Erasing a 2009' corporate tax break has been a target of Democrats for years. (Photo: KQED/John Myers)

The 2012 edition of "Cancel That Corporate Tax Break" at the state Capitol kicks off with a novel, and perhaps politically powerful, proposal from Assembly Speaker John Perez: use the resulting $1 billion in extra tax revenue to dramatically downsize the cost of a college education for middle-class families.

Perez formally introduced his plan Wednesday afternoon, to be contained in two bills -- AB 1500 and AB 1501. One bill will modify the state law allowing national corporations to calculate their tax liability based on their sales revenues inside California; the second bill will create a need-based scholarship for all UC and CSU students whose families make between $70,000 and $150,000 a year... a scholarship paid for with the higher corporate tax revenues.

Perez called it a matter of "tax equity" in a conference call with reporters launching his PR blitz, and even suggested that easing the financial pressures of California college students could itself provide an economic stimulus, given the widely agreed on importance of higher education to the state's economy.

Staffers say that details of the college costs proposal are still a work in progress, but the bills assume a $4000 break per CSU student and a $8100 break per UC student. The goal is for the need-based scholarships (not exactly being called that, but given the application process required, that's what it sounds like) to kick in starting this fall. The proposal would also provide $150 million for community colleges, say Democratic staffers.

But for all of this to happen -- both the fall 2012 implementation and, most importantly, a $1 billion downsizing of the existing corporate tax break -- at least a handful of legislative Republicans have to join Democrats in sending the bills to Governor Jerry Brown. And some GOP stalwarts will undoubtedly remind their party faithful that, in government parlance, the rescinding of a tax incentive is the same as a tax increase.

The single sales factor (SSF) saga began in earnest in 2009, when a particularly corporation-friendly version of the proposal became the price for getting 27 Senate votes and 54 Assembly votes for the budget. The fight then, as it has been ever since, was whether corporations should be given options on how to calculate their state tax liability -- and thus choose the one that's the smallest.

Assembly Speaker John Perez. (Photo: Getty/Justin Sullivan)

Governor Brown came the closest of anyone last September, when he found two GOP assemblymembers who agreed to support a cancellation of the tax break with the money used, instead, for other tax breaks promoted as job creators. But the plan died in the state Senate when the upper house's GOP caucus rejected it en masse.

Might 2012's outcome be different? For starters, skyrocketing UC and CSU costs for families have created bipartisan anguish in California -- and there may be intense pressure to find a new salvation for higher ed. In addition, this is an election year -- one in which a number of Republican legislators may find themselves running for new jobs in new districts where college help for the middle class could become a potent political weapon. And, at the risk of being cynical, failure of the measure on a party-line vote could help Democrats in their electoral quest for a larger (if not supermajority) presence in both houses of the Legislature.

Keep your eye on this proposal; it's shaping up to be a fascinating one to watch as budget and election fights grow more heated in the months to come.

Gov. Jerry Brown's tax initiative may not be the only one on the ballot. (Photo: Getty/Justin Sullivan)

But until that clairvoyant device shows up, we're left to wonder about the answer. And for Governor Jerry Brown, there's not much success these days in convincing others that it's a recipe for disaster.

My story from Tuesday morning's edition of The California Report is below:

A serendipitous turn of the news cycle led backers of the two most prominent measures outside of Brown's tax plan to both be in the spotlight on Monday. Backers of the "millionaires tax" proposal announced the formal kickoff of their signature gathering campaign, while attorney Molly Munger wooed a Sacramento gathering of school parents and teachers on her broad-based tax hike earmarked for schools.

While the two proposals are demonstrably different, their message to the outside world (and, in a way, to the governor) were the same: there's plenty of room on the ballot, and we're not going away.

In purely structural terms, the edge would seem to go to Munger... even though her initiative hasn't yet received formal title and summary. That's because, unlike the labor and liberal activist coalition behind the millionaire's tax, Munger can rely on her personal fortune -- not individual donors -- to get on the ballot.

And when I asked the question directly, she admitted that's what she's prepared to do.

"We're going to get this on the ballot," said Munger. "And we're going to win, too."

Molly Munger is the author of a proposed tax increase on almost all Californians, with the money earmarked for local K-12 schools. (Photo: Nicole Nguyen/KQED)

Backers of the millionaires tax argue theirs offers more appeal.

"We like ours because it is simple and straightforward," said initiative backer Anthony Thigpenn in a conference call with reporters. "It doesn't put additional burden on those people hurting from the economic crisis and can't afford to pay more."

Thigpenn and Munger also disputed the suggestion that multiple tax hike proposals on the ballot spell collective doom for them all. The millionaire's tax group, in particular, believes past same-subject fights disprove the theory.

Perhaps. But none of those anecdotes are from tax increase initiatives, and so we're left to wonder whether the trend would hold.

Governor Brown has made it pretty clear he believes it wouldn't.

"One of the things about elections: you want 'em simple," Brown said in a December chat with Capitol reporters. "Complexity... gives fodder to the opposition."

The governor's top political consiglieri, Steve Glazer, took to Twitter after the back-to-back Monday events repeating that position. "Stating the obvious," he tweeted. "Competing state tax measures could mean all lose -- that means kids lose," referring to both the tax revenues in all measures earmarked for schools... and perhaps, the notion that Brown's tax could be attached to a series of deep K-12 cuts should voters reject it.

But neither group says Brown has specifically asked them to stand down. The millionaires tax coalition leaders say that they met with the Guv in late December, but didn't hear those magic words. Munger told reporters she's never met with the Guv, though hedged on whether she'd been asked to halt her campaign by First Lady Anne Gust Brown.

Meantime, the governor's fundraising effort continues to pick up steam and -- at this rate -- all three measures could be on the streets gathering signatures by the end of the month.

And just to add another variable to an already tangled issue: the interaction between all three tax raising measures may not end on election day. The tax-the-rich initiative's backers say a court may have to resolve whose tax trumps, should voters approve both theirs and the one from Brown. Meantime, Molly Munger told reporters that a legal opinion says if her tax initiative and Brown's both win on election day, only the governor's state/local realignment language would be enacted... while all of his tax increases would be squashed.

This week, we saw a few of the cards floating around the 2012 election cycle when it comes to campaign cash. But there's still some tough poker being played on strategy -- both when it comes to ballot initiatives and tough policy debates in Sacramento.

On this week's Capital Notes Podcast, Anthony York of the Los Angeles Times and I talk about the money moves for the 2012 season as well as the debate over tax initiatives and public employee pensions.

We also touch on the buzz generated this week by the state's second highest-ranking official on his comments about the guy in job #1.

(And again, we get beaten by the news: just as we're musing on the bill to allow some internal state budget cash borrowing, Governor Brown signs the bill. Go figure.)

The smart estimate: an eventual budget bump of a "few hundred million dollars." (Photo: Getty/Ryan Anson)

And the bottom line: the eventual capital gains from the 2012 Facebook IPO will no doubt help balance the state's books. But the smart bet is that it won't be enough to stave off the vast majority of the tough choices that lie ahead.

Wednesday's IPO announcement by the Menlo Park company is the jumping off point of my budget story on this morning's edition of The California Report -- specifically, the impact on state finances.

The easy assumption to make is that Facebook will be, for the budget, better than Google was in 2006. After all, news reports say that the search engine giant's 2004 initial public offering will be dwarfed by the king of social media. So that would mean the state's finances are in store for some great times?

Well, not so fast.

The news, as we remember from the spring of 2006, was amazing: a $7 billion windfall of tax revenues, led largely by Google. The company's insiders and staffers began cashing in their IPO stocks on Valentine's Day 2005, meaning much of the state taxes they paid on capital gains showed up in the 2006 calendar year. And while the data doesn't single out Google, state tax stats show that the number of $1 million+ tax returns in California jumped an amazing 27% between 2004 and 2006.

"This is of course, great news for California," said Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger at the time, in one of his more modest statements.

But the main problem with using Google as a template for Facebook is that the rest of the California economy is either sluggishly improving or still in the doldrums -- unlike 2006.

"The stock market was doing pretty well, and the housing market was booming" in 2006, says Jason Sisney of the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office. "That $7 billion was an accumulation of all of those factors, of which Google was one part, but just one part."

Sisney also points out that there are too many variables in the Facebook IPO's impact on state revenues for any safe forecast (the LAO overall revenue forecast is due out later this month). Those variables include how long the company's insiders are prohibited from selling their shares; how many of them are actually California residents; and the chances of any major changes in federal or state tax laws that provoke changes in when those shares are sold.

Tax changes like... the federal debate over keeping the Bush 2001 tax cuts or allowing them to expire... or even perhaps the November tax initiatives that seek to raise rates on high-income earners.

And then there's the complexity of how revenues would be scored. Sisney says it's possible Facebook capital gains revenues could start showing up as late as 2014, but as soon as the budget now being crafted. After all, remember that any capital gains realized by a shareholder before July 1, 2013 -- some 15 months after the earliest date for the IPO -- would be counted as revenues for the fiscal plan now under consideration.

(Keep in mind, too, that any major spreading out of the taxable income bump from Facebook will likely cause the dollars to be spread thinner by budgeting standards, with those bucks having to be counted in the tax year from which they came... a factor that also could cause other ripple effects on spending levels.)

Nonetheless, there are some important lessons from the past -- notably on the issue of how the money can/should be spent. And for that, you can actually roll the clock back beyond Google to the dot-com explosion of the late 1990s and the Capitol pressures placed for additional long-term spending with revenues that certainly looked to be a one-time fad.

"All these constituency groups that had been starved suddenly came to the table and said, 'Okay, we just elected a Democrat, let's fund these programs, that's what you're all about,'" remembers Steve Maviglio, at the time press secretary to Governor Gray Davis. "There was massive pressure."

Pressure also grew in 2006 when the Google dollars, combined with the state's healthy economy, produced a major windfall. A summer 2006 LAO report calculated the year-to-year spending increase in the budget at 9.5%:

The 2006‑07 budget sharply increases funding for education, provides targeted increases in several other program areas, and prepays nearly $3 billion in budgetary debt incurred during the 2002‑03 through 2004‑05 fiscal years. The expanded commitments included in this spending plan are in striking contrast to the four previous years, when policymakers were faced with closing major budget shortfalls.

While some of the money was indeed used for one-time expenses, there was political pressure -- in an election year, no less -- to help fill in holes left by those deficits from earlier in the decade.

And that's a pent-up feeling that will no doubt be talked about this time around, depending on when Facebook IPO capital gains show up, and at what level.

"We should use this added revenue to protect our public school students from the Governor's trigger cuts and pay down the state's debt service," said Assembly GOP leader Connie Conway in a prepared statement on Wednesday. "Let's not repeat the mistakes of the past by using one-time funding for on-going programs."

But using the windfall on public schools -- in an amount above what schools would get on the natural from income taxes, under the Proposition 98 formulas -- might mean an artificially high funding level that continues on into the future. It remains unclear exactly what kind of regular or special school funding the GOP leadership has in mind.

Both Assembly Speaker John Perez and Governor Jerry Brown have said in separate one-on-one interviews that they believe unexpected dollars should go towards lowering what Brown has termed the state's "wall of debt." Brown also mentioned the need for a healthy rainy day fund.

"You shouldn’t spend all your money," he said in our December conversation. "You need the flexibility of a reserve. And certainly, I'll try to build that."

But for now, this all speculation. And the speculation reflects the reality of state finances after years of deep and unpopular cuts -- a reality that, occasionally, likes to turn to fantasy about a new gold rush that helps right the ship of state in a hurry.

Phew.

Billable Hours: While there was a lot of drama over the big deadline for some interesting legislation on Tuesday, it was also a little overwrought. After all, these were merely bills left over from 2011 -- 2012 bills are still being introduced at a healthy clip -- and even then, pet projects in the Legislature have a way of reemerging in the final hours of a two year session, which will be coming up on August 31.

And yet, there were some intense moments over the last two days. Tops on that list certainly has to be the seemingly-all-but-dead AB 327, the bill seeking to modify the three strikes sentencing law. Assemblyman Mike Davis (D-LA) saw his bill come up short on Monday, only to ask for reconsideration (a do-over in less technical terms) on Tuesday.

After the day before's long and impassioned debate, a number of assemblymembers rose Tuesday to say the bill didn't need to be rehashed, only to then... yes... rehash it. Democrats largely argued the original 1994 initiative counts too many less-than-serious crimes as a "strike," while Republicans countered that the law generally works as it is. AB 327 would place the amendment on the November 2014 ballot; a similar change to the three strikes law may be on this fall's ballot, and so if it ultimately clears the state Capitol AB 327 may be more of a backstop if the 2012 initiative either fails to make the ballot or is rejected by voters.

AB 327's first call today, like Monday, came up short of the 41 votes needed for passage. Then, after some discussion, one Democrat changed his 'no' to an 'aye' -- Assemblyman Charles Calderon (D-Montebello) -- while three Dem assemblymembers who had taken a pass on voting cast a vote for passage: Alyson Huber (D-El Dorado Hills), Richard Pan (D-Sacramento), and Tony Mendoza (D-Artesia).

Meantime, a 2011 bill that did not get a do-over after an earlier defeat was SB 810, the single-payer health care bill carried by Sen. Mark Leno (D-SF). A handful of skeptical Democrats failed to give it the needed 21 votes, thus killing the hopes of many universal health care advocates to get the bill in front of Governor Jerry Brown, after it was vetoed twice by Governor Arnold Schwarznegger. A blogger on the liberal Daily Kos website Tuesday morning called the Dems "gutless" for not signing on to SB 810.

Also dying by day's end... after failing to get a supermajority vote... AB 1148, a bill to add new campaign disclosure rules by Assemblywoman Julia Brownley (D-Santa Monica). The bill would have required more prominent disclosure of big donors in TV ads, updated info on those donors on a campaign's website, and notations in California's well-known slate mailers of which candidates or campaigns had paid to be included in the list of "endorsed" campaigns. AB 1148 also would have broadened the disclosure rules out to independent expenditure committees.

A supermajority vote also eluded a Senate bill to keep affordable housing projects alive in the aftermath of abolishing redevelopment, though Senate Democrats removed the urgency language, presented it as a simple majority vote bill, whereby it then received bipartisan support.

Cash Crunch 2012: It was either shocking news or just a gentle reminder that was delivered Tuesday morning by Controller John Chiang, just before the Assembly's budget-writing committee was scheduled to meet. The state is poised to run short on cash to pay monthly bills by March 1.

"This liquidity shortfall is projected to persist for a defined period of time -- about seven weeks, from February 29 until approximately April 13," wrote Chiang in a letter to the chairs of the Legislature's budget committees.

While the letter refers to a plan to provide $3.3 billion of cash in the bank, the details of that plan remained fuzzy by day's end. Some of it will be payment deferrals -- Chiang says that includes payments to the UC and CSU systems as well as Medi-Cal -- while another chunk, approximately $865 million, would come from internal fund borrowing assuming legislators send SB 95 to the governor's desk soon.

The rest, says a spokesman for Treasurer Bill Lockyer, will come from investors in what's effectively going to be a supplemental revenue anticipation note (RAN), but one offered to private investors much in the way Lockyer crafted a plan in 2011 during the federal debt ceiling debate.

The cash plan "is not an ideal solution," wrote Chiang, "but it is the best way to manage the challenge without relying on IOUs or delaying tax refunds."

2011 Campaign Cash: Tuesday's deadline for candidates and campaigns to file detailed fundraising and expense reports for the year that just ended didn't offer very many juicy details about the political year ahead. In fact, if anything it seemed to point out how few dollars were committed by December 31.

While Governor Brown made clear that he's in fine shape for a re-election bid, should he choose to undertake one (more than $5 million in his 2010 and 2014 accounts, combined), very few other campaigns seemed to report big bucks.

In fact, most striking was how small the war chests were (again, as of Dec. 31) for some big campaigns this year. Neither of the two initiatives on the June ballot, the Proposition 28 term limits change or the Proposition 29 cigarette tax, seemed to have attracted much moolah before the new year. Having said that, the tobacco companies that will no doubt fight Prop 29 could easily pony up cash anytime.

One of the standouts in terms of limited dollars: the California Republican Party. The state GOP bet big on getting the referendum against the new Senate redistricting maps qualified for the November ballot (and the signatures are still being counted); overall, the party's report shows it raised $4.2 million in 2011. But the state GOP only had $439,000 in cash left on Dec. 31, and the fate of the redistricting effort still seems somewhat in doubt.

Meantime, the redistricting referendum campaign reported (PDF) having only $620.31 in the bank on the final day of 2011 and has reported no 2012 contributions. The campaign owes $214,000 in unpaid bills.

Compare that to California Democrats, who reported raising $11 million in 2011 and still sitting on a rather impressive $9.3 million in cash as of Dec. 31. That suggests Dems are well positioned for legislative and even ballot measure efforts in 2012, while Republicans will need a major infusion of cash... and in a hurry.

California's state Senate map is now set for 2012, after a 7-0 Supreme Court ruling. (Photo: CRC Map)

That's because the final legal attempt by GOP activists to block the map was resoundingly rejected Friday morning by the California Supreme Court.

The court's 92 page ruling offers a fascinating look into what happens when something as politically charged as redistricting slams into the preternaturally cautious world of the courts. And all seven justices agreed that even if the wording of 2010's Proposition 20 means the Citizens Redistricting Commission's map is legally "stayed" when a referendum qualifies, none of the alternative lines offered to them are as good as the ones drawn by the panel itself.

"The Commission's certified state Senate map is the alternative most consistent with the constitutional scheme and criteria embodied in the federal and state Constitutions," wrote Chief Justice Tani Cantil Sakauye on behalf of the Court.

There is some surprise to the ruling, at least for those of us who watched and reported on oral arguments on January 10. The final decision seems to suggest a shift in the justices' thinking on the first of the two questions in this case: does Prop 20 require legal intervention when a referendum is "likely to qualify?"

While comments from several justices during oral arguments seemed to suggest that the threshold was important and had that it had been met, the ruling (written by the one justice who seemed skeptical during oral arguments, Cantil Sakauye) says that the Court has a role to intervene regardless of that standard:

Even when it cannot be determined from the available data how likely it is that a referendum will qualify for the ballot... a court may conclude that it is prudent to determine, at that time, which districts should be used in the event the referendum does qualify so that election officials are not left without meaningful guidance if the referendum ultimately qualifies."

But the real prickly issue, and a controversial one in the initial reaction from some Republicans, is which Senate map will be used for 2012 if the referendum qualifies (which is looking more and more likely as the signatures are verified). The plaintiff, Orange County GOP activist Julie Vandermost, suggested three options in her petition: the old 2001 districts with modifications to make them more constitutionally viable, a new map where two commission-drawn Assembly districts would be "nested" together to form a Senate district, or a newly drawn map offered by Vandermost's hired expert, former GOP redistricting consultant Tony Quinn.

The Court ruling resoundingly rejects all three options and, instead, blesses the use of the commission's work even if the referendum qualifies... by decreeing that the map, in that instance, would no longer be called a "certified commission" map but rather an "interim" map. And here, the opinion written by the chief justice comes about as close as you can get to a formal seal of approval of the citizens commission:

When a redistricting map adopted by such a nonpartisan entity is challenged by a proposed referendum measure sponsored by one political party, we believe it is unrealistic to maintain that a court should be viewed as improperly intruding into the "political thicket" if it determines, after reviewing the pros and cons of all viable alternative maps in relation to the constitutional scheme and criteria, that the map devised by the nonpartisan Commission is the most appropriate one to be used in an interim election.

And that -- in practical terms -- may be game, set, match to the commission. Yes, the referendum seems poised to qualify and, if it does, the voters may indeed reject the commission's Senate map for any reason they so choose. But the GOP campaign against the Senate map labored mightily to collect contributions just to gather signatures -- and financing a full-blown ballot measure campaign through the summer and fall wil cost much, much more. Even so, good government groups, Democrats (because the map looks good to them), and newspaper editorial boards are almost sure to now characterize the referendum as a GOP "sour grapes" exercise.

That may help explain the sharp criticism of the decision leveled by those who have fought the hardest to promote the referendum and the legal challenges.

Tani Cantil-Sakauye as Rose Bird? (Photo: AP/Paul Sakuma)

But the ultimate angry quote came from referendum campaign manager Dave Gilliard. "Sadly," his statement says, "the Chief Justice applied a flawed, politically-based precedent established by former Chief Justice Rose Bird, who was removed from office by the voters for repeatedly ignoring the constitution and the will of the voters."

The likening of Chief Justice Cantil Sakauye, appointed by a Republican governor (as were six of the seven justices on the Court) to the late Bird -- appointed by then/now Governor Jerry Brown, and whose role in a 1982 redistricting fight was only a portion of what fueled the bitter campaign that removed her from the bench -- drew what sounded like the cyber-equivalent of gasps from a handful of state GOP Twitters.

"Oh good grief," tweeted GOP strategist Matt Rexroad, one of the state's most savvy redistricting experts. He later tweeted that the GOP effort's setbacks may leave some lingering intraparty rumbles. "Lots of opportunity cost with the time and energy put into this failed effort," wrote Rexroad.

And so there are only two remaining hurdles for the entire work product of the 14 member commission to be set in stone: the Senate referendum itself, assuming it qualifies, and a federal court challenge to the panel's map for California's congressional districts. That challenge, say observers, is a long shot -- given the state's high court has already rejected the same argument, and given the fact that the U.S. Department of Justice recently cleared all of the commission's maps on their adherence to the federal Voting Rights Act... the same standard by which the lawsuit argues the congressional map is flawed.

Tweets from this morning from me and others via Storify:

But there's a lot more sailing to be done before the voyage is complete. On this week's Capital Notes Podcast, we discuss Brown's cruise so far -- from successful fundraising to a good showing in the latest statewide poll.

Anthony York of the Los Angeles Times and I also discuss this week's lawsuit filed by legislative leaders over the boundaries (or even existence) of the role for a state controller in the annual budget process.

Note that we discuss the possibility of a redistricting ruling by the California Supreme Court (as we taped this on Thursday). Guess Anthony's source was right; that ruling is due at 10:00 a.m.

Coming to the November ballot: government reform? (Photo: Getty/Eric Tahyer)

Now, it looks as though the white knight has ridden in... on his own jet.

The reform group assembled and underwritten by billionaire Nicolas Berggruen, the Think Long Committee for California, today endorsed and pledged its support to the wide-ranging initiative drafted by another reform group, California Forward.

Wonder Twin powers, activate!

California Forward's initiative "perfectly reflects both the growing public demand in California for a more accountable government and Think Long's mission of strengthening California’s democracy for the long term," said Berggruen in a emailed statement.

As I wrote back in early November, the initiative is a wide-ranging retooling of government functions on both the local and state levels. It includes new local flexibility to spend state revenues; performance measures and "pay as you go" rules for state budgets; and a new rule requiring state legislation to be in print for three days before a vote.

"We are looking forward to working together with California Forward," says the statement from Berggruen, "and are prepared to dedicate ample time and resources to this worthy cause."

That last comment is the biggie: resources, as in money. There's no word on exactly how much the billionaire investor-turned-reformer will sink into the initiative, but there's wide agreement that he'll do what it takes to get the measure on the ballot -- a task that, these days, typically takes around $3 million.

So far, California Forward -- a longer established bipartisan group but one without big bucks -- has reported less than $600,000 for its initiative campaign. So this news will be very big for their campaign.

Berggruen backs CA Forward. (Photo: Getty/Johannes Eisele)

When Think Long announced last week that it wasn't pursuing its own reform plan for 2012, the safe money was a partnership with California Forward, given the numerous ties between the two groups (in the VIPs involved) and the general approach of both groups to systemic governance changes. So this news isn't surprising. But it is a shot in the arm for those who have been looking for a bipartisan and non-governmental approach to reform.

A new survey finds voters disapprove of more education cuts. Is that driving support for Brown's tax hike?

But dig deeper into the poll and it's pretty clear that were it not for the linkage to schools, the Brown proposal would either be less popular... or fail to break the 50-percent barrier altogether.

The poll from the Public Policy Institute of California finds overwhelming support from Democrats and a thumbs up from 65% of independents surveyed for Brown's temporary income and sales tax hike, one he believes will bring in $7 billion a year. Even 53% of Republicans in the PPIC poll say they support the initiative.

But as several other questions in the poll make clear, it's probably not Brown's proposal that they love so much... but rather the consequences of its failure that they hate.

75% of likely voters told PPIC's surveyors that they oppose the $4.8 billion in automatic "trigger cuts" to K-12 schools should the governor's tax increase be rejected.

"There's no question that if this was just a general tax increase," says PPIC president and pollster Mark Baldassare, "that you'd have a whole different response."

And there's some data in the poll to help prove that point. 64% of likely voters (and 69% of all adults) say they oppose a sales tax increase -- and, well, the governor's plan includes a half-cent sales tax increase.

What they really like, not surprisingly, is a tax hike on the wealthy (74% of all adults, 68% of likely voters). Heck, they even support splitting commercial property tax increase protections out of the sacrosanct Proposition 13 (60% of both all adults and likely voters) -- and an initiative to do just that (PDF) was just cleared for signature gathering, though for now it's seen as a concealed weapon of labor unions in their bid to stifle fundraising for the ground zero initiative on political donations by paycheck deductions.

Undoubtedly, the governor's most liberal supporters will see that kind of poll data as proof that any one of the other tax initiatives that are out there is better than his. And Brown has yet to dissuade all of those groups from launching their own campaigns in competition with his.

For now, though, Brown gets some more good news about his effort -- one day after campaign finance documents showed his first month of dialing for dollars a successful one. In fact, his more immediate roadblock may be with the Legislature on budget cuts. Tuesday afternoon, Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg announced that hearings on Brown's budget won't begun until the middle of next month with the Senate budget hearing on the governor's proposal to shrink and cut the CalWorks program scheduled for March 1 -- the very day by which Brown's plan assumes the actual cut would have been enacted by legislators.

Gov. Jerry Brown's tax initiative campaign reports more than $1.45 million in contributions. (Photo:Getty/Justin Sullivan)

Campaign finance records show as of this weekend, Brown had reported more than $1.45 million in contributions. Those dollars were raised in the first month of the governor's efforts, and will no doubt help pay for signature gathering now that his tax increase initiative has hit the streets.

The three largest donations came from some not-so-always aligned groups: the California Association of Hospitals and Health Systems ($500,000), the State Building Trades Council ($250,000), and Occidental Petroleum ($250,000). $100,000 contributions have come from two Indian gaming tribes and Blue Shield of California.

What these early dollars seem to clearly show is that Governor Brown is eager to crate a coalition of support for his tax hike that spans the political spectrum. And that includes those who don't agree with him on every issue.

Take Occidental, a major player in the 2010 campaign in support of Proposition 23. That was the initiative designed to either delay or kill (depending on your viewpoint) the state's landmark climate change law, AB 32. In fact, Oxy's participation in that campaign earned them criticism from then Governor Arnold Schwarznegger, a longtime ally of Occidental and other oil companies.

In fact, it seems noteworthy that Schwarzenegger's definition of the infamous "special interests" in California politics now matches up rather nicely with Jerry Brown's tax initiative donors: organized labor, Indian gaming tribes, and Big Oil. Indian tribes, in particular, have found a more friendly ear in the governor's office with Brown than with Schwarzenegger. And while these are only early donors to the cause, they do offer a glimpse at how the governor sees the campaign that lies ahead.

Update 3:36 p.m. In an email, Brown campaign adviser Steve Glazer says the governor is reaching out to "all individuals, businesses and associations who support our tough cuts and temporary tax solution for the state," groups that believe the proposal puts California on "sound financial footing for economic expansion and job creation."