There has been an onslaught of analysis following the May 19th defeat of the ballot measures that were designed to help plug the alarmingly large hole in the state’s budget. Plenty of smart folks have opined on the reasons behind the poll results, but here is a different approach offering five simple steps that would go a long way towards permanently solving the state’s budget problem.
1. End, or at least reform, collective bargaining for public employees. The power of public employee unions in California is the single largest obstacle to real substantive budget reform. Unionization made sense at the turn of the 20th century when workers had no power against management but the balance has tilted far too much in the other direction. The public employee unions are the single most powerful special interest group in the state and all but control the legislature, just as the railroad tycoons did a century ago. Most union workers are hard-working, tax-paying citizens – they’re not the problem. The union bosses are. Sacramento, city halls and schools are the only places left in the state where unions of any stripe have any real influence – the government is a generation behind the private sector in this regard. Do you have a union that effectively mandates your salary and benefits, regardless of your employer’s financial position? How about a guaranteed pension? If not, why should state government workers?
2. Run the state’s finances like your household’s. Some people say that government should be run like a business; however, the problem is that state government produces no product and faces no competition. And it can’t go out of business. So instead, how about running it like a California family household? If your family got a one-time windfall in the form of a bonus, tax refund or moderate inheritance, would you buy a new house with a 30-year mortgage that doubled the monthly payment of your previous home? Of course not, because although you could make the payments this year, you probably couldn’t next year after the money runs out. Yet that’s exactly what lawmakers in Sacramento do – they commit to ongoing programs on the basis of one or two years of good income tax revenue when companies like Google go public. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
3. Eliminate the worst-performing 25% of the bureaucracy. There are thousands of state agencies, boards and commissions, all of which require staff and other resources to operate, and many of which overlap in responsibilities. Not all of them are useful – in fact most probably are not – so let’s start by ranking each of them from top to bottom in terms of effectiveness at delivering on their intended mission using good practices borrowed from states that have actually done this. Then eliminate the bottom 25%. It sounds simple because it is.
4. Favor local governments over the state wherever possible. Every time a dollar is sent to the state to pay for a service that is actually provided by your community governments (city, county and school) a good chunk is siphoned off to pay for Sacramento bureaucrats. So a dollar of taxes for education becomes far less than a dollar spent on our local schools and far more than it needs to be to pay for a state agency to micromanage our schools. There do need to be some state standards but the influence of the state over local governments is far too vast and unnecessary. A wise man once said that the government that is closest to you governs best. Or put another way: if you had a problem with your child’s school, would you call your school or Sacramento? Bureaucrats in Sacramento wouldn’t take your call but they happily take your money.
5. Do less with less. Most Californians recognize the need for government to play a functional role in society, but in this state that role takes far too much from us and provides too little in return. Please give us a responsible government that provides essential services at a high level without consuming more than it absolutely needs. We want good schools, safe water, clean beaches and paved roads – and we don’t need to pay the nation’s highest income and sales taxes to get them. Is that too much to ask?
Mark Kersey, owner of Kersey Strategies, is the past president of the San Diego Young Republicans and a current board member of the Lincoln Club of San Diego County.
