Elsewhere, reaction broke along familiar fault lines. Business owners backed the governor's proposal to cut lawmakers' pay. Union members protested outside the Capitol and in Los Angeles about his plan to force state workers to take unpaid time off. Service providers spoke out against program reductions.
"Cutting crucial health and human services for the poor while demand for those services skyrockets during this recession is simply the wrong approach to solving the financial crisis," Jeffrey Luther, president of the California Academy of Family Physicians, said in a statement.
The governor's decision to devote his entire address to the financial crisis was a practical one. With the current budget already billions of dollars in the red, the state has no money for his visions of universal healthcare and new education programs, and he has proposed drastic cuts in those areas.
The deficit projected by the middle of next year is three times the size it was a year ago.
"People are asking if California is governable," Schwarzenegger said. "They don't understand how we could have let political dysfunction paralyze our state for so long."
State officials are expected to run out of cash to pay bills in coming weeks, possibly forcing them to issue IOUs and delay tax refunds if Schwarzenegger and lawmakers are unable to break a stalemate in negotiations. The governor released his proposed budget for the next fiscal year on Dec. 31.
Noting that the crisis had forced state construction projects to halt last month, costing thousands of jobs during a recession, the governor asked, "How could we have let something like this happen?"
Though Schwarzenegger spoke generally of the gridlock in state government, he took special aim, as he has in recent months, at state lawmakers. He has laid most of the blame for the state's current plight on their shoulders, although this month he vetoed a Democratic proposal to solve part of the problem.
He said the Legislature had been engaged for years in a "civil war" in which "the needs of the people became secondary."
"Conan's sword could not have cleaved our political system in two as cleanly as our own political parties have done," he said, in a customary allusion to one of his movies.
His only specific proposal was for lawmakers and the governor to give up their salaries and daily expense payments if they fail to approve a budget for the next fiscal year by the June 15 deadline.
