Common sense spending

If you found yourself deep in debt, the first thing you’d do is stop spending so much. Then you might try to pick up more overtime at work or get a part-time job. Not many of us would just run to the payday loan business for more money and keep spending the same, or would get a new credit card and just keep spending like nothing’s changed.

And, yet, isn’t that what your federal and state leaders seem to do? Can’t afford something? No problem. Get another loan. And when they start promising tax cuts at the same time they look like the drunk guy at the casino buying everyone a round after he just blew the rent at the craps table.

So it’s always appreciated when our state lawmakers pledge to fight any tax increases and advocate restrained spending to help solve the state’s $14.5-billion deficit.

State Sen. Tom Harman is right. The state has a “spending problem — not a revenue problem.”

Still, $14.5 billion doesn’t represent a deficit. It’s more like a gaping hole and one could reasonably argue that nothing ought to be off-limits to negotiations. Maybe even fee or tax increases. It’s just that the main reason we don’t like tax increases is because there’s no such thing as a temporary one. When the economy improves state lawmakers aren’t going to reduce the tax increase and hand out rebates.

Schwarzenegger’s proposal to push for a constitutional amendment capping spending and making it correspond with revenue — meaning when the state takes in less money then it automatically has to restrain spending by the same degree — is intriguing and worthy of more debate. Voters have overwhelmingly shot it down in the past, but the size of this latest debt might compel them to reconsider.

One thing we’re sure of is we hope Harman and Assemblyman Jim Silva continue to resist the governor’s attempt to cut spending 10% across the board.

State-funding programs aren’t all created equal. We’re sure there’s plenty of pork to trim, but the budget cannot be balanced on the back of society’s most vulnerable. It’s easy to slash funding to the poor since they lack so much political muscle, but that doesn’t make it right. Furthermore, they might fight back. Advocates for the mentally ill are suing the state, saying Schwarzenegger overruled the wishes of voters when he scrapped a $55-million program serving the homeless mentally ill.

So if they can’t just cut spending across the board then that means Democrats and Republicans will have to spend long hours at the negotiating table to determine which programs and agencies need the most financial dieting. It means that with a two-thirds majority required to pass the budget that the Republicans have more say than usual. So the minority party won’t have any excuses this time — they can’t just blame the Democrats for the state’s budget woes.

We hope that Democrats and Republicans honestly work in a bi-partisan manner to make the necessary sacrifices without cynically balancing the budget on the backs of those least able to fend for themselves.