ONCE AGAIN SACRAMENTO is late in delivering this fiscal year's budget. Why? The simple and direct answer is that California is just one of three states in the country that require a two-thirds majority vote to pass their annual budgets. Due to this anomaly, the minority party can veto any budget proposal with a one-third vote. Proposition 56 on the March 2004 ballot would have changed the required vote from two-thirds to 55 percent. Unfortunately, only one county in California supported that measure: San Francisco.

The 2004-05 budget is the first submitted by our new governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. As a candidate last fall, Schwarzenegger professed that balancing the budget on time would be no problem. Most important, candidate Schwarzenegger demanded that the voters cut up the credit cards of profligately spending legislators. The irresponsible borrowing in Sacramento must end, he said. Next, he promised to root out the "billions and billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse" in state government. With that done, the chronic, structural imbalance of our budget – which the nonpartisan legislative analyst's office pegs at about $8 billion – would magically disappear. That $8 billion represents the difference between California's revenues and expenditures.

Apparently the governor failed at unearthing those billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse. Instead he has decided that to balance the budget it will be necessary to deny, for the first time since 1960, college opportunities to thousands of qualifying California high school students. Also necessary is to cut the wages of In Home Support Service workers to the minimum of $6.75 an hour and to deny child support to thousands of mothers who are struggling to complete their transition from welfare to work. Of course, even these proposed cuts to higher education and to health and human services will only save his budget around $1.1 billion. So how has Schwarzenegger proposed to close the balance of a $15 billion shortfall? Amazingly, he suggests borrowing billions of dollars from K-12 spending, billions more from cities and counties, another billion in pension obligation bonds, and another billion or more from the recently passed Proposition 57 deficit bond, which was intended to dig us out of last year's spending hole.

For years now, Democrats in Sacramento have advocated for a balanced approach to finally addressing the structural imbalance of the budget. That would mean making judicious cuts in spending where necessary and raising revenues to a level of taxation that existed prior to the tax cuts of the late 1990s. Those tax cuts of more than $30 billion represented the largest single spending program of the Davis years. In fact, if the state had not returned those billions of dollars to taxpayers, we would not have a structural imbalance in our budget today. Republican legislators, however, refuse to even allow for a public policy debate around taxes. So with the revenue side of the equation off the table, and unable themselves to make the severity of spending reductions necessary to bring the budget into balance, my Republican colleagues have no other option but to continually extend this charade with the voters by further reliance on borrowing.

The very tragic and disappointing irony is that our "Blow up the Boxes" governor has bought into this madness. The same guy who travels the state, telling anyone who will listen that we must cut up the credit cards of irresponsible legislators because they cannot be trusted since they will "rob you blind," is borrowing in unprecedented amounts. Legislative analyst Elizabeth Hill identified $20 billion in "outstanding budget-related borrowing" in the governor's May revision spending plan.

Leadership is not demonstrated by telling people what they want to hear. Leadership entails bold honesty and a forthright discussion about what the role of state government will be in California's future, the cost of that role, and the means by which to pay for it. Sadly, this administration has abrogated that leadership to my Republican colleagues – which is no leadership at all.

Mark Leno represents San Francisco in the state assembly.