The Overgrown Thicket

by Karl Kurtz

In the last several weeks the brambles and thorns of preparation for NCSL's Legislative Summit, heavy business travel, personal vacation and a major project analyzing a new national opinion poll on attitudes toward democratic institutions have kept us from penetrating The Thicket.  We'll try to beat some new paths and get back on track.

During our hiatus, a few of the newsworthy events that should have appeared in The Thicket include:

• The New York Senate leadership situation seems to have stabilized, and both parties agreed on new rules that increase transparency, place term limits on leaders and committee chairs, and, perhaps most remarkably, provide equal staff resources to senators of both parties.  The rules were issued in a joint statement by Senate President Malcolm Smith, Senate Majority Leader Pedro Espada, Deputy majority Leader Jeff Klein, Conference Leader John Sampson and Minority Leader Dean Skelos.
• The California and Illinois legislatures resolved budget impasses, leaving Arizona, Connecticut, North Carolina and Pennsylvania as the 3 states without budgets after the start of fiscal year 2010.
• National Journal's Lou Jacobson has published a list of "The Six Most Dysfunctional State Governments."  New York, Nevada, Illinois, Alaska, South Carolina and California make the list, which is based on a pseudo-scientific scale that appears to be based on talking to one or two people in each of these states.  The focus is heavily on scandal or malfeasance in the office of the governor.  Media cynicism is rampant in this article, leading with statements like "Of course, ineffective government is the oldest story in the book."

Writing in the Sacramento Bee, Dan Walters has a particularly trenchant summary of the California budget problems:

There are, in the broadest sense, three aspects to the state's chronic fiscal dilemma – societal, financial and political.

The first stems from California's immense geographic, economic and cultural diversity. It's nearly impossible to find consensus on anything, not just on the budget-related issues of taxes and services, but on water, education, transportation and many other long-unresolved matters. Californians want high levels of services, at least the services they and others in their socioeconomic strata use, but are leery of taxes, especially those they would pay.

The second aspect is that California, due to interlocking political and socioeconomic factors, has a lopsided revenue system, dependent on personal income taxes for more than half its general fund revenue and just 1 percent of taxpayers, whose incomes are tied to the stock market, for half of those income taxes. The state rides a roller coaster of revenue that soars when the economy jumps and plummets when it sours, leading to binges of spending and tax cuts, followed by deficit hangovers.

The final factor is a political system that shuns political moderates and sets up conflict between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, flavored by constitutional requirements for two-thirds legislative votes on the budget and raising taxes.

Much of last week's angst had to do with acquiring a handful of Republican votes, which not only affected the content – no new taxes, for example – but its form. Republicans insisted on bills that put the onus for unpopular actions on Democrats and gave GOP lawmakers political cover.

Kudos to Walters, especially for the first of his trio of problems.  Increasing economic and social diversity and complexity are too often overlooked in facile discussions of budget impasses, "gridlock." or governmental "dysfunction."

Comments

[Lurker]

With respect to the "dysfunctional government" I think most people would arrive at California and New York because of the severe trouble they have legislating. South Carolina is likely because of the Governor (Sandford) and the Legislature violently disagreeing so regularly. I'm not sure about NV, AK and IL. The only think that I can think of for AK is the State Senate coalition, but how is that dysfunction?