Too important, too little coverage: California’s Budget Will Be the Story of 2008

I know, I know. I expect way too much of journalism these days. Of course, my disappointment is the rationale for the existence of this column, so I’m not going to complain too much. Let me just point out that the news media are fiddling while the Golden State’s economic condition – an estimated $16 billion deficit – is burning like a Malibu hillside sparked by a fresh Santa Ana.

Yes, there are transcendent and competing distractions. Lindsay Lohan was or wasn’t having sex on tape and, sure, some of the nation’s best and brightest contract workers played voyeur with the passports of the major presidential candidates, but I’m going to state unequivocally: The California budget is the most important California story of the year.

Governor Schwarzenegger took a tour last week to push for reform – again – and the coverage of his appearances and proposals focused mostly on “timing.” The Governator’s proposals for reform have failed twice before. Now, he says the “timing” is right for his Budget Stabilization Act, a proposal to amend the state’s constitution. The broad idea has been explained pretty succinctly in most media, when it’s been explained at all. Essentially, the Budget Stabilization Act, if approved in November by referendum-loving Californians, would create a Revenue Stabilization Fund. In years that tax revenues exceeded the 10-year average growth rate, those extra bucks would be put into the fund. That piggy-bank would be opened only in years that the state’s tax take ran below the 10-year average. The law would include automatic cuts in down years.

Maybe it’s because the budget story seems difficult to understand (and thus is under-reported), but you’d be hard-pressed to find any significant accounting of the issue on TV news, on radio news or in many newspapers. Even the LA Times, which still has enough of a “Big J” residue from the days prior to Trib or Zell ownership to be taken seriously, hasn’t done a whole lot on this beyond some columns by veteran political reporter George Skelton, an editorial on the same day, and an op-ed piece two months earlier by, of all people, former California Governor Gray Davis, who was recalled, then terminated by the state’s voters in the wake of the Enron debacle and runaway electricity prices here.

Today, by comparison, Davis looks like a frugal manager in the face of Schwarzenegger’s record in pumping up spending in the state by close to 30 percent during his tenure in Sacramento. That little bit of context was MIA in the coverage of Arnold’s tour last week. Some papers around the state did point out the obvious, that politicians do not have it in their DNA to spend less.

Skelton’s March 20 piece, titled, “In reform push, Schwarzenegger's timing could be right,” valuably points out, “The governor's proposed budget reform is more iffy, in both its prospects for enactment and potential effectiveness. The goal is to finally keep his campaign pledges to ‘end the crazy deficit spending’ and ‘tear up the credit card.’" Finally? Arnold’s out in two years.