A FISCAL CRISIS IN CALIFORNIA? Ed Morrissey notes that the inability to restrain spending has made this inevitable, and suggests that the likely outcome is a tax increase justified by the crisis.

I’ve just been reading Daniel Weintraub’s excellent Party of One: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Rise of the Independent Voter, which comes out in a couple of weeks, and you can certainly see how Schwarzenegger’s compassionate-conservative approach, coupled with the inbred, gerrymandered lack of accountability in the California legislature, made this inevitable. I predict that Schwarzenegger will announce a “compromise” tax increase based on the “emergency,” with some cosmetic budget cuts that won’t really amount to much. But I could be wrong — as Weintraub’s book notes, Schwarzenegger is a canny politician in many ways. However, his budget approach seems to have been based on kicking the can down the road, and that only works for so long. Meanwhile, I’m reminded of Poul Anderson’s statement that “compassionate government” is a code phrase meaning that there will be absolutely no compassion for the taxpayer.