Another Fine Mess

Sacramento produced a budget for part of the next fiscal year and, exhausted, went on vacation. The product was what you might expect from leaving important papers on a table in an unsupervised day-care center, not what taxpayers have a right to expect from government.

The California Senate got it nearly right, approving a budget of $44.2 billion and a plan to accelerate tax collections by $560 million that would have made it possible to plug up some holes left in the budget for health care, counties, schools and the judicial system.

The Assembly--a caldron these days of ego and ambition, with heavy helpings of malice--once again could do nothing right. It did manage to approve the poor excuse for a budget, but could go no further.

The 1988 fiscal year expired last Thursday at midnight, and the state will be late making some payments until Gov. George Deukmejian decides what parts of the budget to approve and what parts to veto. He cannot add to it, and parts of it are so inadequate--even by Deukmejian’s stingy standards--that the document will simply become a place to start the second debate on a budget for California when the Legislature returns to its session in August.

It did not have to be this way for California government--once a leader in the field of state governance, now not even a follower of a kind of prudent policy that takes into account the way the state must function in the future.

The governor had one chance to produce a budget that would last an entire year, even though it would have done less for some Californians than they needed done. Once he abandoned his $800-million revenue plan because people were calling it a tax increase, he abandoned everything--his responsibility as governor along with any chance to produce a decent budget.

As it is, both the governor and the Legislature probably will be tied down in Sacramento into the fall doing what each seems to enjoy most--provoking partisan rage in one another.