Politics - Dan Walters: Revised state budget is still a sham - sacbee.com
Those are at best, however, marginal improvements in what still remains a stopgap budget filled with accounting gimmicks and questionable "spending cuts" and "revenues" – and still leaves the state's fiscal house in great disorder. It makes little, if any, headway on closing what those in the Capitol call the "structural deficit" – the chronic gap between revenues and spending that was plaguing the state even before its economy went into the tank.
Budget mavens are already talking about at least a $7 billion hole in the 2009-10 budget, even if the economy doesn't worsen, which is entirely possible.
We Californians, and those we elect to state office, still cannot agree on what it is we want from government and how much we're willing to pay for it.
We reject both the heavy new taxes that the Legislature's liberal Democrats espouse and the scorched-earth spending cuts that Republicans advocate in public but are, in reality, unwilling to make.
Truly, the budget dilemma is merely symbolic of our larger civic dysfunction.
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