John Burton wants to put a band-aid on the California budget mess:
Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D-San Francisco) said passing a spending plan with Band-Aids offers the best hope of freeing up lawmakers to deal with the budget’s structural problems in time to bring proposals before voters.
“It is like you have a patient with double pneumonia, which is this year’s problem, and the patient also has cancer, which is a problem for next year and beyond,” said Burton. “You cannot operate on the long-term cancer problem until you deal with the pneumonia.”
This is nonsense, of course, because this legislature only has two modes of operation: business as usual, which means spending like a drunken sailor to appease the special interests, or crisis mode, to appease angry voters. If we sit back and give the legislature time to reflect, consider, and mull things over, they’ll end up doing nothing. The only opportunities we have for structural reform are those brought about by crises, so we have to act right now to correct the problems that made this crisis happen.
And even John Burton knows that.