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Weintraub on the budget "deal":

Giving away the store. The more times I read the bill, the more I’m left scratching my head at how little Gov. Schwarzenegger seems to have extracted from Democrats in exchange for a huge concession: his decision to drop any plans for writing a spending cap into the state constitution. Once he dropped that demand, he should have been able to run the table on the rest of the negotiations to establish a real balanced budget requirement, a bullet-proof reserve for economic downturns and a solid process for making mid-year corrections to stop a deficit from growing out of control. These are all sensible, good-government ideas to which the Democrats should not have even objected. But Schwarzenegger seems to have let them pick away at the details until they reached the point that they were barely more than symbolic gestures. As several senators said Friday, this measure probably doesn’t do any harm. But it doesn’t do a whole lot of good, either.

Check out Weintraub's examples explaining why it doesn't do much good.