The American Spectator : California's Brown Out

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California's Brown Out

By RiShawn Biddle on 3.18.11 @ 6:08AM

The young Jerry Brown would be doing a much better job.

These days, Edmund Gerald (Jerry) Brown Jr. probably wishes he was anything other than California's once and future governor. The state's intractable fiscal and educational woes, along with its dysfunctional political culture, all but assure that his third term in office will be even harder than his time presiding over Golden State government 29 years ago.

Brown isn't getting much help from either fellow state officials or his political allies to shore up $26 billion in budget shortfalls for this and the upcoming fiscal year. Brown needs a two-thirds support from the state legislature for approval of his request to ask voters to approve $12 billion in tax extensions and new hikes. But Republicans refuse to lend their votes (and their political careers) to approve it. While Brown and his fellow Democrats can put the plan on the ballot under the guise of extending earlier tax increases, they are no more willing to risk political suicide than their GOP counterparts.

Meanwhile Brown's fellow Democrats are balking at the governor's plan to cut $12 billion in spending. Assembly and Senate Democratic leaders voted down his plan to shut down the state's coterie of urban redevelopment agencies (which has long provided welfare to real estate developers at the expense of everyone else). University of California and California State University students -- many of whom come from comfortable middle class homes -- are protesting Brown's move to cut $1 billion from the university budgets. Back-benchers accuse Brown of balancing the budgets on the backs of the poor. Declared Assemblywoman Noreen Evans in the California Progress Report: "The sacrifice is almost exclusively being asked of our children and grandchildren."

The only ones to praise Brown so far are public sector unions such as the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees and the state's two largest teachers' unions, who backed his successful return to high office to the tune of $1.6 million, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics. That's because Brown's proposed cuts have largely shielded state workers under collective bargaining from losing jobs. But this will not last for long. Brown has already declared that without the tax hikes, he would cut spending by 27 percent. Hard-core unionists, annoyed over Brown's other cuts, are spoiling for a fight with both Brown and their own union leaders.

Brown isn't the only new governor charged with dealing with fiscal reckoning after decades of short- and long-term profligacy. But unlike governors such as Scott Walker in Wisconsin and even fellow political legatee Andrew Cuomo in New York, Brown has a lot less flexibility in dealing with the problems. Decades of fecklessness on nearly all fronts has left the Golden State in shambles. Meanwhile Brown's own allegiances to public sector unions -- including the state's National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers locals -- means that he's not even attempting smart moves in areas that could bolster California's future for the long run.

Certainly this isn't the first time Brown has steered the state through periods of fiscal pain. As California's governor during the inflation and property tax revolt times of the 1970s, he was as well known for eschewing state limousines, occasionally cutting budgets and building up a $5 billion surplus, as for dating singer Linda Ronstadt, touting alternative energy schemes, and oddball statements that led him to be nicknamed Governor Moonbeam. He even managed to get the endorsement of famed tax reformer Howard Jarvis for a second term in 1978 after he responded to the passage of Proposition 13 with a string of budget cuts and property tax relief.

But it was easy to play the role of frugal liberal. His father, the legendary Pat Brown, and future president Ronald Reagan did most of the tax-and-spending, including greatly expanding the state's higher education and highway systems. More importantly, the Golden State was in its economic and fiscal heyday; steady migration from the East Coast, the rise of Silicon Valley, a flourishing oil sector, and an aerospace sector fueled by federal contracts helped overcome damage to the state from the byzantine structure of state and local governments, and feckless voter referendums.

This time around, Brown has taken back the reins after three decades of governors and legislatures more-consumed by dysfunction than good fiscal stewardship. Brown's immediate successor George Deukmejian presided over a doubling of the state budget. During the 1990s, as Brown went from being state Democratic Party boss to a presidential bid to becoming mayor of Oakland, then-Gov. Pete Wilson and longtime state Assembly Speaker Willie Brown were engaged in their own hijinks, fiscal and otherwise.

Economic and fiscal conditions in the Golden State have taken a turn for the worse over the past 12 years as the brief-yet-disastrous gubernatorial tenure of Gray Davis was followed by the longer (and even worse) reign of Arnold Schwarzenegger. While the governors sparred with legislators over budgets and missed deadlines to pass them, the fiscal profligacy continued unabated. State spending increased by 77 percent between the 1999-2000 and 2008-2009 fiscal years before the current economic malaise finally forced state leaders to cut spending. In that same time, voters passed referendums -- from building new schools to costly high-speed rail projects -- that will cost them $113 billion in principle and interest over the next three decades.

Brown himself cannot escape blame for the state's current predicament; some of the problems in fact date to his previous tenure. One of his most-damaging moves came just after the passage of Prop. 13 in 1978 when he began pouring more state dollars into local governments in order to stave off reductions in property tax revenue. With the state stepping in to subsidize local government (and later, to take on such matters as housing jail inmates), municipalities began exercising even less restraint than they did during the years before property tax relief. The effort (along with Prop. 13, environmental rules and lawsuits by Native American tribes) also helped make California's housing market more expensive by shifting the dominant source of revenue for local governments from property taxes to sales taxes; to get more of that cash, municipalities enacted land use rules to encourage the development of shopping malls and car dealerships.

This time around, Brown has wrangle with more than just the state's fiscal problems. Decades of deal making between NEA and other public-sector unions, state governments, school districts, and municipalities has led to $516 billion in pension deficits and unfunded retiree healthcare benefits, according to the Pew Center on the States. But save for a move by the state's Teachers Retirement System to reduce its inflated rate of return by a quarter of a percent, little is actually being done to address the growing crisis. Within the past month, CalSTRS, along with the gargantuan California Public Employees Retirement System, chastised a state commission for daring to argue that the state should actually do something about it. Brown isn't exactly stepping up to the plate to address it.

But Brown is tearing down the one thing immediate predecessor Schwarzenegger and the state legislature managed to get right: Reforming the state's woeful public schools. In January, the governor tossed out seven of the eleven members of the state board of education -- including Ted Mitchell, the founder of school reform vanguard NewSchools Venture Fund, and Ben Austin, who helped pass the nation's first Parent Trigger law -- and replaced them with a group that included a lobbyist for the NEA's California local.

Since then, the board has sat pat as an effort to use the state's Parent Trigger law -- an effort in Compton to turn McKinley Elementary School into a charter -- has been obstructed by the school district and its AFT local. This has set back efforts to give parents a dominant role in overhauling (or shutting down) the state's failure mills and improve the low quality of its teachers and principals. None of Brown's plans address the byzantine structure of state boards, school districts, county agencies and other entities that have long done a poor job of providing education to the state's students, which would actually save money for taxpayers.

Given the problems at hand, Brown needs to do more than just offer Solomonic solutions for the state's fiscal crisis. He could easily take a page from Walker, Cuomo, or even Chris Christie in New Jersey and stare down the state's political ancien régime. Or maybe, he could just dust off his old playbook and act like Jerry Brown circa 1976.

About the Author

RiShawn Biddle the editor of Dropout Nation , is co-author of A Byte at the Apple: Rethinking Education Data for the Post-NCLB Era. He can be followed at Twitter.com/dropoutnation.

Letter to the Editor View all comments (33) | Leave a comment

Bill Hussein O'Stalin| 3.18.11 @ 6:25AM

It's really amazing how easily the public is duped into voting these idiots back into office.

converse basses| 3.19.11 @ 5:24AM

me,too

Who Knows?| 3.18.11 @ 7:56AM

Jerry Brown, Jerry Brown

He's a clown, that Jerry Brown

Why's everybody always pickin' on me?

Bert| 3.18.11 @ 8:27AM

Mr Biddle , you failed to mention that Moonbean soley created the current CA financial by signing the Dills Act in 1978. Yes , Moonbeam created the massive State Employee Unions and Collective Bargaining in 1978 that has Swallowed CA into massive debt that will destroy it.
Yes, the influx of millions of illegals and foreign nationals who now make up a large massively overpaid and underworked State Union Dem voting block was created by this corrupt hate filled leftist. The CA voters who are so dumb downed and dependent upon state hand outs just voted in the creator of this mess to finish them all off.

saleboter| 3.18.11 @ 8:32AM

Will the last business to leave California please turn out the light

Steve A| 3.18.11 @ 11:02AM

too funny! thanks saleboter. classic

Publius| 3.21.11 @ 9:56AM

And don't forget to grab the (US) flag----if there's one left.

Dee See| 3.18.11 @ 9:18AM

PLEASE, as fallout sails over the Pacific, the borders dissolve, and Mexico itself has been
collapsed by the EUGENIST-Globalists
----STOP serving up '70's Show' themes.

We are dealing with 2 decades of outright
TREASON and MUTINY from above.

---More helpful to deliver a full breakdown on
the capabilities of HAARP tech, CHEM-trailing
and the unfolding catastrophe in yesterday's
Globalist paradise, and now RED China's regional stumbling block -----JAPAN.

Dave| 3.18.11 @ 9:57AM

Looking back and running some numbers, it occurred to me that had the voters of this state (New Taxifornia-West) not passed Prop 13, then a few hundred thousand home owners could have simply had a little more time to plan ahead for (a) the ultimate loss their house due to the state's "failure to pay fair share clause" (b) ended up renting discount trailer space at Miguel's Mobile Casa Village and (c) ultimately saw themselves contributing to the required funding for cities, countries and state government worker salaries, pension funds and lifetime healthcare benefits. Come on, kids, would thata' been so much to ask?

It's actually pretty easy to compute when you finally master the CTA's version of New Math: 2+2+ = Gimme More. I mean what's a few home foreclosures when it comes to making sure a few thousand government employees can retire at 55+ (with full salary and benefits ) while at the same time making sure the earlier mentioned Miguel and family get their free MediCal?

I hear the weather's kind of nice in Nicaragua this time of year.

Rogue Elephant| 3.18.11 @ 10:32AM

CORRECTION: It was the GOP who opposed abolishing RDA's. Brown had the Democrat votes, couldn't muster the needed GOP votes. http://www.sacbee.com/2011/03/....._rss=State Politics

The California GOP establishment is mostly an unprincipled bunch. They are not principled conservatives.

There are exceptions, of course, including Rep. Tom McClintock and former Assemblyman Chuck DeVore.

DeVore is now running for OC Supervisor against a GOP pension-spiker (Todd Spitzer) who just got the endorsement of OC Supervisor (and fellow pension-spiker) Bill Campbell. If Spitzer wins, the OC Board will be dominated by a Republican pension-spiking majority (Spitzer-Campbell-Bates).

See what I mean?

Occam's Tool| 3.18.11 @ 12:38PM

I left California after graduating from UCLA in 1993. I clearly forsaw the mess, and moved to Alabama. Second best decision of my life, after marrying She Who Must be Obeyed.

John II| 3.19.11 @ 12:26AM

"She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed"? That can't be right, Occie. I married her myself 20 years earlier, and we're still married!

You must check your sources more carefully. And now back to Episode 405 of "Rumpole of the Bailey." I mourn the passing of Leo McKern--who played exactly the opposite kind of role as Cromwell in "Man for All Seasons" (1966)

Publius| 3.21.11 @ 10:01AM

Glad to have you here with the rest of the rubes, (or so the elightened say). Whereabouts you live?
Montgomery here.

J.C.Eaton| 3.18.11 @ 1:28PM

There is no power under the canopy of Heaven that can save Callyfornya. None, write it off.

Martin Owens| 3.18.11 @ 1:44PM

Living here in Sacramento these days recalls the opening chapters of Atlas Shrugged.
The ruling class simply slam-bang refuses to acknowledge that they can no longer spend as much money as they like for anything they can dream up, any time they feel like it. And anyone who says differently is an old meany, an earth-hater and probably a racist, too. The Manchus and the Romanovs look brilliant by comparison.

I wonder if they haven’t all privately come to the conclusion that the situation here can no longer be salvaged, and the only thing to do now is get in there and grab their chunk off the carcass while it’s still there to get. There may be a man in California who can lead us out of this, but it’s certainly not Jerry Brown.

Richard Baker| 3.18.11 @ 1:49PM

These clowns are broke, busted, and tapped out and STILL the citizens and government act as if nothing has happened. Crazy! When they go bankrupt (as they are insolvent now) and belly-up, will we still hear the whining and crying from the Fruit Loops who constitute the citizenry of the State? The answer is, of course, yes. Fine, let them stew in their own juices.

Redstateboy| 3.18.11 @ 4:24PM

sort of reminds you of Nero supposedly playing his Harp as Rome burned. My fear is millions of Liber-uls fleeing CA and infesting the rest of the Nation. Already here in God's Country (that'd be Tennessee) NE Liber-uls, who've gutted their States: NY, IL, All of New England; are moving down here and acting like.... "Ya know...??? You are all a bunch of stupid, Racist Rednecks down here! Ya know what we need??? more laws, more taxes, we need to be more Liber-ul." They're so Obtuse due to Liber-ulisms effete, condescending character - they don't even realize they're proposing the very insanity that drove them from their Socialist Utopias in the first place!! Gawd! Liber-uls are soooo stupid!

DANSHANTEAL| 3.18.11 @ 2:48PM

How can you say that? He was governor moonbeam then and governor beanhead now.

Michael| 3.18.11 @ 2:52PM

Governor Jerry Brown. A leftist then and a leftist now. Quick, move to Arizona while you still can!!

Chuck| 3.18.11 @ 4:12PM

Governor Moonbeam has now become Governor Glow-In-The-Dark. Japan's bombardment of Hawaii again with tsunamis this time and now Jerry Brown land with radiation is poetic justice. I hear rumbling in Diablo Canyon.

Cris Worth| 3.18.11 @ 4:36PM

Speaking of poetic justice, Governor Brown sowed the seeds of California's demise 35 years ago and now he will reap what he sowed. Leftist Berkeley protesting leftist Brown, I love it.

Nightmare on Obama Street| 3.18.11 @ 6:16PM

Besides the tidal wave of illegal aliens who cost the State Of California at least 13 billion a year the article fails to mention one other major factor in this disaster of a state. The radical environmentalists have taken over the government bureaucracy and own the legislature. The have made it impossible to create and run business and seek to rule everyday life through regulations.

California has over 500 commissions which are staffed through political patronage and issue fiats without voter approval. California will descent into chaos in the next year. There is no more money and the democrats refuse to recognise this reality.

If you live here and are a conservative. then you live in hell.

Jack| 3.19.11 @ 1:19PM

If Cally is hell then what is Oregon? Living in Eugene is like living in Berkeley. Every Guvmint entity from the dog catcher to the Governor is a flaming socialist. I sometimes think I have woken up to an alternate reality. I prefer to think that our secret ballot is being used to elect who ever they want and that the people of Oregon are not that stupid.

John II| 3.19.11 @ 12:49AM

Actually, if you're conservative and you live in California, you're now in the process of leaving California.

The productive Central Valley hasn't had an ounce of political representation in California for at least two decades, and the whole state is now run by LA and SF degenerates.

I have watched all this from my eagle's nest in the heart of the Americano wilderness, looking west to the setting sun and fretting over the fortunes of those of my many children who have ventured westward. They are making different plans now.

Yet I have to admit that there is an element of poetry (however debased) in the spectacle of Associate Professor Brown's return to oversee the collapse of the Golden State. The man is an intellectual oaf, without shame or dignity--purely a construct of his era, lacking grace or thought.

So it is, I suppose, appropriate that Providence has chosen the Associate Professor to be the final symbol of decline and fall in the land of milk and honey. Whoever is the last to leave, please be sure to leave an inflated whoopee cushion on the seat behind the desk of the weird governor.

play nice| 3.19.11 @ 1:48PM

California - Amarlo o Dejarlo!

M Alborn| 3.22.11 @ 3:02PM

Where do you live? In Quincy perhaps or some place like that? Just wondering almost moved there some years ago

watches| 3.19.11 @ 3:12AM

One of his most-damaging moves came just after the passage of Prop. 13 in 1978 when he began pouring more state dollars into local governments in order to stave off reductions in property tax revenue. With the state stepping in to subsidize local government (and later, to take on such matters as housing jail inmates), municipalities began exercising even less restraint than they did during the years before property tax relief. The effort (along with Prop. 13, environmental rules and lawsuits by Native American tribes) also helped make California's housing market more expensive by shifting the dominant source of revenue for local http://www.watch07.com governments from property taxes to sales taxes; to get more of that cash, municipalities enacted land use rules to encourage the development of shopping malls and car dealerships.

Glein| 3.19.11 @ 12:31PM

Governor "Moonbeam" is the perfect politician for the decline of the California into economic, political ruin. He has carried water for every liberal, progressive, public union three card monty game ever played. He is now there to fiddle while Rome burns. The people of California voted Barbara "Don't call me mam" Boxer into office for another 6 years of political incoherence why not put Brown back in office. He and Boxer can fiddle together as California becomes America's first, third world country.

Koblog| 3.20.11 @ 12:03AM

It is clear that California is circling the drain.

So what actually happens when we go bankrupt or run out of money or the state IOUs are no longer accepted by anyone or nobody buys the state bonds because you can't cash them?

Rowdy Boots| 3.20.11 @ 11:31AM

California deserves exactly what it has: A failed state. A silly governor, and a tax structure that steals money from hardworking people and gives it to unions, illegals, "minorities" and other Pets.

I laugh at your fools...I have not bought a bottle of California Wine in 20 years due to the Liberal Left's takeover of that state.

Wine producers, get rid of the Libs and Unions and I may buy another bottle of your Taxpayer Funded wine.

Rowdy Boots

MyGirlFriday| 3.21.11 @ 1:32PM

I am not familiar with the "Pew Report" noted in this article but I am surprised that Mr. Biddle did not mention the Little Hoover Report released just last month "Public Pensions for Retirement Security." The report offers an analysis of what got the Golden State into the budget sinkhole and offers reforms that could get us out. While it is 106 pages, it does offer the public a real look of the present and future danger relating to the state's public pensions. The bottom line, our debt is unsustainable without reforming the public pensions. Every taxpayer in California should read the report if they wish to know the precise facts and figures of our debt but more importantly what they are paying in taxes to support these monolithic social programs.