Time to look in the mirror?

So, now that we’ve successfully shot down the budget propositions, now what?

And since we’re asking, just how much of the blame for the state’s budget mess is of our own, meaning “we the voters”, doing? It’s certainly a fair question and not from the standpoint of “we keep voting the same types of knuckle heads into office” – not that that is not a valid point. We’re sure it happens from time to time but we can’t recall the last time a bond measure that involved education or transportation got shot down by the voters.

The absolute fact of the matter is, we love bond measures! A few billion here to build a high-speed rail from L.A. to San Fran? Sure. Another few hundred million to repair schools? You betcha. And $6 billion for stem cell research? No problemo.

To be fair, each individual bond measure stands on its own, merit-wise. We’re not here to trash any individual bond or the bond initiative process but to call attention to the failure of the royal “we” to realize that each bond measure passed will require an obligation on the state’s general fund in way of interest payments. We lied. We don’t have $20-30 billion to build this rail road and we don’t have the money for stem cell research. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

At some point, Californians are going to have to come to grips with the fact that there is an actual price tag associated with these bond measures that requires some sober assessment instead of the reflexive impulse to hit/fill-in/punch-out the “Yes” button/bubble/chad that suggests the level of cognitive internal debate for a random bond measure was, “You had me at ‘It’s for the children’”.

And, we suppose, an equally fair retort to this is: Where on god’s green earth does all that bond revenue go? We keep being asked to pass (and we do) education bond after education bond which set atop already the rather large K-12 slice of the state’s budget pie and then we are told K-12 is grossly under-funded, our students are under-performing and we’re facing a shortage of teachers. What in the hell is going on here and how can this be?

This provides a nice segue to return to our normally-scheduled bashing of Sacramento politicians.