continuum:

Voters favor cuts to balance the budget — yet they object to most of the cuts that could be made, a Los Angeles Times/USC Poll shows.

Don’t start at the services level. I’d start at the Agency level. Do we really need an acupuncture board? But aside from that, some of the obvious cuts sound extremely scary. California diced up their agency equivalent of the Department of Health in a huge shuffle just a year ago, mostly into DHHS and CEMA. This was largely a consequence of Katrina and 9/11 reorganizations in other states (with a noticeable lag). But California has a history of responding to some pretty significant catastrophes. The net funding of the associated agencies and departments (departments are organizationally under the agency level) skyrocketed. But there was no new mission. Most of the new funding was because we split the overhead and had to hire new administrators, not because we provided new services. But if you asked someone whether California should cut the California Emergency Management Agency, you’ll get a lot of “How could we do without that? They respond to disasters!” You’ll need to follow up with the fact that the Agency was created in 2009 and we functioned reasonably well before we consolidated the missions into a new agency. Granted, as part of the cut you’d have to fold the missions back into previously existing agencies (there’s a decent law enforcement bit that jumped into CEMA), but you’d get to eliminate a bunch of the new overhead. And that’s what gets me about these kinds of surveys. We used to provide a better value for our buck on many of these services. Why do we spend more money on the same level of service?

Note, I don’t actually believe California can solve its problems without some significant cuts. Our recently passed Prop 25 made the political aspect of spending/taxing tradeoffs significantly easier, though. Aside from our pension problem (which is much larger than we admit), I believe our budget could be closed with something like a 2 percentage point increase in the general tax level. That’s approximately a 20% jump in the tax rate (our overall state tax rate is close to 10%, so 2 percentage points would be significant), but it’s not mathematically impossible, like other places. Until our recent simple-majority budget legislation, our most significant constraint was the political process governing our budget (so that 2 percentage point increase would have been impossible). I believe we are still dysfunctional enough to collapse, and Prop 26 (which also passed) requires 2/3 majority for most taxes and fees. I believe the end result is that it is significantly easier to cut spending than to increase revenue, but I’m not well read in this area. Also, politically, cutting spending in California may be as difficult at a simple majority as hiking taxes is at a 2/3 majority.