As was already pointed out elsewhere, using per-capita $ numbers instead of percentage-of-GDP is fairly misleading, and if you use percentage-of-GDP it's more like 19th for California; I didn't feel the need to point that out again. So California isn't particularly exceptional in the amount of their revenues. Those numbers were likely also for prior to the economic bust; I'd be interested to see where they fall for 2010-2011. Remember, for 2008, there were no budget problems for CA; our revenue has cratered since then because we're so reliant on personal income.

I also made the point that the shift from property taxes to income taxes made the budget harder to balance by destabilizing revenue. California's problems are often caused by revenue volatility, and the state's budget is fine during booms and blows up during busts. States that rely more on property tax and less on income tax have much more stable revenues. I don't believe that's something that you've find much controversy on among either researchers or academics.

And your counter-argument around "everyone has to compromise" is, I'm afraid, just straight-up incorrect. Sure, everyone has to compromise. The point is that the more votes you have to get on board, the more watered down it gets. The budget you get with a 2/3 majority required is demonstrably worse than the budget you would have gotten with a 51% majority, because getting those extra 16% on board almost certainly required a bunch more one-off compromises to individual legislators. If you've seen the CA budgetary process in action, you'll know it worked pretty much exactly like that, and pretty much every year involved a late budget and some holdout congressman demanding pork for his district in exchange for his vote. Imagine how much already has to go on to get the vote to 51% on any given budget, and then just add a bunch more of it.