LETTER
The Budget, Cont’d
One of my favorite movies is “Groundhog Day,” a comedy in which Bill Murray plays a man trapped in a time warp; he wakes up every morning at the same time to experience the exact same day over and over again.
I find myself in a sort of Groundhog Day, too.
For each of my three years in the Legislature, I have experienced a January in which there is a budget deficit greater than that which was forecast. That deficit gets even worse until June, at which time an on-time budget is not reached. Then, sometime in July or August, a budget agreement is reached with nearly all Democrats and a few Republicans voting for it, and then we do it all over again.
The budget that was just passed will guarantee that I will experience the same Groundhog Day again in my next, fourth year in the Legislature. Let me make a few predictions about what next year’s budget crisis will be like:
& #149; The deficit, now projected at $7.9 billion, will be considerably larger than that.
& #149; A number of assumptions in the budget will prove wrong, and some of the debt instruments will remain unissued due to legal challenges.
& #149; Our state credit rating will be at or near the lowest in the nation.
& #149; Democrats will call for tax increases in order to avoid “draconian cuts in services to the blind and disabled.” Republicans will call for spending reductions that didn’t happen the prior year.
Does all of this sound familiar? The agreement just reached continues the functions of government. It may have been the best deal we could do since Democrats refused to reduce spending. But, because it increases spending by more than $1 billion over last year, the crisis is far from over. Economic growth can never catch up with a combination of continually increasing spending and continually mounting debt and deferral repayments.
(The only thing that may change some of this is if a new governor is elected on Oct. 7 and he or she calls for some midyear adjustments.)
The crisis will not be over until spending goes down. Until then, the Groundhog Day of the Bill Murray movie will seem oh-so-real to Californians.
By the way, as you may have guessed, I voted “no” on the budget.
John Campbell
(Campbell is the Republican assemblyman from Irvine.)
