Late budgets cost me money. They cost CA, so they cost me.
I’ve tried to get the legislators to take responsibility, but this year’s budget set a record for being late. I amended the CA constitution to require on time budgets, but the legislators ignored me. I bet if I ignored the constitution they’d go all legal on my butt.
We need an on-time budget more than we need partisan politics. I feel like I’m the last hold out for trying to get the legislators to play nice, to realize they’re playing politics with the lives of real people, but I don’t think they’re listening. I agree that democracy is the oppression of the majority, and I want to be better than that. I think clever, intelligent, dedicated legislators can create something better by listening and accounting for different points of view. I think a 2/3 agreement on a budget should produce a better budget than a 50+1 agreement.
But I don’t see that happening in CA. I think especially now that the flood gates to campaign $$ have opened, legislators will become even more capitalistic. Maximizing their own gains at the expense of the common, or at least the general, good. So, I’m tired of being idealistic here.
We the people have fired warning shots of initiatives at them. Some have passed, some have not. They’ve not listened. I don’t think they’ll cooperate and compromise on a budget in a timely manner, and I don’t think they’ll change the budget procedure to make it easier to get a budget on time, either. So, it’s left to us. And though I hate changing the constitution by a simple majority vote, the budget procedure is in the constitution, so that’s where we have to go to change it. Like Prop 19, this one shows a good use of the initiative process. Sac Bee crappy argument (bare assertions of omissions from the prop with no reasoning as to why the omissions are bad) against notwithstanding, I don’t see any problems with the text of the proposed law.
And OK, I’ll throw them a bone. They worked out a compromise in order to pass last year’s budget. Prop 24 takes away that compromise. Yeah, maybe it was a bad idea, but I won’t fault them for following the procedure I wanted them to follow. I’m tempted to use the initiative process to tell them they screwed up on that compromise, but a budget deal is a complicated thing, and I’m not savvy enough to the details of the budget to know whether this compromise was all that bad/worth it. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt because I’ve not seen anything that says this compromise was terrible.
Oh, and I've filled out my ballot. That might have eliminated my interest in thinking through any more issues. Kinda like rendering a verdict when on a jury. In each case I've been on, we've had extended and interesting debate up to the time we reached our verdict. Once we reached the verdict, no one was interested in discussing the case anymore.
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