What You Really Learn in Math 101
In a recent opinion piece on the Sacramento Bee’s web site, Dan Walters criticizes those who oppose the recent budget deal as panderers, suggesting that they’re somehow dishonest in their opposition. Read the piece here:
California budget’s foes pander on the numbers
I’m reposting my response here because comments on the Bee’s website only allows 1000 characters and I had to cut it up into five different posts:
Dan,
If you’re going to write an opinion piece on the state budget, it might be helpful for you to provide at least one fact or piece of evidence to support your claims. Basically you are claiming that the budget couldn’t be balanced unless taxes were raised. Then you go on to criticize two potential gubernatorial candidates for not giving specifics as to how they would have balanced the budget. But what’s sauce for the goose, is sauce for the gander. It’s intellectually dishonest for you to make the claims you do without backing them up. You simply proclaim that the governor is right but then offer no proof or at least a counter argument to those who claim the tax increase wasn’t necessary.
So let me provide a few examples of how to back up an assertion:
You claim that Steve Poizner is pandering when he called the budget “a financial fiasco”. It isn’t pandering to say that raising taxes in a recession would be extremely harmful to the economy when virtually every economist would agree that it’s the likely outcome. Furthermore, we have historical evidence that this budget will worsen our financial problems. In 1994, Republican Governor Pete Wilson went along with the Democratic Legislature’s attempt to eliminate the (at that time) historic $14 billion deficit with $7 billion in tax hikes and $7 billion in spending cuts. This resulted in a deeper and more sustained recession and the deficit quickly re-appeared because revenues shrank further due to the tax increases. Prosperity only returned when the tax increases expired. There’s certainly every reason to believe that the basic laws of economics will apply this time as well. And we’ll likely have “a financial fiasco” on our hands as we did before.
You further take Poizner to task for saying, “When politicians who were elected to oppose more taxes end up supporting them, this is not a hard choice – it’s a broken promise.” Well, every Republican in the State legislature signed a pledge not to raise taxes and then six of them voted for a budget that included over $12 billion in tax increases. The Governor unequivocally made that same pledge verbally numerous times as well and then approved the largest single tax increase by any State in U.S. history. I’m not sure what you’d call it, but in my book that’s pretty much the definition of breaking your promise.
Now let’s turn to your claim that the budget couldn’t be balanced without tax increases. This is false and I’ll give you and our esteemed Governor a much needed math lesson. The final budget raised taxes by about $12.5 billion. Here’s how you find that much without the taxes:
As reported in the SacBee on Dec. 15th, the Republicans proposed the following:
Redirect Proposition 10 unspent funds – $2.1 billion
Redirect Proposition 63 unspent funds – $3.9 billion
Transfer from trial court improvement fund – $61 million
Fund transfers from Department of Parks and Recreation – $27 million
Delay loan repayment to Integrated Waste Management Board – $21 million
Delay loan repayment to Public Utilities Commission – $5 million
Motor Vehicle Account Fund Transfer – $170 million
Redirect tribal gaming payments for transportation loans – $200 million
This comes to about $7 billion. Now add Senator Chuck DeVore’s plan to permit oil slant drilling which would allow us to borrow up to $5 billion against future revenues. That’s $12 billion right there. Now that’s not the only way to get the needed funds. Preferably, the legislature could just cut $12 billion of the $40 billion increase in state spending that occurred over the last 5 years. Or cut some of the 175,000 new state workers who were added to the state payroll over the last decade. (I’ll do the math for you – That’s 48 jobs added per day.)
My point is that it’s disingenuous to say the budget couldn’t be balanced without raising taxes. The truth is that it would have been politically difficult, not mathematically impossible. Of course, maybe in Gov. Schwarzenegger’s Math 101 class they only teach you how to balance the budget by raising taxes. Keeping your word and making politically difficult decisions must be taught in one of the advanced courses.
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by David Boaz or 
by David Bergland, both excellent books on libertarian thought.
