Lower Your California Flag To Half-Mast

by dday

I’ve been live-blogging the events in the state capitol today over at Calitics. Basically, most of the horrible measures in the California budget revision passed, with a couple notable exceptions. Cities get to keep their gas tax money, and the controversial offshore drilling plan was defeated. Which puts the budget $1 billion or so out of balance, but Schwarzenegger has a line-item veto so he will blue-pencil his way to finishing this up.

It’s a dark day for California, which suffers a radical transformation of how it provides services today, because a literally insane minority refuses to budge and can hijack the legislature. Importantly, the process is the culprit here. The current system is designed to produce bad outcomes and provide no accountability for them. So until we change that system, we’ll keep running into this brick wall. In all likelihood, we’ll be back filling a new budget gap this winter.

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