While the House-Senate conference committee in Washington tries to hammer out agreement on a budget resolution, voters in California go to the polls on May 19 to decide on a series of ballot propositions backed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger which would both increase taxes and set some limits (or purport to do so) on state spending. As Dan Weintraub of the Sacramento Bee points out, the state Republican party has opposed the propositions, a slap at Schwarzenegger, and the Democratic party has, with perhaps characteristic nuance, declined to endorse them. Weintraub, who writes cogently on policy as well as politics, calls this a game of chicken: Republicans hope they can impose spending limits through a later ballot proposition, while Democrats hope they can persuade voters to get rid of the two-thirds requirement for passing a budget.
Behind this is a larger issue. One in eight Americans live in California. While those of us in Washington have focused on the Obama budget’s humungous increase in federal spending, state spending has gone up robustly in California ever since Schwarzenegger was defeated on a series of ballot propositions which would have weakened the public employee unions’ stranglehold on the California legislature. The public employee unions have been plundering California’s private sector economy, and the state’s March 2009 unemployment was 11.2%, the fourth highest in the nation (after Michigan, Oregon and South Carolina). The cumulative effect of this public sector growth in California, and in states like New York and New Jersey where the public employees’ unions have also developed a stranglehold on policy, rises to the level of national significance.
