'BLAMELESS' DAVIS SAYS FEES RAISE SELVES.

GOV. Gray Davis chooses his words carefully.

When he came to the Daily News a few weeks ago to sell his new budget plan, he offhandedly declared, ``I propose that we reinstate the vehicle ...'' before catching and correcting himself.

If he'd continued as he started, the next words out of his mouth would have been ``license fee,'' as his budget includes a provision to triple the annual tax Californians pay on each car they lease or own.

But under a handy, tortured legal opinion produced by lawyers for Davis and state Controller Steve Westly, no one in Sacramento actually has to accept responsibility for hiking the vehicle license fee. The official line is that whenever the state is sufficiently short on funds, the tax goes up all on its own, like weeds through cracks in the pavement.

So instead of taking responsibility for raising the regressive car tax in the midst of a recession, Davis shifted gears and decreed: ``I'm not proposing'' any such thing, and he went on to offer a history of the onerous ``fee'' that looks like it's going up soon - and never coming back down.

When the Legislature began cutting the fee in 1998, the governor explained, it agreed that the state would reimburse local governments for revenues they would lose as a result of the reduction. But the Legislature intended that if the state were ever unable to make those payments, the tax could be restored to earlier, higher levels.

``Our budget assumes,'' Davis said, that in due time, the funds won't be there to make the repayments, and ``the fees will start to kick in'' - all by themselves, of course.

It's a done deal, and neither Davis and Westly nor the beleaguered taxpayers of California can do a thing to stop it.

But how about the federal government?

In the weeks since Davis visited our headquarters, Congress has approved President George W. Bush's tax plan, which, to win over key swing votes, includes $20 billion in cold, hard cash for the nation's financially strapped state governments.

For California, the recently signed law means $2.4 billion in new revenue that wasn't included in Davis' budget revision in May. And with an extra couple billion smackeroos on hand, presumably the state won't have such a hard time offsetting those vehicle-license-fee reductions of days long past (1998).

In fact, under a strict interpretation of Davis and Westly's legal opinion, the increase might no longer be justified at all. If nothing else, it needn't be so steep. Instead of requiring an extra $4 billion out of motorists, $1.6 billion should now more than suffice, in which case the car tax need be only doubled, not tripled, at an average saving of $46 per year, per car, for California families.

Not that Davis or Westly see it that way. Neither politician greeted the good news of the federal windfall with an announcement that the VLF autopilot will now reverse course, or at least slow down. Sacramento still expects the tax to raise itself miraculously, at the full rate, and Democrats in the Legislature have used Congress' largess to cancel earlier spending cuts.

Credit the lawyers. The way Davis and Westly's high-priced sophists have massaged the law, no infusion of revenue into the state treasury, no matter how large, could ever derail the VLF express.

That's because the lawyers' interpretation of the 1998 law is so skewed as to render tax relief for motorists the lowest of all possible state priorities. As long as Sacramento politicians can think of some other way to spend the extra $4 billion in car-tax revenue, the state will be deemed too short on cash to go without it.

The VLF will automatically ``trigger'' itself on, year after year, during recessions and boom times alike.

The more money the politicians spend, the more money they get.

No wonder when the governor was asked when Californians might be able to expect the car tax to go back down, he was unable to offer a concrete answer. He pointed to top budget aide Nancy McFadden, who helpfully explained: ``The (VLF) statute is actually very vague in terms of when it triggers off. It's clear about triggering on, but it's very vague about triggering off.''

Go figure.

When the Sacramento lawyers got together to cut their deal, they produced 10 pages explaining that a car-tax increase this year was an unavoidable act of fate, but they didn't spend a single sentence spelling out how or when this overwhelming force might some day be contained.

They chose their words carefully, just as their boss does.