Welch: L.A. Times should point fingers at the mirror

Reason Magazine’s Matt Welch, a former writer for the L.A. Times, discusses the habit of his former paper and several of its brethren across the state, of blaming the voters for not passing tax increases and for being contradictory. Because newspapers are never contradictory and certainly not politicians.

Business columnist Michael Hiltzik, in a piece riddled with separate problems, concluded that “In any event, far more blame for the deficit belongs to California voters. Year in, year out, they enact spending mandates at the polls, often without endowing a revenue source.” Assistant Managing Editor David Lauter, in a defense of the May 20 news analysis, reiterated that “voters’ conflicting commands at the ballot box have been a big part of the problem” and that “lots of others who have analyzed the problem agree.” The paper’s editorial board snorted that “Perhaps now Sacramento has gotten the message. Unfortunately, the voters who sent it can’t agree what it was.”

The papers blame voters for voting spending increases at the ballot box over the years, then not stepping up when it comes time to vote the according tax increase. There’s a problem with this reasoning.

In this blame-the-voter critique, with its palpable whiff of condescension, the L.A. Times has curiously excluded a presumably influential or at least easy-to-find California co-conspirator: The paper’s own editorial board.

By my quick count (based on the Ballotopedia website; please check my math!), there have been at least 22 bond measures put to California voters since the year 2000, totaling $112 billion in bonds (not adjusted for inflation, and not including debt service and other tack-on goodies, which tend to roughly double the cost of most bonds over time). These initiatives range from a 2002 $200 million upgrade in voting technology, to a mammoth $19.925 billion package for roads, bridges, ports, and security (why not have it all!) in 2006′s Proposition 1B. While expensive, these bond measures amount to only a fraction of the tax/budget tweaks that citizens have voted on over the past decade.

So how many of these 22 bond measures did the irresponsible, mixed-signaling voters approve? A full 21. Guilty as charged! How about the cooler and more rational heads on the L.A. Times editorial board?

Twenty.

Yes, it’s the voters fault for voting in those 21 bond measures, and decry them from the heralded Ivory Tower we shall. But oops, our editorial board endorsed a full 20 of those issues. The legislature, complaining about non-existent funds, put 18 of the issues on the ballot.

If only the L.A. Times spent the same amount of time reading its own editorial page as it does haranguing voters from high atop its bully pulpit.

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