On Sunday night Assembly Republicans, the chamber's minority party, got to present their tax-lite vision of California's future. It's a debt-laden budget that would cut college, kindergarten, kibble for guide dogs to the blind and health care for kids. Their proposal won just 27 votes in the 80-member Assembly. Even five Republicans couldn't bring themselves to vote Yes.

Legislative Republicans have argued that California, which cut taxes deeply during the flush days of the stock market boom, can't restore those revenues in the face of an enormous budget deficit. Higher state taxes would hurt the economy, they say.

This argument has never been particularly compelling. Neither of the two ways of coping with a budget deficit -- raising taxes or cutting spending -- is good for the economy. If it were possible to have something for nothing, the intelligent choice would be to avoid doing either.
In economic terms, every cut in state spending is also a cut in someone's personal income; if a Highway Patrol officer gets laid off or a blind person gets a lower SSI grant, the state's economy is reduced by the size of the spending cut.

Tax hikes, of course, also reduce disposable income. But the right kind of tax increase, such as an increase in the top bracket of the income tax, does less short-run damage, since high earners tend to respond to higher taxes not by consuming less but by reducing savings. In a budget crisis, temporarily higher state taxes are less bad for the economy than spending cuts of the same size.

That's even more true for California now that Washington has deeply slashed federal taxes. In the coming year, Californians' federal taxes will fall by about $15 billion, much of it coming out of the tax bills of the state's highest earners, who will get an average tax cut of $44,000 a year. If the state raised taxes to claim just a portion of that windfall, it could avoid billions worth of spending cuts damaging to the economy. And higher earners would still be better off than they were last year.

So with the economic case against higher taxes so weak, the question came down to values for legislative Republicans. They hate taxes so much they'd proposed to cut the equivalent of two campuses out of the University of California and the California State University, the state's great engines of future prosperity, rather than ask the state's highest earners to surrender a piece of an enormous federal tax cut. They put Shaquille O'Neal's next Mercedes Benz ahead of health care for children of the working poor.

California needs a budget, and soon. But it doesn't need one that's mean and stupid.