California’s Fiscal Insanity: Another Reminder
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By Peter Schrag
So whodunit?
There’s nothing surprising in the latest budget deficit projection from the Legislative Analyst’s Office -- $25 billion, in case you missed it, over some two years. Even the receding governor and legislators who cooked the current year’s budget couldn’t have believed the fiscal fantasies they worked into the mix.
To get through the current year’s budget problems, they relied on yet another set of temporary fiddles and fudges -- sales of state buildings and other assets; federal stimulus money, short-term tax increases -- all of which were only good for a year or two and are now expiring.
Among the ironic results is that while the schools will lose some $2 billion as the stimulus money runs out, the state won’t save a dime. If “the Legislature funds schools at the forecasted minimum guarantee in 2011–12,” the LAO report says, “it would mean billions of dollars in programmatic cuts to education but not contribute a single dollar to closing the $25 billion budget problem.”
