The state of California is the eighth largest economy in the world, just behind France and Italy, and ahead of Spain and Canada. That fact in and of itself is amazing, California being only one of 50 states in this country. So why are we stony cold broke and about to have to admit that we cannot pay our bills?
We have to ask ourselves: “Why is it that the state of California is about to start issuing IOUs?”
Frankly, the answer is pretty simple. We, the voters, have been had.
We have allowed our legislators to cravenly avoid real answers to real problems by simply making more and more things illegal, and we have voted for high-minded sounding initiative measures that were crafted by people who had a secret agenda. The initiatives were sold to us in very expensive, 30-second sound bites, allegedly paid for by civic-minded groups but generally actually financed by people looking to line their pockets.
We have passed measures that have tied the hands of government in important respects, allowed a small minority of the legislature to block any action, and have destroyed any benefit we might have gained from experience in the legislature. We also allowed members of the legislature to curry favor by making our criminal justice system increasingly pervasive and unduly harsh with no thought as to the consequences, economic and otherwise.
In my view, three things are primarily responsible for where we are today.
The first of these was Proposition 13 back in the 1970s. As those with a little gray in their hair will recall, there was a big to-do about increasing property taxes and causing elderly people on fixed incomes to be unable to afford to stay in their homes. The specter was raised of hordes of sick and old people forced out into the street. As with all successful propaganda campaigns, there was a kernel of truth in this. However, you can bet those old people didn’t have the money that it took to get an initiative measure on the ballot and get it passed. That is a very expensive proposition.
Of course only a few paid attention to the fact that Proposition 13 did a number of other things. First, it put the same tax increase limitations on skyscrapers as it did in simple homes owned by the elderly. Second, even though only a majority vote was required to pass Proposition 13, changing it or increasing taxes would forever require a two-thirds vote of the electorate or of the Legislature. Ironically, if a two-thirds vote had been necessary to pass Proposition 13, it would have failed. Getting a two-thirds super majority is very, very hard.
About that time, we decided that the criminal justice system was the way to fix nearly anything. The electorate cheered every time something else was made illegal (in 10 years, more than 1,000 new crimes were invented by the legislature) and swooned with joy when first the Legislature, and then the voters themselves, passed the three-strikes law. That one requires a double sentence for anyone convicted of a second felony and 25-years-to-life for anyone convicted of three felonies.
At first blush, that might seem like a good idea. After all, someone who commits three felonies must be a pretty dangerous individual. However, that just isn’t so. Granted, one of the felonies has to be “serious or violent,” but it can also be decades old. By the way, the definition of “serious” is pretty broad. The rule also doesn’t take into account that it costs about $50,000 a year to keep someone in prison (more then it costs to send someone to the finest university). As a consequence, we have been spending more on building prisons than on building schools. Our prisons are overcrowded, and health care in our prison system has deteriorated to the point where a federal judge has taken over that part and given it to a very powerful referee.
The state of California has 32 prisons housing approximately 180,000 inmates. That’s up from fewer than 20,000 inmates in 1977. California has the largest prison system in the Western world. It costs us about $10 billion a year to operate this system and that cost is only going to go up as we keep putting people away. That $10 billion does not count the extra police, probation officers, judges, court clerks, prosecutors and public defenders needed to deal with the ever-increasing workload. We can see the effects right here. The population of Shasta County is 2.3 times as big as it was in 1970. Yet we have over 7 times as many lawyers in the DA’s office now as we did in 1970.
The third measure that got us where we are is term limits. The idea was that our legislature was full of people who had been there too long, were too entrenched and needed replacing. No doubt somewhat true. However, we threw out the baby with the bathwater. It takes a while — some say as long as 10 years — to learn how to do any complicated job. Legislation is a complicated job. We may have gotten rid of some deadwood, but in the process we turned our entire legislature into two groups of people: newcomers and short-timers. The people in our legislature are not there long enough to learn how to make a deal, come to the table and arrive at a reasonable compromise. Not long ago I heard a Good Republican bemoaning the loss of former speaker of the assembly Willie Brown. “I didn’t agree with him much”, said the Good Republican, “but he knew how to make a deal. We need somebody who knows how to make a deal.”
A historical perspective is crucial in any legislative process. You have to know what did and did not work in the past. As a consequence of term limits, the only people who have a real historical perspective in Sacramento are party bosses and lobbyists. Many of the people in our legislature don’t have any choice except to listen to lobbyists and party bosses because there’s nobody else to get history from. Guess who is running the show?
Proposition 13 prevented the government from getting any kind of cost of living increase for any kind of property so long as it wasn’t sold. If it wasn’t sold, taxes could not rise more than a fraction every year, no matter what happened to the cost of running the state. At the same time, the three-strikes law greatly increased the burden placed on the state to house prisoners (who are unlikely to be dangerous to anyone) at great cost for many years. Forget about the human costs of locking someone up forever. Finally, term limits filled the legislature full of people who know they’re not going to be there very long so they can afford to take extreme positions. When you add to that the requirements of Proposition 13 that allow a minority to block any kind of tax bill, you create the kind of train wreck we are seeing now.
Republicans in the Legislature have made a pledge not to increase taxes in any way shape or form. Because Republicans control more than one-third of the seats in the legislature, they have an absolute veto power. We cannot balance the budget without a tax increase for at least some part of the shortfall. As a consequence, California is about to become a laughingstock — again. Worse than that, a lot of people are going to be thrown out of work for no reason.
Dugan Barr has practiced law in Redding since 1967. He has tried more than 200 civil jury cases to verdict. He is married and has five children. The offices of Barr and Mudford, LLP, are at 1824 Court St. in Redding and can be reached at 243-8008.
