So, California...Follow

Only just last night? What specifically about the election results caused this revelation? Some of us have been aware of the ridiculous overspending in California for decades...

And it's really not the initiative system btw. It's quite arguable that without that system, while we might not be quite as far in debt, we'd be paying double the taxes to pay for all the crap the Democrat dominated Assembly would like to pay for if the people would let them. The only thing holding back nearly unlimited spending has been initiatives designed to limit tax revenues. There have been a couple famous ones where the people of California basically told the Assembly "We're not paying for that!". Sadly, it hadn't worked as well as it should, but it's better than the alternative.

And the Assembly's response was, predictably, "We're funding it anyway!"

I wouldn't be surprised one way or the other, considering that most people vote on initiatives based on what the immediate effects are, not any subsequent effects.

I would rate this exchange as one of the most horrifically banal I've ever borne witness to.

See, those are what a lot of the initiatives we get in Oregon are like.

"We're going to increase mandatory minimum sentences! But -- we're not going to increase funding for any law enforcement! And we know people are going to vote down jail bonds!"

It's kind of ridiculous. Having seen enough of that in the last ten years, I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happens in California.

That's an amazing analogy.

No, they are not.



This is generally true, however it only takes one unfunded mandate to destroy the budget. For example, the three strikes law requires life in prison even for a nonviolent third offense, yet had no funding mechanism for the tremendous expense it requires. Yes, it was passed a long time ago - but the full costs will continue to rise for a very long time.



Wait, you just said that most are bond issues?



1. There is a requirement that the state budget be balanced.

2. It requires 2/3 vote to pass a budget and to increase taxes - meaning everything requires Republican votes.

3. The governor can line item veto any spending item out of the budget.

4. The governor has been Republican since 1983 except about four years and nine months.

So why is there an actual budget crisis? Revenues fell. Why? They are largely linked to home values which fell.

Further, due to prop 13, although home values are recovering, the rate of increase in the effective home value upon which taxes are based is capped at 2% per year.

Example: A home worth $1 million fell to $0.5 million due to the housing bubble. Even if it rebounds to be worth $1 million the next day, to the state it can only increase at 2% per year for the purposes of assessing property taxes, so $0.51 million the next year, and so on.

Thus if housing prices are highly unstable, property taxes go down very fast but cannot recover. Since they are such an unusually large fraction of the overall state budget, the whole thing is tanked.

Just to clarify, I was talking about most initiatives involving new programs and proposals (which would cost money). My point was that most initiatives don't just demand that the government implement something, but demand that X be done, paid for by Y bond plan. Given that I see usually a half dozen of these on the ballot every time, I can assure you that this is true.



Yes. That is one of the rare cases in which an initiative imposed requirements on the government and didn't include any specific plan to pay for it. I'll also point out, however, that while there wasn't an adjoining payment structure for that, most people consider "law enforcement" to be a normally required component of government and it should be thought of a little bit different than "we demand that the government build a new ballpark, or freeway, or art museum". I'll also point out that there are regular bond initiatives designed to pay for various needed expenses related to law enforcement, so it's a bit unfair to say that "the people" had no intention to pay for this.

What "the people" don't want to pay for is the massive amounts of money that are spent on projects which they didn't ask for. And that amount dwarfs any of the initiative stuff being tossed around.



Yeah. I wasn't clear. Most initiatives modify laws, or block previous legislative acts. Of those which propose "new" things which will cost money, most include some sort of bond measure as part of the new thing.

The main point is that the idea that our budget problems have arisen primarily as a result of the initiative process is just plain ridiculous. If we're to look at unfunded mandates, a whole hell of a lot of them come out of the Assembly, and not from the people via initiatives.

It's also helpful to look at the unfunded mandates passed onto the state (and not just California) from the federal government. This is another area where it's a bit murky. The Assembly doesn't just pass a spending bill, they just continue complying with an existing federal program which has changed such that it ends out costing the state more money. Education programs are notorious for this, and the newly passed health care bill will swamp us with rising costs, when we already can't afford the current stuff. And let's not forget the complete ******** over that California gets from the federal government with regard to managing illegal aliens.


But we just want to blame the initiative process? Really?



True, but meaningless. It requires that much to pass a budget, but not to pass legislation which mandates costs which much be included in that budget. In the same way that a law requiring you to pay for your meal before you leave the restaurant doesn't actually prevent you from ordering a more expensive meal than you can afford, the Democrat controlled Assembly manages to put us into a budget crisis every single year by mandating so many costs, that we have to find things to cut. And of course, it's never their pet projects that end out getting cut.



The spending problems occur long before a year's budget is being drawn up. I could draw you a very large picture of the degree to which union lobbyists pretty much control the process and use it to enrich themselves, but I'm pretty sure you'd just refuse to look at it anyway.



Yes. And that's irrelevant.



No. Spending increased by nearly 100% over the period of time during which the housing bubble occurred, specifically counting on the revenue from said housing bubble to continue forever. See. The problem is that when revenues are tied to housing (as a good chunk is), then in times when revenues increase artificially and unsustainably, the "floor" for the budget rises. But instead of keeping expenses the same and putting the money aside (or heaven forbid, giving tax credits back to the people), the California Assembly just kept increasing costs right to the edge of what the revenues were bringing in.

That's why we're in a budget crisis. Housing prices fell, but our spending should not have increased as the bubble increased. It did. And that was not "the people", or the Governor. It was the Assembly seeing free money falling from the sky and assuming it would always be there, and passing spending bills to allocate not just that money, but money in the future as well. And now that the future is here and the money isn't here, we're kinda screwed.



Not completely correct. That will only be the case if the home which used to be worth 1M was sold and repurchased for .5M. It's only when property is purchased that the value is recalculated for property tax purposes.

The larger point is that a home which was purchased in 1990 for 100k was generating taxes based on that 100k value 3 years ago, even if it's market value had increased to 1M. If the bubble bursts and it's now worth .5M, and the owners sell, the state gains in tax revenue based on what they would have gotten otherwise. Similarly, anyone who spotted the bubble coming and sold 2-3 years ago, also increased the states tax revenue from that property over what it would have gotten.

Heck. All the people who bought at 1M and have seen their property values drop so much that they can't afford to sell the homes are "stuck" paying taxes on the full 1M even though their homes may be worth half of that. It doesn't work quite the way you seem to think it does.


The reason the housing bubble affected the state's revenue isn't so much about property taxes, but because the state itself has money invested in the market. So not only did they lose money off that, but the general economic downturn also hurt them badly. We can also look at state backed pensions for government union employees which lost a boatload of money, but since they're backed by the state, the state has to pick up the tab until those funds recover.


That's why California is in such a mess.

If I remember right, she's spent about $81 million out of pocket the rest were contributions from her supporters. Frankly, due to the idiot ads that both she and Poizner aired, I hated both of them. My daughter told me to vote for Meg Whitman because she thinks Poizner's name denotes evil and sounds like "poisoner."

Funny enough, the whole "anti-incumbent" atmosphere in 2010 lead to a whopping 82 of the 84 incumbents winning last week.

So not as dangerous as the media would have lead you to believe, eh?

So Fox news was presenting a liberal slant by talking about the "anti-incumbent" atmosphere for weeks up until these primaries? Couldn't it be possible that they, & CNN & MSNBC et. al, were wrong & that the people who actually bother to vote tended to stick with established candidates?

I think so, hence how the media spin on the 24 hour news cycle has changed to "Girl Power!" & cries of "Year of the Women".

I know this comes as a shock to those who've been spoon fed their opinions about Fox News, and it's funny that I have to point this out every single time, but they have a roughly equal number of liberal and conservative pundits on their panels. As a result, the liberals on those panels do constantly repeat the "anti-incumbent" claim, and are frequently corrected by conservatives who say that it's more likely either "anti-Democrat" or "anti-tax-and-spend".




Oh, I'm quite sure that the news just loves to use buzz phrases regardless of the situation. Doesn't change the fact that if you look at anything other than incumbency and gender, you'll see another pattern which only the conservatives are talking about. Not because it's not there, but because the liberals want to pretend that it isn't.



Yeah. Buzz phrases. I get it. I also get that those phrases are overwhelmingly coming from liberal pundits, not conservatives. Watch the actual panel discussions, not just the leadins and you'll see what I'm talking about. It looks to me like they want to talk about anything other than a wave of opposition to liberal economic platform, so they invent every possible other reason for the trends we're seeing among voters. Of course, if you never watch any political talk which includes a conservative viewpoint you'll fail to realize that there is another explanation...