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6>;34= 140A Governor-Elect Jerry Brown in Sacramento in 2009. Getting the state deficit in order won’t just be tough on Brown—it’ll be tough on all of us.

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CWXaS CTa\ CW^a^dVWQaTS What can we expect from Jerry Brown this time around? By Tom Hayden

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recently asked my friend Angela Oh, defense attorney and Buddhist priest, what she thought about the karma of Jerry Brown. She paused for only a moment. “His karma,� she replied, “is to inherit the collapse of so many institutions his father built.� Infrastructure decay. Traffic congestion and pollution. Water shortages. More prison inmates than state university students. Since Brown rebelled against his father’s legacy during his “small is beautiful� phase, it’s tempting to accept Oh’s analysis. But there are several differences this time. First, the booming revenues of Pat Brown’s era aren’t likely to return anytime soon. The current deficit estimates for California range in the $20 billion to $28 billion range, our debt has doubled in seven years and our credit rating is the worst of the heavily populated states. Jerry Brown’s old prophecy of a coming “era of limits� has come true.

The second difference is that our productive industrial economy has been either outsourced or automated. Brown’s prophecies of globalization—in which he proposed a “North American common market�—have proven true as well. Brown’s central pledge to build a more energy-efficient economy with 500,000 green jobs will be incredibly difficult to fund. Furthermore, some of the state crises are Brown’s own responsibility, not the legacy of his father. Brown’s implementation of Proposition 13 by spending the state’s surplus created an illusion that there was no revenue crisis. And his hard-line anticrime philosophy, beginning with his support for mandatory minimum sentencing in 1975, eventually resulted in a prison gulag of 150,000 inmates costing more tax dollars than the state university system and five times the state’s budget for the environment and natural resources. Finally, the state’s financial crisis has been inflamed by Democrats “fascinated by supply-side economics,� according to a leading analyst of the budget in Sacramento. Two-thirds of the structural

shortfall is due to tax cuts enacted by the State Legislature during the past 15 years, according to the California Budget Project. Recent corporate tax breaks, the source says, were “largely backed by D’s.� In other words: Brown’s party.

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o his credit, Brown has been holding televised teach-ins and town meetings on the budget quandary. At a UCLA forum on Dec. 14, his message that there will be deep cuts proposed in his January budget was consistent with his longtime frugality. But he also wants fairness. Remember, Brown has a Catholic sensibility that frowns on privilege and ostentatious strutting. “Those who are the most privileged have to lead� in cutting back budgets and perks, he said, noting that he was cutting his own office expenditures by 20 percent. A few minutes later, he upped that figure to 25 percent or more. “There are limits to inequality,� he added, because “it tears at the social fabric.� The language about sacrifice from the top was vintage Brown. His new symbol will have to be something other than the Plymouth, '' THE BOHEMIAN

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