However, if this isn't an ideal time for fiscal conservatives to cut every social program they don't like, what is? There seems to be a process for adding programs but none for retiring them. And once added, times eventually get hard, taxes must go up to balance the budget, and the ratchet ticks another notch.

Companies in this situation find lines of business they can no longer afford to be in, and they shut them down entirely. The state should do the same.

This is also an ideal time for measures designed to reduce the cost of services. We keep authorizing more money for schools, yet education seems to keep getting more expensive as schools are burdened with costs of complying with government regulations. Likewise government keeps passing measures to make health care incrementally safer or incrementally more philanthropic, and curiously it keeps getting more expensive. With education taking the lion's share of the state budget, this is a perfect time to re-examine the burdens state regulation places on it.

http://www.cbp.org/pdfs/2008/0807_pp_cutsortaxe…

Enjoy. Good luck, California, you need it. I don't think you can convert to an objective, truly just property tax system in place of Prop 13, which would be great to do now since so much is in need of reform and revision there. Hopefully someday you'll be exporting electric power rather than having to import it, and have developed Monterey Bay into another national-class metro area rivaling San Diego, but that's expecting too much of you again, at this time. We'll see what you manage to do. Washington should let you fail before taking any action — if you cannot prevent failure, which you ought to be able to do.

What can Obama and Washington do? I still say do something quick that works toward their goals in Washington, like folding Medicaid into Medicare (expanding the scope of Medicare on its way toward encompassing all citizens and their dependents eventually). Taking over Medicaid (“100% financing at this time”) would be a big help to the states while they proceeded to enact their own needed reforms.

Now they need to look at what may work best for everyone, as described below for the federal government but which involves the states, too,

http://budget.senate.gov/democratic/testimony/2…

but they must set priorities, and reduce or eliminate what is unimportant or unnecessary, which is where California routinely failed before I moved away from there in 1992. Requiring discipline and the setting of priorities, and having to say No, challenges California's maturity. It proved too much for so many in 1975 with New York City (which arrogantly expected the rest of the country to give it the money to keep wasting), has proved too much before elsewhere, and may be too challenging again now. Surely the answer isn't magical assumptions that “green jobs” will be a solution — as Michigan's governor and New York City's current mayor wrongly profess so embarrassingly.

The thing is that the beauty of the blame game isn't that people are getting off on trashing other people, it's that we can get to the bottom of why we're in the mess we're in and take proactive steps to prevent the same thing happening in the future.

Without doing that we are not an evolved species. We learn from our mistakes. If we simply blind ourselves to the mistakes, we will not learn and will repeat history over and over until our stubborn eyes open up.

Rule of thumb: anyone who seems overly interested in not playing the blame game is the first place to start. ; )

Also, California has voters approving new spending initiatives that leave the fund raising to the state such as stem cell.