I'm a bullet, bite me: Budgets, reality & sacrifice?

"We believe that Californians are sending enough of their money to Sacramento," said Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's press secretary, Aaron McLear, "and we ought to live within our means."

McLear was responding to a proposal by Democrats in the state Senate to raise taxes by $11.5 billion, "more than double the tax increase proposed by their counterparts in the Assembly," the San Jose Mercury News reported. 

The budget was due Sunday, June 15.  (For details, see the state constitution, article 4, section 12.)  Still, the budget hasn't been on time in more than two decades.  This is not unusual for state legislatures.  The immediate problem in California this year is a more-than $15 billion deficit.  Each party's plans to fix that "assume billions of dollars in new, unspecified revenues," explains The Bond Buyer, the self-proclaimed "Daily Newspaper of Public Finance."

In August, the state is expected to run out of money.  As an editorial in the Sacramento Bee put it, that's when California becomes "the state of Vallejo," the town that is bankrupt right now.

When it comes to the budget, the current governor is as competent as the former governor.  Schwarzenegger should be taken much more to task for promising "to 'clean house' and bring an end to what he called the irresponsible spending of Democrat Gray Davis." The same article in Sunday's San Jose Mercury News goes on to describe a reality attentive readers of this column have been broadly made aware of before:

"Despite different economic circumstances, both Davis and Schwarzenegger enjoyed strikingly similar growth in tax revenues: up 31.1 percent for Davis from 1999 to 2003, and up 34 percent so far for Schwarzenegger, who has now served approximately the same length of time.

"And both men increased spending at about the same clip. The state general fund grew by 32 percent, from $57.8 billion to $76.3 billion, under Davis. It surged 33.4 percent, from $76.3 billion to $101.8 billion, under Schwarzenegger."

All of this is very nice and very accurate, but the politics played with the budget only highlights that neither party nor branch of government has shown a particular genius in addressing the economic issues confronting California.  Unless genius is defined as presumably keeping your constituents believing that fighting only for their narrow interest is the best way to govern. 

It's not that our state representatives are leading us to this.  They are holding dear, for the time being, to their positions, following the citizens of their districts in destroying what little sense of community, or even consensus about whether we should be a community, there might be left among us.  How we spend our money, even more than an electoral campaign, is where we see the true differences in how we all see the fundamental role of government. 

The truth, though, is, or seems to be, that we're all going to have to bite the bullet.  Not the same bullet, but each of us will have to sacrifice in some fundamental way, and not just at the gas pump (our only real common experience these days), if there's any hope of fixing the budget mess.  Wouldn't it be fascinating if that sacrifice could start in Sacramento?