You can tune out Gov. Newsom when he talks about the state’s big budget deficit. Ignore the Democrats who control the legislature, too. And turn the volume down when lobbies complain about proposed cuts.

California’s ballooning budget deficits are not a crisis. They are normal and predictable. 

Because they are grounded in our state constitution, and in a reality so paradoxical it would make Kafka blush:

Our constitution requires the state to balance its budget. But balancing the state budget requires violating the state constitution.

How’s that? Because on fiscal matters, our constitution is a ratchet. The document is full of guarantees and formulas that ratchet up spending on favored programs — and limits on taxes and fees that ratchet down revenues in slower economic times. 

Californians may have forgotten about the ratchet. The past decade was an unusual one for the state budget, as stock market growth and federal pandemic relief created budget surpluses. 

But with those revenue sources gone or declining, California’s constitution is reasserting itself, and producing deficits projected recently to range anywhere from $27 billion to $70 billion.

That leaves Gov. Newsom stuck, and forced to do what all California governors must: 

Violate the constitution. 

First, he’s not offering a balanced budget. The spending delays, draw-downs on reserves, and cuts he’s proposing eliminate only about half of the deficit.

Second, he’s violating the state’s education funding guarantee, a voter-approved formula called Prop. 98.

Prop. 98 is, famously, so complicated that no one really understands it. (It involves three complex formulas to determine state funding, and it’s never clear really clear which formula will apply in which year.) The main effect of Prop. 98 is to keep pushing education spending up; it’s one of the biggest spending ratchets in our constitutional budget ratchet.

Newsom’s maneuver is a sneaky ploy to reduce Prop. 98’s ratchet effect by changing the inputs to the formula. Newsom’s budget proposes to travel back in time and reclassify certain moneys spent on education in previous years as non-education spending. 

This maneuver is intended to lower the funding base, which would make the budget look less out of balance. The problem is that the lower funding base would mean tens of billions less in school funding in future years

Yes, my fellow Californians, “screw the kids” remains the real, if unofficial, state motto.

The powerful education lobby is crying foul, as are some Democrats and local governments. Newsom defends himself by saying he’s required to balance the budget. 

The problem with this blame game — and demands that Newsom reverse the cuts — is that it defines the discussion as being about the budget. The real problem is California’s broken constitution.

Finding tens of billions of dollars in cuts for anything is hard. Health programs have all kinds of court-ordered, statutory, and, in some cases, constitutional protections. Cuts to prisons and state agencies require concessions from politically powerful labor unions. Tax increases run up against Prop. 13 and other state revenue limits. 

That doesn’t mean I’m trying to let Newsom, the Democratic supermajority in the legislature, and other powerful Sacramento interests off the hook for the state’s budget problems. It’s the exact opposite. The governor, Democrats, and interest groups are responsible for the budget mess — because they’ve had plenty of time to fix the constitution, and haven’t even tried.

Gavin Newsom has been in statewide office since 2011. California Democrats have had full control of Sacramento since that same year. And powerful unions and other lobbies have held sway for far longer than that.

All of these politicians and lobbies know very well that the California constitution is broken. They have long had the power to come together and give the state the new constitution it needs — without all the fiscal ratchets that drive up spending and limit revenues. 

But they haven’t been willing to lead and change the system. They have focused instead on building their own power within this broken system. Jerry Brown and other California leaders have spent the past decades dismissing calls for a constitutional rewrite (including my own, via the book California Crackup) as unrealistic.

But state leaders are the ones who have lost touch with reality. They claim they can fix the budget, but they can’t because the constitution won’t let them.  And they won’t fix the constitution because they say it’s politically impossible. How long can they keep saying this — and keep pretending they are doing their jobs?

When the governor and legislators say they are trying to solve the problem, they aren’t telling the truth. This miserable budget, full of cuts to education, is a product of the budget system, and the constitution, that they themselves have chosen.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square,  an Arizona State University media enterprise.

The new film Civil War is a cinematic achievement. Director Alex Garland has made a movie that might be worse than a real American civil war.

Perhaps that was Garland’s intention. His film is a series of horrifying set pieces — torture by gas station attendants, summary execution of journalists, a massive California-and-Texas invasion of Washington D.C. — that add up to a warning. If we don’t steer away from our current path of political conflict, Garland suggests, this could be the end of the United States.

To be fair, there’s established logic in this message. As Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran wrote: “When we perceive the end in the beginning, we move faster than time. Illumination, that lightning disappointment, affords certitude which transforms disillusion into deliverance.”

But Civil War never provides the illumination or certitude that inspire action. It’s too Hollywood, which is to say that it’s too unoriginal and violent. 

Indeed, the film is so over-the-top that it feels uncomfortably, well, Putinist. These days the Russian and Chinese governments routinely promote the idea that the U.S. is headed for bloody civil war that will destroy the country. Civil War brings that propaganda to cinematic life.

If the U.S. does see another civil war,  it will not resemble the new film’s vision of warring armies advancing on Washington. That’s an anachronism, owing more to the 1860s Civil War than modern warfare. 

Nor will it involve fights between specific states. Our most bitter fault lines are not about geography but about ideology, race, gender, age, class, education. A civil war will map those divides within our cities and our neighborhoods.

Indeed, the real challenge of the next American civil war will be perceiving whether it is a war at all. Such a conflict will be fought with cyberattacks, disinformation, and psychological warfare. The battlegrounds will be legal, with warring factions seeking to cancel each other’s rights and prerogatives, and global, with our enemies funding and fueling the conflict while our allies seek to intervene and negotiate peace.

For these reasons, it’s time to retire the idea of California “secession,” even for Californians sympathetic to making California independent by peaceful means. Let’s face facts: The Golden State is never going to break away and fire on Camp Pendleton, like South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter in 1861. We have no military, and no offensive warfare beyond Gov. Newsom’s Fox News appearances.  

No—if California ever becomes an independent nation, the more likely path will be through a U.S. government meltdown. Unfortunately, that scenario is  possible. It is easy to imagine a fascist president, with a compliant Supreme Court and  Congress, using his military to punish cities and states he doesn’t like. Such a president might invoke executive powers to shut down Congress (as Donald Trump attempted on Jan. 6) or government agencies that won’t bend to his command. 

In such a circumstance, California, without representation in Congress, would have to take on the duties of a nation, and over time would naturally drift away from the disintegrating U.S. to become a separate republic.

To make a great movie about a real American civil war would require a filmmaker with the virtuosity of the late Akira Kurosawa, whose 1950 film Rashomon famously tells one story from multiple, contradictory perspectives. Or perhaps the San Fernando Valley auteur Paul Thomas Anderson (who used a similar technique in Magnolia), or Drew Goddard, who made the Lake Tahoe noir Bad Times at the El Royale, could manage it.

Garland’s film never comes close. We never get to know the civil war’s combatants. Instead, the director tells his story through the narrow perspectives of four journalists who come off as callous, selfish, or vaguely ridiculous. As the president is about to be executed by California and Texas soldiers, one journalist asks the soldiers to wait a second because “I need a quote.” 

The film feels unimaginative because the idea of another American civil war is so old. Marvel made a much smarter film on the subject in 2016 when feuding superheroes turned on each other in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War. 

But watching this Civil War, I found myself thinking of the 1997 satire The Second American Civil War. That cable TV movie, with scenes filmed at the State Capitol, envisioned a future too much like our present, with civil war in a country divided by race, immigration, politics, and media nonsense. This older film, while sillier, is the more responsible and restrained movie. 

“The country is falling apart,” says a TV producer played by Dan Hedaya. “We don’t need exclamation marks.”

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square, an Arizona State University media enterprise.

The Oakland A’s are baseball’s biggest losers. But their new temporary home — West Sacramento — is a winner.

No California city has had a better 21st century than West Sacramento. The municipality has grown in population and prosperity with striking speed, even as California has stagnated.

The A’s will spend 2025 through 2027 playing in West Sacramento’s minor league ballpark as a new stadium is built in their future home, Las Vegas. Perhaps their relocation will bring West Sac, as it’s often called, more of the notice it merits, especially in city halls and among state policymakers.

The city’s success is best explained through three paradoxes.

The first paradox: West Sac grew rich because it was so poor. Sacramento became a city in 1849, but West Sacramento didn’t incorporate until 1987. For most of the 20th century, it was an afterthought — an industrial town of seedy hotels, vacant lots, and warehouses.

All that kept land prices low, which made West Sac attractive as the region became more expensive. A first wave of development, beginning in the 1990s, focused on the riverfront, and included the A’s future ballpark, which opened in 2000. 

This brings me to the second paradox: West Sac achieved big success because it was small. A quarter century ago, it had just 30,000 residents and a median household income of $32,000.  (Today those figures are 54,000 people and $87,000). And the powerful unions, environmental groups, and state agencies that often delay or block California projects had little interest in a poor small city.

So, the ballpark  took just 19 months to build. Bsuinesses found they could launch quickly. And while housing construction languished elsewhere, West Sacramento built both market and affordable housing, as well as entire new neighborhoods, at the some of the fastest rates in California. The small city also brought in large new retailers, most notably the Capitol region’s first IKEA, which produced the sales taxes that West Sac could use for more projects and better services. 

Such speedy development points to the third paradox: West Sac benefited both because of its distance from, and its proximity to, the city of Sacramento.

The two cities lie just across the river from each other. But West Sac is a separate municipality situated in a different county, Yolo. Sacramento runs on constant political competition, which can distract from the painstaking work of governance. West Sac has had the good fortune of stable political leadership for over a generation.

The embodiment of that stability was Christopher Cabaldon, a legislative aide and higher education administrator who served on the city council and then as mayor for more than two decades.

“We focus on results as opposed to process,” he told Governing in 2019. “Other communities are into community meetings and workshops and planning and task forces and consultant reports, and, no, that’s not us.”

In contrast to Sacramento, whose city government is prone to obsess about creating signature attractions (an arena, an aquarium), to draw visitors, West Sac focused on building the housing and amenities to attract more residents.

Its proximity to the Capitol eventually became a draw. As California’s growing state government brought more people to Sacramento, and affordable housing became ever harder to find, people took notice of West Sac, with its new housing, new neighborhoods, and new restaurants. Many West Sac residents lived so close to the Capitol that they could walk across the Tower Bridge and be at work in minutes. 

In 2014, West Sac was named the “Most Livable City in America” by the U.S. Conference of Mayors. The honor only made West Sac more ambitious. In 2017, with more families moving in, the city devoted its growing revenues to West Sacramento Home Run, an initiative offering universal pre-school and college saving accounts. 

Ironically, the very same state government whose proximity helped West Sac grow also produces regulations that make it harder for California cities to grow. Now that West Sac is bigger, its leaders confront more obstacles and opposition. But West Sac remains a great counter-example of what California cities might do if they had more freedom.

The A’s decision to come to town brought public joy. Many Capitol region  residents that say they can’t wait to go to the West Sac ballpark and marvel at the famous stars of the Dodgers and Yankees as they hit homers against the weak, and temporary, home team.

Of course, the real marvel won’t be the ballplayers, but the small city they’ll be visiting.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square, an Arizona State University media enterprise.

I’m not really American, and I couldn’t be prouder of that.

I hope you, my fellow Californians, feel the same way.

Because sometimes there’s no greater compliment than an intended insult. 

This time, the backhanded praise came in a recent Los Angeles Times survey, conducted by the Canadian firm Leger, that examined how Americans feel about California. 

Among the findings: half of American adults believe our state is in decline. Dislike of the Golden State runs even deeper among conservatives. Two-thirds of Republicans surveyed say that the national impact of California has been “net negative.” 

And nearly half of Republicans consider California and Californians to be “not really American.”

The media treated this label “not really American” as harsh criticism. Newspapers dwelled on how such anti-California perspective reflected a terribly divided country. Two L.A. Times columnists, taking the bait, defended California as being very American. 

But why bother? Who in their right mind wants to be “really American” now?  

In this century, our country has become defined by its anti-democratic fascism, rage and violence. Being considered less than American by other Americans should be considered a badge of honor. Reading the poll, I wanted to print “Not Really American” T-shirts.

Disdain from the Americans isn’t new, either. It’s one of the few things that never changes here. The first best-selling book about California, The Land of Gold: Reality versus Fiction—published in 1855 by Southern author Hinton Helper — called California “an ugly cheat” and said “there is but lank promise in the future.” 

Meanwhile, California partisans have appreciated our state because it isn’t too American. The journalist Carey McWilliams, perhaps California’s greatest interpreter, wrote in 1949: “One cannot, as yet, properly place California in the American scheme of things…California is no ordinary state; it is an anomaly, a freak, the great exception among the American states.”

Even Republicans, back when they ran the state, considered California’s singularity a virtue. But in the past two generations, as California grw more liberal, our distinctiveness came to be seen as disloyalty. 

In 2015, the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia declared that California “does not count” as a “real” American state or as part of the U.S. West. Tellingly, he included this insult in his dissent from the decision legalizing same-sex marriage — which makes it just another compliment.

Californians ought to be prepared for more such compliments. Donald Trump’s backers have published plans for an initiative called Project 2025, which would treat California as an American enemy — because, of course, our values are not really American. The plans seek not just to overturn California policies, but to punish Californians for having backed them in the first place. 

For instance, California’s “un-American” support for women’s rights and reproductive rights would be met with a Trump federal abortion ban at 15 weeks, as well as harsh penalties for Californians who continued to provide the services. 

Our wise extension of health insurance, including Medicaid, to all our people, regardless of their legal status, would also be targeted. 

In addition, we’d lose the power to establish higher-than-American standards for fighting climate change and improving air quality.  

And of course, we’d pay a price for our not-really-American commitment to gun control. And we’d pay for protecting immigrants from Trump’s promised military-led deportation scheme, which is all but certain to sweep up U.S. citizens too, since half of California’s kids have an immigrant parent. 

Trump has promised to overturn the 14th Amendment’s protection of birthright citizenship, which would take U.S. passports from five million naturalized California citizens.

In this context, is it any wonder that a majority of our not-really American state is ready to leave before the Americans kick us out? According to another recent poll from the Independent California Institute, 58% of California adults say we’d be better off than we are now if California peacefully became independent — its own country — in the next 10 years. 

An even higher number, 68%, say California would be better off if, instead of seceding, the state obtained a special autonomous status within the U.S. that allowed for more control of our land and infrastructure.

All that said, while many Americans seem to hate California, we don’t hate Americans back. The same Independent California Institute poll asked Californians if they felt more Californian or American. 

Fifty-one percent said that they felt equally Californian and American. Only 21% said they felt more Californian. Still, 63% said they wouldn’t live anywhere in America other than California, our less-than-fully American home.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square, an Arizona State University media enterprise.

The good news is that California will almost certainly have a high-speed rail line someday. 

The bad news is that it may look a lot like “Whoosh.”

Whoosh is the name of the new high-speed rail line that opened last October on the Indonesian island of Java. Its existence is a breakthrough—Whoosh is the first bullet train in Southeast Asia and the Southern Hemisphere.

Similarly, California’s train could be the first truly high-speed service in North America. (Amtrak’s Acela and Florida’s Brightline don’t count — they don’t surpass 150 miles per hour). 

I rode Whoosh during a reporting trip to Java in February. It was disappointing, in ways that may preview how Californians are likely to feel about the high-speed rail we eventually get.

Most stories about the possibilities for California high-speed rail look at proven, efficient bullet trains in Europe and East Asia. I myself have written about the glories of high-speed rail systems in Germany and Taiwan.  Riding Whoosh was a very different experience. 

Whoosh is the by-product of  ambitions by the administration of President Joko Widodo to build a high-speed rail route traversing the 600 miles of the island of Java — from the mega-city of Jakarta in the west to Surabaya in the east. California’s official high-speed rail plans are of similar ambition, extending 600 miles from San Francisco and Sacramento in the north to San Diego in the south. Both systems will use similar technologies and have promised the same top speed — 350 kilometers, or 220 miles, per hour.

But neither rail ambition, Indonesian nor Californian, seems likely to be achieved in our lifetimes. Whoosh is only a very partial realization of a trans-Java high-speed rail: It extends just 88 miles, from Jakarta to the outskirts of the city of Bandung — the distance from L.A. to Santa Barbara.  Similarly, California voters approved high-speed rail in 2008 on the promise they’d be zipping from L.A. to the Bay in less than three hours by 2020. Currently, only a first segment — 171 miles from Merced to Bakersfield — is under construction, and even that isn’t scheduled to be operational until 2030.

I boarded Whoosh early on a weekday morning. The red train was shiny and new, and inside the car, seating was spacious and comfortable. But there were few other passengers. Even with subsidized fares that made my ticket the equivalent of $18, many trains were pretty empty. News reports say Whoosh is already losing money, as many high-speed rail systems worldwide do.

Why isn’t Whoosh more popular? One reason echoes a failure of California’s own high-speed rail plans — the first segment of this train doesn’t take you to the centers of the biggest cities.

In Jakarta, you don’t board the train in the city center but at Halim Station, on the city’s southeast side. My taxi ride there from Central Jakarta took 45 minutes. Halim is next to a smaller domestic airport—Jakarta’s version of Burbank. But the train doesn’t go into the airport, and one can’t walk easily from terminals, or even surrounding neighborhoods, to the station, because it involves crossing highways.

The train ride itself, from Jakarta to Bandung, was fast and uneventful. It lasted only 45 minutes — much better than the three hours the trip would take by car. 

However, on the other end of Whoosh, connections were even more fraught. The train doesn’t go tnear the center of Bandung. Instead, it dropped me at Tegalluar station, well to the south of Bandung. 

There I found myself surrounded by open land and a large soccer stadium. To get to central Bandung, where I was to interview local government members and visit a school,  I would need to spend another 45 minutes in the taxis. The two taxi rides — within Jakarta and greater Bandung — took 90 minutes, twice the amount of time I spent on the train ride. 

On my return trip from Bandung to Jakarta, I tried an alternative path. I boarded a special feeder train — which ran slowly on diesel engines — from central Bandung to a different Whoosh station. That trip took 22 minutes. After Whoosh delivered me back to Halim station in southeast Jakarta, I boarded Jakarta’s Metro to return  to where I was staying in Central Jakarta. That ride took 70 minutes.

California’s approach to high-speed rail suffers from a similar failure to connect. The first segment remains entirely within the Central Valley, not penetrating even the outer edges of the Bay Area and of Southern California. That first segment’s endpoints, Merced and Bakersfield, have limited public transportation options; moving on to further destinations would require navigating slow transit connections, or accessing a car.

In California and as in Indonesia, it’s unlikely that either rail plan will ever produce a robust and deeply connected rail system. The obstacle is the same in both places: lack of public money.

Neither Indonesia’s nor California’s government is willing to pay the high costs of a great high-speed rail system. So, both projects are dependent on money from outside the state.

Whoosh’s funding came from China’s Belt and Road Initiative, Xi Jinping’s highly touted but largely failed infrastructure loan program. (Chinese entities own a big share of Whoosh as a  result). Meanwhile, California, despite state bond funds, needs the federal government to make high-speed rail happen. And Washington is an unstable supporter.  The Biden administration recently sent an infusion of $3 billion. The Trump administration previously took money away.

Worse still, both Indonesia and California have seen cost overruns and big delays on their first train segments — scandals which discourage further investment. Whoosh was more than $1 billion over budget, and four years late, on its first $7.2 billion segment. California’s first segment is estimated to cost $33 billion — as much as the estimated cost of the entire system when voters approved it in 2008. Now the entire system’s price tag is $128 billion, with completion still decades away. 

What I learned in Java was that, in high-speed rail as in other things, you get what you pay for. And if your government won’t spend the money required to build robust and well-connected rail systems, you won’t get much.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square, an Arizona State University media enterprise.

Please don’t save democracy.

If you’re a politician — stop promising to save it.

Just stop trying.

Because you can’t. Democracy isn’t something you save. The sooner we stop talking about saving democracy, the better off democracy will be.

Our mindless recitation of “saving democracy” — everyone from President Biden to Sascha Baron Cohen has pledged its rescue — demonstrates how little we understand about the governing systems that organize our lives.

To start, the words “democracy” and “save” don’t fit together.

Democracy is not a penalty shot saved by a goalkeeper. Democracy is not a dollar saved by in the bank. Democracy is not a file saved in Microsoft Word.

Democracy is not even the migrant saved from drowning in the Rio Grande.

It’s easy to get confused about democracy’s meaning because we use the word “democracy” promiscuously. We use it to refer to things in politics or government with which we agree. We use it to describe the status quo in countries that think of themselves as democracies.

We also use “democracy” to refer to our post-World War II liberal order, supposedly superior to all other systems, even though that order often protects military and corporate powers that undermine democracy. We use “democracy” to mean elections, even though many countries with autocracies stage elections.

After 18 years of convening conversations about democracy around the world, I have found a more useful definition of democracy. Democracy is best understood as four words:

Everyday people governing themselves.

When you think about democracy this way, you realize that democracy isn’t something you save. It’s something you do — with other people. When people in your neighborhood or city or nation are governing themselves — deliberating, making decisions, implementing policies — you are in a democracy.

Thus, democracy is a do-it-yourself enterprise. The philosopher G.W. Chesterton observed in Orthodoxy that democracy is like blowing one’s nose or writing love letters — something “we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly.”

So, when you judge whether a particular place counts as democratic, consider democracy as a spectrum, with “everyday people governing themselves” as its most democratic pole.

Soon, you’ll recognize that most democracy exists at the local level, in the smaller entities where it’s easier for everyday people to get together and govern. As Mahatma Gandhi wrote: “True democracy cannot be worked by 20 men sitting at the center. It has to be worked from below, by the people of every village.”

Unfortunately, when asked whether they live in a democracy, people today don’t think of their city, but of their nation-state. They usually answer the question based on whether their national leaders are fairly elected and respect constitutional norms.

The word “democracy” has become a synonym for a safe destination, the political-economic equivalent of a comfortable sofa where we can lie down and relax. From this sofa conception flows the idea that democracy can be “saved” — from authoritarians or foreign powers or misinformation that might tear us from our sofas.

But real democracy is not a sofa. It’s not cushy. Democracy, at least democracy on the spectrum of “everyday people governing themselves,” is not about voting for one powerful person. It’s about decentralizing decision-making power and handing it to regular people.

For this reason, President Biden’s pledges to protect democracy — coming from an officeholder who can govern by executive order and take military action without public deliberation — will never be credible.

Democracy requires us to get off our couches. It also involves faith and competition, which is why it resembles religions or sports more than a system of government.  Democracy is maintained through practice. If people stop going to Mass or listening to the Pope, Catholicism dies. If people stop throwing balls at rounded bats, there is no baseball.

So, if you value democracy, do it — wherever you can. Let the kids in your local sports league vote for the all-stars, instead of the coaches or parents. Let workers and customers make big decisions at your company. Create assemblies of everyday citizens to write your city’s ordinances.

And don’t waste another moment hoping your leaders will save democracy. Get out there and do it yourself.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square, an Arizona State University media enterprise.

Shohei Ohtani is the only major league baseball player who can both hit and pitch at an elite level.

Perhaps he should manage California’s state budget too.

I say that because of his new contract. This winter, Ohtani signed what was initially reported as a 10-year, $700 million contract to play for the Los Angeles Dodgers. But the real details were different.

Ohtani agreed to collect just $2 million annually for the next 10 years. The team would defer the rest of the deal, some $680 million — and pay it to Ohtani more than a decade from now, when he is in his 40s and retired. Ohtani essentially leaves the Dodgers more money to sign other top players and build an elite team around him now; future Dodgers teams are not his problem.

To find a public financial document in California with more deferrals than Ohtani’s contract, you’d have to look at the state budget Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed last month.

Attempting to close a $58 billion budget gap, Newsom is relying on at least $10 billion in deferrals and delayed payments.

Such deferrals are complicated — involving multiple shifts of moneys between accounts. The proposed budget defers payments to the state’s two university systems, suggesting they borrow instead. The budget also delays $1.6 billion in transit grants and $700 million in school facilities.

And in an accounting gimmick, Newsom saves $1 billion by pushing the last state payroll of the coming 2024-25 budget year back one day, into a new budget year.

These $10 billion-plus in deferrals don’t include education, which Newsom and Democrats claim their budget doesn’t cut. But that’s deceptive. The state’s non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s Office found that California is actually reducing spending on schools and community colleges by $15.2 billion, relative to the budget enacted in June 2023.

The way the state does this is too complicated to explain here — it involves the convoluted three-part Prop. 98 funding formula. The short version: Newsom is charging $9 billion in reductions to the 2022-23 school year and redefining these cuts as a reset of the funding baseline. There are several more billion in school cuts that appear in the budget without explanation of how they would be enacted.

Meanwhile, the same budget makes few cuts in an expanding state bureaucracy that has seen significant pay raises recently. Staffing increases and pay raises will produce even larger pension obligations in years to come. Payments to retired workers, as Shohei Ohtani understands, are a form of deferred compensation.

Why is the budget so out of whack? For years, I’ve conducted a long-distance argument about this with David Crane, a former UC regent and state pension fund board member who founded a political organization, Govern for California, to elect more public-spirited lawmakers.

Crane argues that California governance fails because our  politicians lack  the courage to take on the state’s powerful labor and corporate lobbies.

I argue the problem is structural — that California’s broken state constitution pushes the budget out of balance.

But in this budget season, I must concede that Crane has the better side of the argument. California is not in a recession. The governor and legislative Democrats have the money and power to make hard choices now. By deferring so much, they would make it future budgets hard to balance, and push more costs onto younger Californians.

Which is why our leaders should take Crane’s advice, and do the hard work of evaluating programs for effectiveness and cutting those that don’t work.  State agencies and local governments also should enact Crane’s best idea: stop spending billions on retiree health care costs and instead have government workers rely on federal programs like Medicare and Obamacare, like other retirees do. Ending these retiree health benefits will free up money to provide better services for Californians.

Ironically, when details of Ohtani’s contract were first disclosed,  top state financial officials criticized the deferrals. They complained that Ohtani might dodge California’s income taxes by retiring from the Dodgers and leaving California by the time that $680 million is due him.

They had a point — so why imitate Ohtani now?

The truth, harder than an Ohtani fastball, is that California doesn’t have time to waste with gimmicks. Tax receipts are already running billions behind the overly optimistic revenue projections in Newsom’s January budget. If the governor were to tear up his proposal and offer a budget that relies more on rigorous reforms than deferrals, he’d be hitting a fiscal home run.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square, an Arizona State University media enterprise.

Harris K. Telemacher was a Los Angeles TV weathercaster with an ocean of knowledge — he had a PhD in humanities and quoted Shakespeare — but no real meteorological training. So, assuming California weather was predictable, he taped his televised forecasts weeks in advance. This worked until an unexpected Pacific storm deluged the Southland during one of his pre-recorded forecasts.

Telemacher also was a fictional character invented Steve Martin in the film L.A. Story. But he embodied a real-life cliché that needs retiring.

California weather has never been as predictable as a TV weathercaster gag — especially when it comes to the rain and snow of Golden State winters like this one.

In fact, no state in the lower 48 sees as much variability in its year-to-year precipitation as California. Such variability makes our weather at least as unpredictable as anything else in this volatile state. Last year, California was in the midst of the driest three-year run in recorded history when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, forecasted a drier-than-average winter. Instead, we experienced one of our wettest winters ever.

Now, another winter of weather surprises has arrived, demonstrating that California desperately needs better seasonal forecasts so we can plan and protect ourselves in this era of climate change.

Seasonal forecasts are not the predictions of tomorrow’s weather delivered by Telemacher and his present-day imitators. Seasonal forecasts provide ranges of possible climate changes for the next season on the calendar. (Federal agency forecasts for winter are usually out by Halloween). Meteorologists will tell you that while it’s impossible to tell you the weather on a particular day months in advance, they should be able to predict, broadly, how wet or dry the next season should be.

But that’s always been hard to do in California. Lately, it’s become even harder because of the state’s “weather whiplash” — the seesawing we’ve seen between flood and drought.

Our current inability to predict seasonal wet conditions makes it harder to manage water supplies (we need to store more in wet winters to prepare for drier years), prepare for disasters (including unpredictable floods, like the one that recently inundated parts of San Diego), and do long-term planning for agriculture, which supplies food to the entire nation.

But improving seasonal forecasts is easier said than done. Even the most advanced meteorologists have failed to produce accurate seasonal forecasts. Indeed, recent studies suggest our need a better understanding of the peculiarities of the Pacific Ocean to improve their forecasts.

Determining how much rain or snow is likely to fall in California depends on predicting atmospheric patterns over the northern Pacific Ocean. To do so, meteorologists have depended on sea surface temperatures in the South Pacific and the phenomena known as El Niño and La Ninã. Warm temperatures, or “El Niño” conditions, were believed to herald rain. Cool “La Niña” conditions were thought to signal a dry winter.

But research from UCLA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory finds that El Niño conditions don’t explain most of our weather variability. To cite one example, tropical sea surface temperatures and conditions were very similar in 2021-22 and 2022-23, but the first winter was dry and the second was one of our wettest.

“It remains elusive how predictable the year-to-year variability of CA winter precipitation is and why it is challenging to achieve skillful seasonal prediction of CA precipitation,” the paper said.

According to the authors, to arrive at more accurate seasonal forecasts, scientists need a better understanding of the ocean’s “circulation anomalies” that are independent of El Niño. Current climate models, the paper argued, “show nearly no skill in predicting these” anomalies, which means they have “limited predictive skill for California winter precipitation.”

The paper also argued that current climate models can’t predict patterns that stem from tropical convection (i.e. tropical clouds and thunderstorms) or the stratospheric polar vortex. This means that for better seasonal forecasts in California, meteorologists need a better understanding of conditions in the far-away western Pacific, Indian, and Arctic oceans.

How do we achieve this?

One answer is more detailed observation of oceans, sea ice, and clouds — and their impacts on precipitation. Another answer is to employ better computer capacity and artificial intelligence to build better climate models. This is a planetary problem — if you want better predictions of California precipitation, you need to improve modeling and data for climate of the whole earth.

But such improvements won’t happen fast. So, for at least a few more winters, we’re stuck with unreliable seasonal forecasts, and unpredictable weather.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square, an Arizona State University media enterprise.

If the world really is going to hell, please get your brakes checked. The ride will be very downhill.

I learned that lesson, among others, after my own brakes started to smoke while descending down, down, down Highway 190 into California’s answer to the underworld — Death Valley.

I did not run into the Devil on this Death Valley visit. But I did enjoy the otherworldly vistas of mountains, deserts, and salt flats in Death Valley locations like Dante’s View, Hell’s Gate and the Amargosa Chaos.

Despite such sights, Death Valley attracts just over 1 million visitors annually, just one-third as many as cram into Yosemite each year.

This relatively lower number of visitors is healthier for the sensitive desert ecosystems. But Death Valley deserves Yosemite-level respect, and not just for its 130-plus temperatures or the damage that a drive to the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere can do to your car.

Death Valley, bigger than Connecticut, is the largest national park in the continental United States, and one of the world’s largest sections of protected desert. The National Park service bills it as a “vast geological museum,” with visible examples from most of the planet’s geologic eras. 

Nearly all of it is officially wilderness, providing quiet, darkness, and solitude unmatched anywhere else in our state.

Now, Death Valley offers a portal to our planetary future. As the climate changes, our world is becoming a place of extremes. Death Valley is already there. It’s at once the hottest and driest place in the country, and a place where a sudden, dangerous rain storm can bring snow, level hills, or revive ancient lakes.

Because of its scary extremes, Death Valley is misunderstood. Just as Voltaire quipped that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor a real empire, Death Valley is not exactly a valley, nor is it dead.

It’s a graben, a block of the earth’s crust dropped pped between two higher pieces of crust.  And it’s full of life — with more than 300 species of birds, 50 species of native mammals, and even species of native fish.

Understanding the way life flourishes in Death Valley should demonstrate that, as California’s landscapes and climate change, we shouldn’t trust our eyes. Places may look more barren, but they still contain much that is worthy of our devotion.

Protecting places of extremes will demand more sharing of responsibility, and more varied participation in governance.  In recent years, Death Valley has received notice for a novel governance system that empowers its Indigenous residents, the Timbisha Shoshone.

In 2000, after decades of activism, the federal government created the first reservation inside a national park for the Shoshone. Since then, the Shoshone and the National Park Service co-manage Death Valley to protect its treasures and allow traditional Native pratices.  

The collaboration initially drew criticism from some environmentalists who didn’t want people, even the Indigineous, touching too much of the park. But in recent years, such criticism has faded because of the mounting threat of climate change to the park, and the ability of humans to survive there.

As the philosopher Margret Grebowicz described in a January essay for the New Republic, Death Valley’s already scorching summer temperatures have risen, drying up the piñon pine nuts and killing off the honey mesquite, both of which the tribe’s members harvest. The heat also makes the Shoshone’s summer migration more dangerous.

Along with the greater heat has come unusual rain. Death Valley has seen a “thousand-year” storm in each of the last two years, forcing temporary park closures.

The 2023 storm — remnants of Hurricane Hilary — created ephemeral lakes, some of which are still present. This includes Lake Manly, which last appeared in 2005 in Badwater Basin, a remnant of a large lake that dominated Death Valley in ancient times.

After a mechanic added some brake fluid to my car, I visited Lake Manly, which demonstrated one silver lining of our downhill drive to climate hell: there will be some compensating beauty.

To reach the lake, you walk across white salt flats resembling fresh fallen snow. The lake perfectly reflects the Panamint Mountains to the West. Its color is silverly blue, and feels not quite of this planet.

Several visitors removed their shoes to wade into the two-feet-deep waters. Among them was a Nevada church group, one of whose members recited the 23rd Psalm, and its famous lines about facing future peril:

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.

Come to California if you want to live.

That’s my New Year’s suggestion for a new state slogan. California is losing population for the first time since it became a state. The cause of the problem is not people leaving — in fact, our levels of departures, as percentage of population, are among the very lowest in the nation. Rather, the problem is that so few people are moving here.

The biggest reason for that is well known: The cost of living in the Golden State is among America’s highest. But less well known is that our high costs buy you more living. Literally. On average, Californians live to 79, which beats the American average by more than two years, along with the average of all but three other states.

Historically, California was middling in life expectancy. But during the 21st century, federal data has ranked it at or near the very top of the 50 states. Lately, only Hawai‘i residents, who reach an average 80.7 years, have lived longer. Our biggest metro areas are among the healthiest places in the country. The Bay Area ranks second in life expectancy nationally, and Los Angeles third.

Nor do you have to spend your whole life here to gain the extra time. Stanford and MIT researchers have found that moving to California even after age 65 can increase your life span by more than a year, or 5%.

Why do we live longer? There are many reasons. Wealthier, higher-income states with relatively high levels of education — like California — tend to rank highest in life expectancy. Money, after all, buys more access to better health care, and California’s rich people live near some of the world’s best hospitals and highest-quality health systems.

Healthy behavior helps. The percentage of us who smoke is lower than that of any state besides Utah. Our obesity rate is the fourth-lowest in the U.S. We have some of the country’s lowest rates of infant mortality and suicide.

The cost of living in the Golden State is among America’s highest. But less well known is that our high costs buy you more living. Literally.

Our more liberal public policy counts too. California’s strong environmental protections for air and water help us live longer. Gun control keeps many of us alive — we have the eighth-lowest rate of gun deaths and gun ownership. A new study from the gun control non-profit Everytown for Gun Safety finds that the Golden State has the strongest gun laws in the country. If every other state copied our regulations, the study found, nearly 300,000 lives could be saved over the next decade.

Then there’s our nation-leading commitment to health care coverage. This month, California became the first state in the union to make all unauthorized immigrants eligible for Medi-Cal, California’s name for the federal health care program Medicaid. With this move, Golden State becomes the first state to expand Medicaid to cover all low-income residents. That portends even longer lives for future Californians, since low-income populations usually have the highest mortality rates.

The news is not all good. California saw its life expectancy drop below 80 years during the pandemic. But the overall U.S. life expectancy dropped even further, to just over 76 years. And there is a significant disparity — approaching 7 years — in expected life span between residents of California’s urban and suburban coastal counties, and those who live in the rural North State and Central Valley. 

Frustratingly, California also lags in rankings of mental health services — which is one reason that Prop 1, a $6.38 billion mental health measure, is on the March ballot. And the state has failed to reduce the number of people in the state who are unhoused, a life circumstance that according to a UCSF study makes you 16 times more likely to die suddenly.

California also struggles to prevent deadly drug use, especially among young people. A new “report card” on California from the advocacy coalition Children Now gives the state a “D-” on substance abuse prevention, saying that California’s “unfocused” plan offers little in early intervention “and instead requires kids to ‘fail first’ before getting the help they need.”

Of course, the other states also struggle with drugs, mental health, and homelessness, and many of them offer less in services and support than we do. The statistics demonstrate that California, for all its failures, is a great place to settle if your goal is to stick around awhile on earth.

And if my formulation — “Come to California if you want to live” — seems too sharp, then the state might instead borrow a line from the comedian Mort Sahl, who spent his later years in Marin County, whose residents enjoy the state’s longest life expectancy (more than 83 years).

“You haven’t lived,” Sahl said, “until you’ve died in California.”

He died in 2021, in Mill Valley, at age 94.

Joe Mathews writes the Democracy Local column for Zócalo Public Square, an Arizona State University media enterprise.