Californians voted yesterday to reject the package of tax increases and spending limitations supported by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Democratic state legislators and some but not all public employee unions. They key vote on Proposition 1A (labeled “’rainy day’ budget stabilization fund”) was 66%-34% no. 1B (labeled “education funding. payment plan”) went down 63%-37%. 1C (“lottery modernization”) was rejected 65%-35%. 1D (“children’s services funding”) lost 66%-34%. 1E (“mental health funding”) was beaten 66%-34%. Only 1F, cutting legislators’ salaries when the budget isn’t balanced, passed, by a 74%-26% margin. It carried every county. Of the other propositions 1B was approved in three counties (San Francisco, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz) and the other lost in all 58 counties.
I suppose you could argue that this was the verdict of an unrepresentative sliver of the electorate: 3,882,919 votes were cast on 1A, only 29% of the 13,577,265 Californians who voted for president last November and only 43% of the 8,984,057 who voted in the October 2003 recall election (which was more than have voted in any regularly scheduled gubernatorial election). It appears that Schwarzenegger did not vote: press accounts said he did not take out an absentee ballot, and he spent the day in Washington, joining in the celebration for Barack Obama’s imposition of higher auto mileage standards and meeting with Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer.
It appears that Schwarzenegger almost did not vote: he spent the day in Washington, joining in the celebration for Barack Obama’s imposition of higher auto mileage standards and meeting with Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, and only at the last minute filled out an absentee ballot.
California is now facing a huge budget shortfall and rapidly declining revenues from its highly progressive income tax. What do you want to bet that one of the subjects of Schwarzenegger’s conversations in Washington was a federal bailout of the state government?
Schwarzenegger’s governorship has been a tragedy. He came to office promising to curb California’s extravagant spending. He took on the public employee unions with a series of ballot propositions in November 2005, but they spent something like $100 million against them and whipped them soundly. At which point he hired a top aide to his predecessor Gray Davis as his chief of staff and governed as Davis had, trying to hold down the spending demanded of the Democratic legislature by the public employee unions.
Like Davis, he failed, as became evident in both cases when the economy turned down. The ballot propositions rejected yesterday were Schwarzenegger’s attempt to wrest from the Democratic legislators some limitations on future spending in return for higher taxes to support current spending. To which the voters said, “No!”
Now the rest of us are going to be asked to bail out California’s public employee unions. To which, I fear, the answer from Washington will be, “Yes, we can!”
