Happy New Fiscal Year California!

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By David Dayen
d-day

Congratulations, California! It's July 1, the start of the new fiscal year, and you don't have a budget, again. And if Mike Villines is to be believed, you won't have one for some time:

"We're doing meetings, but we're not making a ton of progress," Villines said on the final day of the 2007-08 fiscal year.

"The four legislative leaders are meeting regularly, but "a lot of it is building a rapport."

I hope they're playing that "trust" game where one of them falls to the ground and relies on everyone else to catch them, that's always a good one. Maybe they could swing a team building trip to Joshua Tree while they're at it!

According to Villines, those mean old Democrats are just irrationally sticking to raising taxes at a time of budget deficits between $15 and $20 billion dollars! Don't they know they could just stop funding public schools and everyone could go home for the summer?

In part, he blamed Democrats for sticking to a plan to raise taxes - $11 billion in the Senate and $6 billion in the Assembly - for stalling talks. He called such figures "totally unfounded and out of touch with reality."

"We understand the budget is a compromise. Being in the minority, we understand that," Villines said. "But we're having a difficult time getting our counterparts to really change their original premise on the budget, which is, 'We need taxes. We need to continue spending in government and that's the budget that we want.'"

"I keep waiting for that to end so we can get to where we are seriously negotiating," he added. "We haven't gotten there."

It's funny that Villines claims he understands the budget to be a compromise, given that there are literally dozens of members of his caucus who have never voted for a budget in their political careers.