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Gov. Jerry Brown cautioned lawmakers that even though there is a budget surplus, they should not overspend as he delivers his annual State of the State speech before a joint session of the Legislature at the Capitol in Sacramento, Calif., Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2014. Brown delivered a dual message in his annual address to the Legislature, that a California resurgence is well underway but is threatened by economic and environmental uncertainties.(AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

SACRAMENTO Republicans and Democrats reacted favorably to Gov. Jerry Browns announcement on Wednesday that he supports the creation of a new rainy day fund that would help the state government amass reserves to weather tough financial times and chisel away at its mountains of unfunded debt.

But despite the apparent agreement, there are enormous differences of opinion over how that fund should be set up and what it will mean for future spending plans.

As he called for a special legislative session to hammer out the rainy-day fund details, Brown looks like a fiscal hawk. But hes playing a middle-of-the-road role, as he tries to soften a Republican-backed rainy-day fund measure already slated for the November ballot while reining in legislative Democrats and liberal interest groups that are more interested in ramping up new spending programs than paying down old debts.

During 2010-2011 budget negotiations, Democrats back when they needed Republicans to pass a budget agreed to put ACA 4 on the ballot in exchange for Republican budget votes. Democrats agreed to the deal, then tied up this measure in the rules committee. Republicans are still sore that it missed the 2012 ballot.

Of course, placing it on the ballot and convincing voters to approve it are two different things. Public-sector unions have been highly critical of the rainy-day plan and could spend the money to defeat it if they decide to fight. Thats why the GOP should be happy to have a popular governor as a potential ally here even if they have to agree to a few changed provisions.

As the Brown administration explained at a press briefing on Wednesday, voters approved Proposition 58 in 2004, which diverts 3 percent of annual revenues into a reserve fund. But the state has suspended the diversion every year over the past six years, the Legislature can tap the funds at will, and the deposits are made in good times and bad ones.

The administration said that ACA 4 would be an improvement, but It does not give the state a realistic option to pay off its liabilities. Brown also is concerned that the proposed measure does nothing to address the sharp ups and downs of Proposition 98 (the school-funding law) and bases deposits on a complicated formula of historical revenue data, rather than real-time economic data.

So the governor offered a plan that would deposit money in a rainy-day fund based on spikes in capital-gains revenues, doubles the size of the account, allows the Legislature to use the money for debt payments rather than savings, caps the amount of money that can be withdrawn in emergencies and makes a few other budgeting changes.

Republican senators applauded the effort, but offered some caveats. While Republicans are open to alternatives to a bipartisan agreement passed in 2010 , we want a strong locked box that protects taxpayers monies instead of a piggy bank that can be raided on the whim of the majority partys desire to spend, said Sen. Jim Nielsen, R-Gerber, in a statement. Assembly Republicans echoed those points. Republicans also are waiting to see all the details.

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Rainy-day plan ignites spending debate

True Progressives Are Frustrated: Need More Alan Graysons In Congress
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In a 2006 interview, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer said the Constitution is basically about one word democracy that appears in neither that document nor the Declaration of Independence. Democracy is Americas way of allocating political power. The Constitution, however, was adopted to confine that power in order to secure the blessings of that which simultaneously justifies and limits democratic government natural liberty.

The fundamental division in U.S. politics is between those who take their bearings from the individuals right to a capacious, indeed indefinite, realm of freedom, and those whose fundamental value is the right of the majority to have its way in making rules about which specified liberties shall be respected.

Now the nation no longer lacks what it has long needed, a slender book that lucidly explains the intensity of conservatisms disagreements with progressivism. For the many Americans who are puzzled and dismayed by the heatedness of political argument today, the message of Timothy Sandefurs The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty is this: The temperature of todays politics is commensurate to the stakes of todays argument.

The argument is between conservatives who say U.S. politics is basically about a condition, liberty, and progressives who say it is about a process, democracy. Progressives, who consider democracy the source of liberty, reverse the Founders premise, which was: Liberty preexists governments, which, the Declaration says, are legitimate when instituted to secure natural rights.

Progressives consider, for example, the rights to property and free speech as, in Sandefurs formulation, spaces of privacy that government chooses to carve out and protect to the extent that these rights serve democracy. Conservatives believe that liberty, understood as a general absence of interference, and individual rights, which cannot be exhaustively listed, are natural and that governmental restrictions on them must be as few as possible and rigorously justified. Merely invoking the right of a majority to have its way is an insufficient justification.

With the Declaration, Americans ceased claiming the rights of aggrieved Englishmen and began asserting rights that are universal because they are natural, meaning necessary for the flourishing of human nature. In Europe, wrote James Madison, charters of liberty have been granted by power, but America has charters of power granted by liberty.

Sandefur, principal attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation, notes that since the 1864 admission of Nevada to statehood, every states admission has been conditioned on adoption of a constitution consistent with the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration . The Constitution is the nations fundamental law but is not the first law. The Declaration is, appearing on Page 1 of Volume 1 of the U.S. Statutes at Large, and the Congress has placed it at the head of the United States Code, under the caption, The Organic Laws of the United States of America. Hence the Declaration sets the framework for reading the Constitution not as basically about democratic government majorities granting rights but about natural rights defining the limits of even democratic government.

The perennial conflict in American politics, Sandefur says, concerns which takes precedence: the individuals right to freedom, or the power of the majority to govern. The purpose of the post-Civil Wars 14th Amendment protection of Americans privileges or immunities protections vitiated by an absurdly narrow Supreme Court reading of that clause in 1873 was to assert, on behalf of emancipated blacks, national rights of citizens. National citizenship grounded on natural rights would thwart Southern states then asserting their power to acknowledge only such rights as they chose to dispense.

Government, the framers said, is instituted to improve upon the state of nature, in which the individual is at the mercy of the strong. But when democracy, meaning the process of majority rule, is the supreme value when it is elevated to the status of what the Constitution is basically about the individual is again at the mercy of the strong, the strength of mere numbers.

Sandefur says progressivism inverts Americas constitutional foundations by holding that the Constitution is about democracy, which rejects the framers premise that majority rule is legitimate only within the boundaries of the individuals natural rights. These include indeed, are mostly unenumerated rights whose existence and importance are affirmed by the Ninth Amendment.

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Progressives are wrong about the essence of the Constitution

It seems memories are short on San Francisco's progressive left, at least when it comes to tech companies and it happens to be union contract negotiating time.

Supervisor David Campos marched at the head of a protest Tuesday by the city's largest public employee union to denounce the Mid-Market tax break, designed to attract companies to the downtrodden area, as a corporate giveaway. He took the microphone as the throng blocked Market Street in front of Twitter's headquarters.

"We're simply here to say that these corporations have to pay their fair share," Campos told the crowd, mostly members of Service Employees International Union Local 1021, a progressive powerhouse on the city's political scene that organized the protest as it seeks pay raises for its workers.

This is the same David Campos who co-sponsored legislation in 2011 with a fellow progressive supervisor at the time, Ross Mirkarimi, that created a six-year tax break for startup companies' stock options.

That legislation was aimed at helping tech companies, like Zynga and Yelp, that were preparing to go public and would have seen a big spike in their tax bills if they remained in San Francisco, the only jurisdiction in the state that taxed gains on stock options.

The view of many at City Hall was that the stock-option tax break was a way to keep tech companies in San Francisco that didn't stand to benefit from a tax break the city had carved out for businesses that moved to, or grew in, the forlorn Mid-Market area. That tax break was designed, in part, to keep Twitter from fleeing to the suburbs.

While SEIU members attack the Mid-Market tax break as a failed form of trickle-down economics, the stock option tax break authored by progressives has so far cost the city more money.

The city wound up not collecting $1.9 million in taxes from the Mid-Market incentive through the end of 2012, while the stock-option break amounted to almost $4.9 million over the same period, according to the city's tax collector.

Figures are still being compiled for 2013, which included Twitter's lucrative initial public offering. Analysts project the tax break will allow the company to save more than $56 million on its tax bill over six years.

SEIU official Gabriel Haaland told the San Francisco Bay Guardian in 2011 that the Mid-Market tax break was "a sleazy land grab," while praising the Mirkarimi-led effort as "honestly trying to deal with tax policy," even though the Mid-Market incentive has led to a resurgence in the area and the stock option tax break doesn't require larger companies to provide community benefits, like local purchasing and volunteering, as the Mid-Market break does.

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Progressives rip one corporate tax break, laud another