Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown agree that serious reforms are needed to wrangle California’s notoriously unwieldy, consistently overdue budget. While they overlap in a few areas – both agree cuts are needed in the pension system, for example – their approaches are as different as the candidates themselves.
California Watch has been tracking every comment, promise and deflection by Whitman and Brown on the issue of the budget over at Politics Verbatim. This post is the first in a series that will utilize those records to lay out each candidate's stance in detail. Up until Election Day, we'll also be tackling important topics like immigration, jobs and taxes.
On the budget:
While Whitman’s budget proposal focuses heavily on dramatic cuts that she says will eliminate $15 billion (over four years) of the state’s $20 billion shortfall, Brown’s official plan is all about the process.
He says he would start the budget proceedings earlier – even meet with the legislature before being sworn in – and would involve all lawmakers instead of the traditional "Big Five." He wants to make lawmakers identify funding sources for bills, a “pay as you go” approach. He also advocates a “zero-based budget.” This would mean starting from scratch every year until the economy stabilizes as opposed to tweaking the previous year’s budget.
Brown proposes leading by example, cutting 10 to 15 percent of the governor’s office budget. “I have a long and well-deserved reputation for being cheap,” he says in his proposal. (Whitman has mocked these cuts as insignificant.)
While Whitman agrees the budget process needs to start earlier, she and Brown disagree on a key factor – the two-thirds majority currently required to pass a budget. Brown supports Proposition 25, which would repeal that requirement as it applies to the budget. Although the proposition would maintain the two-thirds requirement for tax increases, Whitman opposes it, saying it “is nothing more than a license for Sacramento to raise our taxes.”
Both candidates support penalizing lawmakers for late budgets, stripping salaries and other benefits for missed deadlines. Whitman would also make the legislature part time, according to her policy agenda. “If serving in Sacramento were a part-time job, maybe we wouldn’t have so many full-time spenders in the Capitol,” she says.
In terms of cuts, Whitman’s plan specifically targets the pension system, welfare and state workers. She advocates eliminating 40,000 state employee positions, which she says will happen through voluntary retirements over the next four years. Some of the deepest cuts would be to welfare. Whitman would implement a two-year limit on benefits and require recipients to meet stricter requirements. According to Whitman, this would result in $1 billion in savings that could be directed to higher education.
The former eBay CEO wants to implement a spending cap that would be tied to the state’s gross domestic product. She has also proposed a statewide grand jury to root out fraud and abuse – a plan Brown has dismissed as “just another level of bureaucracy.”
While the attorney general is less about dramatic cuts, he does identify potential cost-saving areas, like prison health care and Medi-Cal. And he and Whitman agree that the pension system has become an impossible burden to the state that must be reined in.
In his Pension Reform Plan, Brown advocates a two-tiered pension system that would require new employees to “work longer and to a later age for full retirement benefits.” He wants to target pension spiking, he says, the practice of inflating a salary during the last year of employment – the year that currently determines lifelong pension benefits. Under Brown’s plan, pension benefits would be determined by the average of the last three years. Brown would also require higher employee contributions.
Whitman would switch new employees over to a “401(k)-style plan” and increase the retirement age from 55 to 65 for “most state employees.” Public safety workers would be bumped from age 50 to 55. The former eBay CEO says she would institute longer vesting periods, and like Brown, she would also require higher contributions.
Both candidates also advocate using technology to make government more efficient and finding ways to get more federal money for the state.
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