The state budget is now more than a week overdue, which means Californians are free to engage in some traditional summertime activities: bashing the Legislature, trashing the governor and cursing their combined incompetence.

But if Californians are truly bothered by a late budget and the calamitous fiscal consequences that could result this year from a protracted stalemate, here's something else they should do: Kick themselves.

The budget is chronically late for a single reason: 81 of the state's 120 lawmakers have to agree to it.

Two other states require a two-thirds vote to approve a budget, and a couple more require a two-thirds vote to approve certain tax increases. But when it comes to the combination of requiring such a supermajority for both the budget and any tax increase, California stands alone.

"We are," says Jean Ross, executive director of the nonprofit California Budget Project, "a universe of one."

Voters were offered a chance to change all this four years ago with Proposition 56, an initiative that would have changed the threshold for passage of tax and spending bills to 55 percent. The measure also included a provision that would have played into the "bash the Legislature, trash the governor" mentality by permanently docking their pay for every day a budget is late.

Currently, they don't get paychecks when a budget is late — but they do get paid back in full once a budget is finally enacted.

Proposition 56 failed spectacularly. It lost in every county except San Francisco.

It failed because opponents argued, correctly, that a lower threshold would make it easier for lawmakers to pass tax increases and, dubiously, that without the two-thirds majority vote protection lawmakers would willy-nilly increase every tax known to man.

Subsequent polling by the Public Policy Institute of California suggests that public opinion on this issue hasn't changed a whit since 2004.

Paranoia about taxes is pervasive, even though Sacramento hasn't enacted a tax increase since the recession of the early '90s. Over that same period, the Legislature has significantly cut income taxes for families with children, lowered the tax rate for corporations and wealthy households, created millions in tax breaks for businesses and slashed by two-thirds the amount motorists pay each year in vehicle license fees.

Only once was the state close to backtracking on any of those tax cuts. That was in 2003 when the Legislature was gridlocked because of the two-thirds vote requirement and former Gov. Gray Davis decided that to keep the state from going bankrupt he would unilaterally pull a legal trigger to restore the vehicle license fee to its previous rate.

That didn't work out well. He was recalled from office and the man who replaced him, Arnold Schwarzenegger, immediately rescinded the contemplated tax restoration before it went into effect. To avoid bankruptcy, Schwarzenegger decided instead to simply borrow $15 billion.

In addition to tax paranoia, the other reason voters won't change the two-thirds requirement is that they just don't trust the people they elect to make decisions. They seem to like a system that guarantees paralysis, and paralysis is what they've got.

What it means is that we're stuck with a badly broken system — one that empowers the minority, eliminates the possibility of bold action on any front and mocks the concept of accountability.

Following the bust of technology stocks and the subsequent economic downtown in 2002, other states took some bold steps. They raised taxes in some cases, reformed budget processes in others, beefed up reserves to get them through the next recession, streamlined government operations.

California, stuck in its two-thirds-vote straitjacket, could agree only on the one course that no more than 32 percent of lawmakers objected to: It avoided tough choices, employed accounting gimmicks and borrowed money.

It's easy to understand the frustration of everyday Californians over the Legislature's inability to do the one thing it must every year. If they can't pass a budget, goes the lament about legislators, what good are they?

Well, they can't pass a budget because even if 66.6 percent of them agree on a plan, they've got to go back to the drawing board to get one more vote.

How difficult is that?

Think for a moment about that 2004 initiative that would have changed the process. It lost in a landslide, rejected by voters in 57 out of 58 counties. After all the nearly 6.4 million votes were tallied, the measure was defeated by a margin of almost 2-to-1.

Almost, but not quite. Only 65.7 percent of voters were on the same side.

To pass a budget in the Legislature, that wouldn't be enough.

— Timm Herdt is chief of The Star's state bureau. Read his political blog "95 percent accurate*" at http://www.TimmHerdt.com.