Last year, Schwarzenegger told the Los Angeles Times that if you try to balance the budget on the backs of waste, fraud and abuse, "You are not even going to find 1 percent there."

Then all five of his budget measures tanked on the May 19 special election ballot. Now with support of local prosecutors, Schwarzenegger has targeted fraud in the In-Home Supportive Services Program. (One district attorney said her office had found that alleged in-home workers continued to get paid for work when in jail.) He hopes that reform alone will save $500 million.

This is where I'm supposed to insert the standard lament about how puerile Repubs have soiled themselves by using the two-thirds vote required to pass a budget as a way to block budgets with tax increases. But I think Small Business Action Committee head Joel Fox is right to point out that "this is not a cuts-only budget," as last year's budget raised $10 billion in taxes in this fiscal year.

Sure, in the end, a handful of GOP adults will have to vote with Democrats for a budget that includes more tax hikes and more gimmicks. Math is math.

And math being math, the Democrats have an obligation to fix this mess, instead of proclaiming, as the sometimes-absent-from-negotiations Assembly Speaker Karen Bass recently did, that Schwarzenegger "broke it. He should fix it."

It's time for Democrats to agree to more serious cuts -- not just moving around the money and personnel. As Fox argued, in this down economy, it's not even clear if any proposed tax increases can produce what they're supposed to produce.