Curing our budget bulimia

BY RANDY ALCORN
Triggered by a $14 billion budget deficit, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has declared a state financial emergency. It seems like just last year that state politicians were giddily trying to decide how to spend all the windfall tax money that the state’s booming economy would pour into the state treasury. Hmm, wait a minute that was last year. My, how time flies when you’re on a spending binge.

This year, the state’s politicians are wringing their hands and sniping at each other over whether to raise taxes or cut spending to eliminate yet another budget deficit. No surprise that Republicans mostly want to cut spending, while the Democrats mostly want to raise taxes. All the players are playing their usual cards in Sacramento’s endless, politically partisan, poker game.
For years now state finances have suffered binge and purge financial mismanagement—clearly demonstrating how inept, irresponsible, and untrustworthy government is in managing our tax money. Give the governor credit for attempting to cure this budget bulimia when he was first elected. Then, both the state legislature and the voters rejected his initial efforts to impose fiscal responsibility on state government. Now, presented with an “I-told-you-so” opportunity, the governor is reviving his call for constitutional changes that would create sensible fiscal controls on government.
Ironically, the governor’s stated belief that government’s “basic responsibility is to take care of people” is not only incongruous with sensible fiscal responsibility but also with the founding principals of this nation.
American government was established to provide a judicial system, a national defense, and a common agreement under which all its citizens would be equal under the law and would have the individual freedom to pursue their own happiness.
American government was intended to be an impartial referee, not a nanny. Self-reliant citizens would build a great nation; a citizenry dependent on government will wear it down.
Would those who are caterwauling about how spending cuts will hurt the poor, the elderly, the disabled, and the schools have us believe that the state is already running as lean and efficiently as possible, and that most of the expenditures are needed to “take care of people”? Just how many needy folks are there in California that the taxpayers must come up with $140 billion each year to take care of them? Tugging on the public conscience and feeding public fears are political ploys as old as politics.
Californians already suffer one of the nation’s highest tax burdens. Now, government profligates want to add even more tax burden on citizens. As with every purge cycle of California’s budget bulimia there come renewed attacks on Proposition 13.
With the value of California real estate grown so high, gluttonous government chafes under the dietary restraint that prevents it from taxing people out of their homes as it could in the days before Prop 13.
One simple truth about California’s budget problem is not that the state has so many needy people to take care of; but rather that it has too much government to take care of. Government’s larded bureaucracies, excessive pay, and unconscionably generous retirement benefits are a significant source of the state’s spending problem.
Recently, the governor was told by a special commission he appointed that the state immediately needed $1.2 billion to fund state employees’ lifetime healthcare benefits. How many of you working in the private sector have lifetime healthcare benefits? When government employees can retire at full pay after 30 years of employment, and get annual cost of living increases after retirement as well as lifetime healthcare benefits, do you think maybe there is an opportunity here to balance the state budget without imposing more taxes on the common civilians?
The other simple truth about the state’s budget problem is that public education accounts for over 40% of the state budget. Public school systems are certainly not free from bureaucratic excesses and costly inefficiencies. And, regardless of the vitriolic, self-righteous, indignation of the teachers’ union and their paid lackeys in government, any effort to rein in state spending has to include public education.
And, the greatest financial drain on public education in California is its federally mandated obligation to educate the children of millions of illegal immigrants. These kids increase school enrollments by about 25% and cost taxpayers about $15 billion per year. Many of these kids are transient; most do not speak English and come from cultures that place less value on education. Those are conditions that not only strain school budgets but also reduce the effectiveness of public education.
While the governor is suing the federal government over environmental laws, he should add in the cost of educating the children of illegal aliens who are here because the feds do not enforce immigration law. The cure to budget bulimia starts with a strong dose of reality.

Randy Alcorn’s Right on Target column appears every other Tuesday in the Daily Sound. Respond via e-mail to letters@santabarbarafree.com