A How-to Guide for Using IOUs

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The State of California started paying bills with IOUs this week, so Rick Jacobs decided to try the same trick in the real world of convenience stores, vending machines, and cheeseburger drive-thru lanes.

Things didn't work out so well.

Jacobs is a netroots guru who's the founder and executive director of Courage Campaign, a Web-based political community boasting 400,000 members that uses online tools to help make California "more progressive and governable." Their latest tool is a mini-documentary showing what happens when your average dork tries to use printed IOUs called "Arnoldbucks" to carry on the commerce of everyday life when buying candy, fast food, groceries, and trying to get change from a stranger on the street.

"The State of California will gladly pay you Tuesday for a cheeseburger today," the video's protagonist, a comic actor named Andy Cobb, at one point tells a Wendy's cashier, who's not in on the joke (nor apparently familiar with the signature line from old Popeye cartoons).

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"So : is that cool?" Cobb adds, speaking out his car window to the drive-thru speaker.

"Nooo," replies the cashier, firmly, but very politely.

The video was produced by Public Service Administration, an L.A.-based troupe of actors and comics, many of them alums of Chicago's famed Second City improv theater. Courage Campaign posted the video (which you can find at couragecampaign.org) around the time Controller John Chiang announced he would stop sending out tax refund checks and withhold payments to counties for some social service programs, among other emergency financial steps, because California has run out of cash.

Facing a $42 billion budget deficit over the next year and a half, Governor Terminator and the Legislature for months have been locked in a political pygmy-cage match. With Democrats and the Republican governor having agreed to a combination of tax increases and large cuts in education and other services, the ongoing gridlock derives from the absolute refusal by GOP lawmakers to accept any new taxes. Republicans hold only 29 seats in the 80-member Assembly and just 15 in the 40-seat Senate, but are able to hold the budget hostage because California is one of only three states-Arkansas and Rhode Island are the others-requiring a two-thirds vote in each house for passage. With petitions now being prepared for at least one state ballot measure that would seek to roll back the requirement, Jacobs said that raising awareness of the two-thirds rule is crucial-and that the GOP governor should lead the way in calling attention to, and dumping, it.

"The governor is a fraud," he said in an email interview. "We want people to understand that he bears responsibility for the failures of our state. It's time for him to lead, to force hard choices, but most surely to point out that his own Republicans are the reason we have this mess. Imagine the action hero he'd be if he said, 'This two-thirds rule for passing a budget is outrageous. The Republicans should not be in office if they take a pledge not to raise taxes above their oath of office.'"

There is new evidence that concern about the budget rule-once an arcane, inside-baseball matter vigorously debated only by wooly-headed government geeks-has broken through to the public. A statewide survey released January 28 by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) shows that a clear majority of Californians-54 percent-say that the two-thirds requirement should be relaxed to a 55 percent vote. The new poll is the first to show majority support for that position since PPIC began asking the question in 2003.

Amid widespread pessimism in the state-75 percent say California is on the wrong track-substantially more Californians (44 percent) favor the Schwarzenegger-Democrat solution of closing the budget deficit through a combination of taxes and spending cuts than favor the Republican solution of only cuts (33 percent). Among the taxes that a majority of those surveyed said they support: a higher alcohol excise tax, an increased vehicle license fee, and a temporary hike in the sales tax.

By a strong majority-53 to 39 percent-they also say they don't believe the governor and Legislature will be able to work together and accomplish a lot this year. So far, they're right.

You can download your own, handsomely designed Arnoldbucks at couragecampaign.org/page/s/Arnoldbucks.

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