Mike the Mad Biologist

You Can’t Balance State Budgets Without Thinking About Revenue: The California Edition

Posted by Mike on March 15, 2011
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The Sacramento Bee has a good interactive feature of how to balance California’s budget*. It puts all of the realistic proposals on the table (i.e., idiots who want California to stop giving out so much foreign aid, or some other hooey need not apply). What you’ll notice two things very quickly:

1) Most of the cuts are vicious and cruel.

2) The only way to get to a balanced budget is by increasing taxes.

Reality is a bitch.

*While I routinely argue that we shouldn’t worry about federal budget deficits, especially with underutilized human and industrial capacity, states do have to worry about deficits, since they can’t print their own currency.

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Comments

  1. #1 Matthew Platte
    March 15, 2011

    It’s not too difficult to balance the CA budget just by diddling on the Revenue side.

  2. #2 gator
    March 15, 2011

    California exports money through federal taxes. If we simply broken even (Fed money in vs. Fed money out) the CA tax on that money would almost balance the budget. CA would be fine if it wasn’t for all of those red states sucking on the federal teat.

  3. #3 Holland Heese
    March 15, 2011

    Wow… managed it without even looking at the cuts, and got a decent surplus. Of course we can’t raise taxes on anyone here in California, so it’ll be more and more vicious cuts to education in the end.

  4. #4 Kaleberg
    March 15, 2011

    My guess is that California is screwed. They are going to hae to increase taxes or watch the state fall apart. I remember when Prop 13 was passed. So far, everything the critics predicted has come to pass, so I’m betting that everything those same people are predicting now s likely to come to pass as well.

    Needless to say, I’m not surprised there was no option for raising taxes on higher incomes or property tax decontrol when the values reached a certain level.