Government by Fussbudget

California has had its fling with government by fussbudget and busybody, and it doesn’t work. If the state intends to go on being a great place to live, work, raise children and stay on the leading edge of the future, it will scrub from the law all traces of the anti-tax zealots of the 1970s for whom money was the only thing in the Golden State of any real value. The erasure will require an initiative--something that the Legislature should sponsor--and a public vote. It is well worth the effort.

In 1979 voters approved Proposition 4, whose large print imposed a lid on state and local spending and called for refunds of revenues above the ceiling. That sounded so good to taxpayers that 75% of them voted for it, apparently without bothering with the fine print.

The fine print contained an arbitrary formula for determining the ceiling on spending--a combination of the consumer price index and population growth. The fatal flaw in such a formula is that there is absolutely no connection between the consumer price index and the number of children who need schooling, the numbers of potholes in highways, the number of poor people who get sick or with any of the other statistics that measure the kinds of public needs that require government services in the first place.

One of the problems that the fine print is causing was addressed the other day by Gov. George Deukmejian, who says that he remains a devotee of government by fussbudget. You would not get much of a show of hands around the state by asking people whether they think that there are already enough roads and that they are all as smooth as they need to be and that public transportation is more than adequate. But maintaining a decent network of transportation for commuters, manufacturers and farmers, who must get their goods and produce to market or perish, takes money--far more than California now spends on everything from hydrants to highways that go under the name of infrastructure.

Keeping the transportation part of the infrastructure in good repair requires raising gasoline taxes. Inflation has robbed the state’s gasoline taxes of most of the purchasing power that they had two decades ago, and they should be much higher.

But even when there is such a direct relation between taxes and services, as in the case of gasoline and highways, Proposition 4 might well force the state to refund an increase before it could fill that first pothole.

So it is with other state services that show a far more tenuous relation between taxes and needs. California schools spend half as much per child as do New York schools. The average number of children per teacher nationally is 18; the California average is 30. What nonsense that the consumer price index should decide whether Californians can spend more money to educate their young.

Nor is it likely that anyone who is feeling rotten and running a high fever would give a thought to consulting the inflation rate before heading for the doctor’s office. But Proposition 4 puts exactly that limit on medical care for the indigent.

Worse, the governor says, it would prevent Sacramento from so much as replacing money pulled out of health programs by the federal budget as it squeezes down the deficit.

Such is the legacy of the fussbudgets and the busybodies--one that will mean that Californians have put their future behind them unless they move swiftly and energetically to disavow the legacy. Proposition 4 is not necessarily the worst of the handiwork of the zealots, but it is a handy place to start.