Governor Jerry Brown tours his off-the-grid 150-year old family ranch in a remote part of Northern California in his all-terrain vehicle.
“There are no lobbyists for the future.”
— Governor Jerry Brown, late 1970s
You know you’re getting a little older when the most consistent pathfinder in one’s life is embarking on last ever exercises. So it is that we find ourselves with Governor Jerry Brown’s last ever California state budget.
Term limits finally apply to Jerry Brown. As he begins the last year of his record-setting four terms as California governor, a tenure he renewed in January 2011 following a 28-year gap, he has just presented his final state budget to widespread acclaim. What a difference seven years has made.
When Brown, then California’s attorney general, returned to the governorship in January 2011 after a landslide victory over eBay billionaire Meg Whitman’s biggest-spending non-presidential campaign in American history, he inherited a $27 billion state budget deficit. Now he is looking at a proposed $19 billion surplus. (Jerry Brown 1.0 left a minor budget deficit in January 1983, in the midst of a national economic recession.)
Of course, it won’t be such a large surplus if some of Brown’s fellow Democrats, ever eager to spend freely even after that practice plunged the state into disarray during the governorship of Brown’s former chief of staff Gray Davis, have their way. That disarray, accelerated by the great global recession of 2008, continued to a certain degree even under Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Brown intends to fully fund his state rainy day fund, raising it to a whopping and historic $13.5 billion. And he wants to increase funding for his egalitarian educational funding initiative, historic expansion of MediCal for low-income Californians, and new sustainable society initiatives for the greenhouse era funded by the state’s again smoothly functioning carbon cap & trade market.
Though he posits another recession as inevitable, and recognizes that the state’s reliance on high-income and investment income revenues can make for a rocky revenue picture, he has no grand plan to reform the state's tax structure. That means there will be no adoption of the odd “reformist” trope on taxes, which coincidentally (not to mention suspiciously) always begins with proposed cuts in taxes for the rich and big corporations. Which, by the way, is what is happening right now at the federal level with the new reactionary Trump policies, which passed very narrowly despite unanimous Democratic opposition.
Nor are there big new social programs in Brown’s budget. Brown is evidently keeping in mind the increasingly likely onset of the inevitable next recession, as well as the tendency of Democratic politicians to imagine that any and all tax hikes are feasible. That’s precisely how the State of California got into its then chronic budget crisis after the dot-com boom went bust not long after the Millennium, as I’ve discussed many times.
Brown with a trusty Pembroke Welsh Corgi who does not belong to the Queen of England. This one’s name is Colusa, same as the county which contains the ranch. Her big brother, the famed Sutter Brown, Colusa’s predecessor as First Dog of California, is buried there at Rancho Venada. Brown’s sister Kathleen fatefully and rather mischievously gifted the famous pooch.
The potential problem of unsustainable public pension and benefit commitments gobbling up money needed for public services? Brown predicts public pension cuts in the next recession, if need be, based on already established legal precedent. It’s always seemed to me that, in a pinch, the courts would take a pragmatic approach that retains most pension and health benefits for retired public workers that private sector folks certainly no longer have but also balances ongoing benefits with actual public services. Brown has intervened with counsel from the Governor’s Office to try to make certain that view prevails.
In the wake of the unveiling of the final Brown state budget, there is a general consensus that Brown’s pragmatic fiscal approach has been very good for California.
Looking back to the beginning of the decade, we see that Brown ended the Golden State’s chronic budget crisis with early budget cuts followed by revenue enhancements, then held the line against a plethora of big new spending programs while focusing on core elements — renewable energy, conservation, new transportation — needed to get this nascent civilization through the greenhouse era transition.
Although it had seemed to a number of us quite unlikely that he would succeed in getting the needed handful of Republican legislative votes to place the moderate Schwarzenegger-era revenue enhancement program focused on sales tax hikes on the ballot — I’d seen the intransigence up close and personal for years as the Republican Party drifted ever rightward, then heard it, albeit charmingly, all over again over drinks with a few Republican legislative leaders during Brown’s gubernatorial transition — it was nonetheless important for Brown to go through a very extended public exercise of reaching out to Republicans for that very purpose.
When that approach failed, following more than half a year of tedious Brown talks with Republican state legislators, which nonetheless paid off in other ways, the governor was free to pursue his own initiative. An initiative which, with further adjustment, became substantially more left-oriented, i.e., raising of taxes on the wealthy, and hence potentially popular with the electorate.
In the event, once a few course adjustments were made, Brown spearheaded the Proposition 30 revenue initiative to a landslide victory in the November 2012 election, to the great surprise of a great many, ensuring the success of his governorship.
Now he is embarked on the final fiscal chapter of his governorship, with the next chapter of his public adventures beyond the governorship on tap.
Brown at Rancho Venada two years ago with First Lady/Special Counsel Anne Gust Brown and corgis Sutter and Colusa. Brown has had many useful aides, advisors and whatnot during his fascinating time in public life, including the present crack gubernatorial staff headed by the very able Nancy McFadden. But none have been more valuable than the incisive and amusing Stanford and Michigan Law alum.
In addition to expanding funding for his initiative to focus public education funding on disadvantaged schools as a way to erase stubborn gaps in educational achievement, Brown is doubling down on his longstanding quest to expand online education.
It was called “distance learning” decades ago when Brown first championed the idea of using networked personal computers as the delivery mechanism for instruction.
College and university leaders have dragged their heels, of course, weighed down by an old paradigm of traditional in-person classroom instruction. Their attitudes would be much more persuasive if academic rank was more dependent on teaching than on specialty publishing.
As it is, Brown is now pushing for a statewide online community college, a true democratization of basic higher education. I’ve utilized quite a few online university courses to get up to speed and stay up to speed in several areas. Online learning works well, though it does require some self-starting. If more folks drop classes than in the traditional paradigm, that’s fine. It should be clear that there is no shame in that. If it’s not working for you, move on to something that does. If you need help, ask for it. It’s a different time. Greater access and lower cost means greater volume and increased success.
Sustaining education and knowledge in an increasingly dumbed-down society is a big part of the irreducible core that must be achieved if we are to survive our technological adolescence and move through the transition toward a first truly advanced civilization.
Other big parts of that transition — building a sustainable post-greenhouse society that averts the worst of climate change and avoids nuclear war — have been more frequently discussed and more dramatically in the forefront of Brown’s approach.
The Browns moved into the renovated historic Old Governor’s Mansion in downtown Sacramento two years ago, leaving their loft over a fine Chinese restaurant and the best sushi place in town.
Over the holidays, Brown had the Los Angeles Times over to see the latest state of his next abode after the Old Governor’s Mansion he renovated and moved into two years ago.
Rancho Venada is the 150-year old Brown family ranch in a remote part of Northern California. It is, let’s say, a place of austere vistas. While Brown’s asceticism can be overstated, it is certainly true that he is a man who enjoys a breakfast repast of black coffee, toast, and hardboiled egg.
Glimpsed briefly in a previous millennium while en route elsewhere, prior to all the glitzy improvements (haha), Rancho Venada seemed to me more than a little reminiscent of back in the day in the back of beyond. (Indeed, Google, given a general translation command, rendered Rancho Venada as Uzbek for “Ranch Vienna.” It's undoubtedly something else in Spanish.)
Yet, as you can see from the fine photos from the Los Angeles Times and New York Times — and in this very fine piece by the Los Angeles Times videographer — it is a striking locale with ample reason for Brown to wax as poetic as he does about the place. It certainly seems fitting as a setting in which to contemplate post-greenhouse futures. Or even, on occasion, to lie on a sofa and read novels.
Though Brown, who turns 80 in April, certainly deserves a relaxing retirement, we shouldn’t expect too much of that. For one thing, the man, who has the energy and acuity of someone decades younger, simply isn’t wired that way. For another, there is simply too much to do.
The UN special advisor has the State of California’s global climate action summit coming up next September in San Francisco. And there is much more for his global Under2 Coalition of subnational governments representing two-fifths of the world’s economy to do. With the shambolic Donald Trump presidency surviving in its greenhouse denialism into an already chaotic Year 2, one senses a de facto national, continental, and world climate ministry in the making.
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