Some hope for California

[ilbegone]

Editorial in the Press Telegram

Some hope for California

Deficits provoke pointed criticism, but there's room for some common sense.

01/11/2010

Is the Golden State spiraling into financial ruin and taking all of us with it? That seems to be the prevailing tale of woe, but we're not ready to buy it.

The list of horrors is long and the facts are undeniable. State government is at least $20 billion in the red and some say the real figure will be much higher; politicians say the next round of cost cutting will be devastating to those most vulnerable, and they are either afraid or unwilling to raise taxes. Business investors say the state is the worst place in the country to locate or expand. More people are moving to other parts of the country than are moving here.

California's governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, last week gave a relentlessly optimistic budget message, but the reaction has been almost entirely negative. Columnist Dan Walters, known for his solid take on such matters, said the governor's "solutions" are disconnected from reality. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, usually cozy with the Gov, said of his notions about getting more money from the Feds, "Sacramento, not Washington, created the budget crisis."

Their sharpshooting was on target. Yet part of Schwarzenegger's message was right. California is (not "was") the greatest state in the nation, and it has the potential to re-emerge from the depths of its painful economic recession stronger than ever.

But how? If historian Kevin Starr and others are right, that California voters and politicians have created an almost unmanageable government mess, what can be done about it?

Candidates for governor Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner mostly have mouthed generalizations. Jerry Brown says, without fear of criticism, that he would support a tax increase if voters approved (which may not be as loopy as it sounds, if for example a ballot measure proposed tax reform but spending cuts as well).

The most practical recommendations come from Adam Summers, a policy analyst for the Reason Foundation, who came up with a 10-point plan. The gist of it is, avoid gimmicks; focus on spending, not revenue; adopt an outcomes-based budget; dump duplicated functions and scores of boards and commissions; cut personnel, reduce pension benefits for future hires, and offer bonuses for cost-saving ideas; outsource any functions performed by any businesses that can be found in the Yellow Pages; reform education with merit pay and weighted student funding; switch to two-year budgeting with genuine spending caps; and improve the state's business climate by slashing regulations and taxes.

Schwarzenegger said he wants to cut the state's grossly swollen prison costs by outsourcing to private prisons, which will never happen. A better solution comes from Jeffry Rosen, a law professor at Georgetown University, who says better management of probation and parole will accomplish far more.

Rosen, writing in the New York Times Magazine, pointed to a system in Hawaii that has drastically reduced violations and reimprisonment. If the program were adopted in states like California, the prison population could be reduced by 50 percent.

The concept is simple: Eliminate imprisonment for technical parole violations and reduce the length of parole supervision.

When the program was first tried on probationers in Hawaii, with guaranteed jail time for even relatively minor technical offenses, failed drug tests dropped 93 percent. When there was a minor violation, the penalty was a relatively short time in jail rather than a return to the original, longer sentence.

This is what California needs, more common sense and less political zealotry. Only then can the state concentrate on rebuilding its strengths and achieving its potential.