How They Scrooged Us Again

SACRAMENTO — It’s not Christmas in the state Capitol anymore. What for a time promised to be the merriest of giving seasons has turned instead into one more long, hot summer of humbug. With a flush economy and a fat surplus, state budget-makers had fairly trembled with joy at the thought of all the wonderful gifts they could heap upon California.

Now, alas, it is not to be. There is no surplus money to spread around. The presents must be removed, unopened, from under the tree. No shiny new tax cuts. No bailouts for the counties. No more new prisons, pay raises, parks, museums or roadside rest-stops. Nothing.

This time they can’t blame the economy. This time it was politics and pride. In short, Christmas was canceled because Pete Wilson didn’t get his way. The governor who still dreams of the White House had wanted to play Santa Claus in the annual summertime pageant known, prosaically, as the Budget Process. His idea was to convert the surplus into a big, b-as-in-boy billion -dollar tax cut.

Just imagine how swell that would have sounded next primary season. There would be Candidate Wilson, on the courthouse steps in Flinty Village, New Hampshire: I should be the next president because I know how to cut taxes for everybody, and also I was a Marine. Unfortunately for Wilson, Democrats would not indulge his ambition. They calculated that a billion-dollar tax cut would mean less money for California’s public schools, which at last report were too broke to provide textbooks for many students. They balked, Wilson got mad, and then he got even.

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All right, the governor huffed last week, the surplus now would be used to pay back the $1.3 billion that he and the budget-makers had raided from the state pension system five years ago. No tax cut. No goodies for anybody else. The courts had ordered restitution, but the people who run the pension fund had been sports. They had been willing to negotiate a payback over years--with interest, of course.

A favorite battle cry of budget warriors here is: “We stole it, fair and square.” Wilson’s decision to return the loot to the pension fund left a lot of people flabbergasted. It seemed un-American. Why settle today a debt that could be spread across many tomorrows? Besides, with term limits, most of the budget gang would be safely out of town long before the bill came due. Wilson was accused of dropping a “neutron bomb.” Even the governor himself seemed a little glum about the missed Christmas.

“This year has been a disgrace,” he told Dan Morain of The Times last Thursday. Wilson no doubt grasped that running for president as “the candidate who paid back what he stole” lacked the simple elegance of “Wilson, billion-dollar tax-cutter.”

Some insiders theorized Wilson was upset less about the lost tax cut than with the decision by Democrats earlier in the week to swallow his welfare cuts. The governor and his allies, it was suggested, had hoped the Democrats would hang up the budget forever over welfare “reform.” This would make them appear to be obnoxious, old-fashioned liberals--dead meat, in other words. Instead, the wily New Democrats outflanked Wilson. They declined to block the welfare cuts, so they could not be accused of blocking the welfare cuts . . .

Oh ho!

The brilliance of this, one suspects, was lost on the poor.

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After all the shaking and grinding of last week, there still is no budget. As of today, Sunday, the governor and Legislature will have violated the legal deadline by 34 days. Nobody seems to mind that much. Blowing the budget deadline is what they do here in the summertime. They blow the deadline in lean times. They blow it now, even with the state rolling in dough.

The budget impasse has become an annual nuisance to be tolerated, absorbed, like smoke from the autumnal burning of rice stubble. It’s become institutionalized. A credit union across from the Capitol fetches state workers as customers with its promise to deposit loans automatically into their accounts once the budget deadline passes and paychecks stop.

What’s funny, almost, is how earnestly the participants work year after dismal year to persuade reporters, and themselves, that this time they are “winning.” This time they will show that mean old Wilson. This time they will get those dirty Dems. Yes, and this time Lucy will let good old Charlie Brown kick that football.

Obviously, nobody wins these standoffs. Members of the warring sides might hang together, as Ben Franklin almost said, but in the end they all wind up getting hanged. Or, more accurately, hanging themselves. Raise this point, and they start talking about next year. Next year, they promise, we’ll be better-prepared. Next year we’ll show that mean old Wilson. Next year we’ll get those dirty Dems . . .