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Guest Commentary January 14, 2002
You Can't Take More Water Out of a Bucket Than You Put In
The Honorable Richard Riordan
Today, California is spending $28-million dollars more than it brings in. Yesterday, we did the same thing. And, tomorrow, we'll do it again -- unless we correct the way our state government does business.
We can't continue to operate this way. It goes against what I learned in the second grade:
You can't take more water out of a bucket than you put in! This daily deficit figure comes from the state Legislative Analyst's recent Fiscal Outlook report. It says expected revenues are falling $10-billion dollars short of expenditures over the course of a year.
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That means we're spending $28-million dollars a day we don't have -- each and every day, including Sundays. We must fix this problem. And we must do it without breaking the bank. Because the bank is the taxpayers. ...
California is still suffering from mismanagement of the electricity debacle –- and will suffer for years to come unless we take bold action. Governor Davis faced this crisis with a two-part plan. Part one was inaction. Part two was overreaction.
The taxpayers have been taken for a ride -- straight downhill. In two years, we went from a record budget surplus to a probable record budget deficit. ...
I'm often asked: what I do about the current budget problem? Let me say this is the governor's problem right now because the governor created this budget. Would I have increased the budget 36% over the last three years? No. Would I have added 34,000 employees to the state payroll in three years? No.
I would have a different budget. In so many ways. I wouldn't have vetoed the school textbook bill. I would have found the money to pay for it. I'd rather cut administration than cut funding for textbooks. I'd rather cut conferences and political junkets than cut funding for textbooks. This is a shameful display of mismanagement that is costing our children their future. It is more than shameful -- it is immoral! ...
Governor Davis says that California's budget crisis is the result of the tragedy visited upon America. It accelerated the problem -- sure. But he missed the warning signs of the budget problem, just as he missed the warning signals for the electricity crisis. And some of those signs were pretty tough to miss.
Like the $1.1-billion the state was short after the first quarter of this fiscal year. Like the economic indicators of employment, personal income and taxable sales slowing since the beginning of the year. The size of the budget problem was created by mismanagement –- the huge budget increases; the many new government positions.
Gray Davis told the legislature to implement his vision. They did. And now we must pay for it. The budget crisis California faces is not September 11th fault. It's Gray Davis's fault.
Richard Riordan is a former two-term Mayor of Los Angeles and a California GOP candidate for governor in 2002. The above column has been adapted from a speech Mayor Riordan delivered to the Public Policy Institute of California, December 7, 2001, in San Francisco. To contact him, Click Here.
The above column has been distributed by PoliticsOL.com.
