Opinion: Dan Walters: California's budget morass could lead to default on debts - San Jose Mercury News:
"When Mac Taylor, the California Legislature's chief budget adviser, declared last week that the state budget enacted just four months ago is already billions of dollars upside down, no one in the Capitol should have been surprised.
Anyone with half a brain and a hand calculator could figure out that many assumptions on which the budget was based, both spending and revenues, were unrealistic, some of them conjured out of thin air to 'balance' an inherently unbalanced budget for political reasons.
Taylor reported that the current budget is $6.3 billion out of balance and the 2010-11 budget has another $14.4 billion hole. But, as grim as it sounds, that's really a best-case scenario because Taylor has a relatively benign forecast of revenues and the underlying economy."
"When Mac Taylor, the California Legislature's chief budget adviser, declared last week that the state budget enacted just four months ago is already billions of dollars upside down, no one in the Capitol should have been surprised.
Anyone with half a brain and a hand calculator could figure out that many assumptions on which the budget was based, both spending and revenues, were unrealistic, some of them conjured out of thin air to 'balance' an inherently unbalanced budget for political reasons.
Taylor reported that the current budget is $6.3 billion out of balance and the 2010-11 budget has another $14.4 billion hole. But, as grim as it sounds, that's really a best-case scenario because Taylor has a relatively benign forecast of revenues and the underlying economy."