Jerry Brown's Budget: A Danger to Himself and Others

The core feature of Gov. Jerry Brown's proposed budget is that it delivers cuts in a framework of austerity, rather than development within short-term constraints. It continues the Hooverite smothering of California society that was Arnold Schwarzenegger's main achievement. The backlash has been relatively muted because some supporters' hope that Brown's massive cuts to key sectors like health and higher education is just reverse psychology - that it will scare people, even in the midst of still-accelerating foreclosures and unemployment far higher than the national average, to vote to raise taxes on themselves. Whether or not Brown's cuts are sincere doesn't actually matter: either way, they are disastrous fiscal and political strategy, for they hurt society, the economy, and Democrats at the same time. Austerity, whether for budget balancing or for promoting a backlash, never works to advance the only successful agenda the Democrats ever had in the 20th century -- development for the whole society rooted in a vision of government as a creative power.

Brown is one of the original Austerity Democrats of the 1970s, coined the term "the age of limits" as a progressive mantra, and was more conservative with state spending than Ronald Reagan had been. He was a New Democrat before Bill Clinton, and his post-McGovern generation inadvertently helped pass tax revolt legislation like Proposition 13 by no longer telling voters about the enormous benefits of public infrastructure and cheap, efficient, public goods that they got by paying taxes. Since 1978, every prospect of government-led social progress has been readily misframed as a probably unaffordable budgetary cost of dubious efficiency, and Democrats have largely accepted this premise. Brown's first budget proposal continued this tradition, rather than expressing the desire to rebuild for which so many had hoped.

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