"Budget justice" rally this summer in San Francisco

This summer California’s negotiations of a balanced budget for a state billions in the red was like watching a car crash. Well, things might get even worse: the Wall Street Journal’s Stu Woo reports that the independent auditing arm of California’s legislature predicts a $21 billion budget deficit through June 2011. Maybe even more disconcerting, the California Legislative Analyst Office says that even in 2015 California will still have a $20 billion deficit (or about 25 percent of the state’s annual spending).

What this means is five or so more years of political paralysis. California requires 2/3 legislative approval of any tax-and-spend decision: Democrats almost uniformly don’t want to cut spending, Republicans almost uniformly don’t want to raise taxes. The Democrats are a majority, but they’re not 2/3 of the legislative body. So unless the way the state is run changes (maybe via constitutional convention), I don’t see how California’s fiscal crisis has a happy, or even somewhat acceptable, ending.

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