Following the ignoble defeat of every budget measure he tried to push, Arnold Schwarzenegger has announced that California’s top elected officials will get a salary cut of 18%.

In … uh … seven months. Nice to see the Governator springing into action to handle the emergency.

Schwarzenegger and other top officials began immediate meetings on billions in cuts as others across the Golden State began publicly wringing their hands over what was coming.

But the concrete news of the day was the urgent 18% pay slashes by the compensation commission. Now, here’s the really small print contained in that well-publicized crisis announcement:

The pay cuts for officials to share the hard times with voters�don’t take effect for seven months. Not until 2010.

Commission members said their lawyer said the reductions would be impossible to implement during this calendar year.