zealotry comes from an Orange County Register editorial published last Friday, on Speaker Nunez’s' oil tax: “The campaign to increase Californians' taxes to bail out politicians who have spent the state into an $8 billion hole began in earnest this week.”

Right here we see the first deflection of blame. Conservatives want us to ignore their role in the creation of the structural revenue shortfall. We are to pretend that they never rammed through Prop 13 in 1978, or $12 billion in tax giveaways, including the $6.1 billion vehicle license fee cut.

Further, they're not explaining which new spending is the problem here. As the California Budget Project explained last month, increases in spending came primarily in schools and in health care for the elderly. The fact is that we have a growing population of both young and old - and the Register is implying that they are responsible for our state's plight, not the conservatives who systematically starved the state of necessary revenues.

The editorial goes on to suggest that pay cuts are the answer: “Mr. Nunez should influence his friends at the California Teachers Association to agree to forego pay raises for a time. We don't know how much money that would save, but considering public schools get about 52 percent of the state's $102 billion budget, it should be substantial.”

Aside from their "not knowing how much money that would save" (the likely answer is "not very much"), this is a very bad approach to our state's other, related problem - the worsening economic downturn. More and more economists are coming to realize our basic economic problem is a lack of solvency, and the solution is to use government to raise incomes: