Newsom Tried to Use the Pandemic to Create a Progressive Paradise; Now CA's Facing a $68 Billion Deficit!
Now that all of the revenue numbers are in, the state Legislative Analyst's Office reported on December 7 that the state faces a $68 billion budget shortfall next year assuming spending levels "under the state's current law and policy."
In a blog post the week before that, which now seems like an expectation-setting ploy, they'd hinted at a $58 billion budget shortfall; in the 2022-23 budget year legislators and Gov. Gavin Newsom struggled to fill a $31.5 billion budget gap.
Without a massive change in fiscal policy, analysts project that the state's deficits will average $30 billion a year for the next three years, for a total of $155 billion between 2024-28 - more than six times the amount the state has available in reserves.
So on top of everything else, they miscalculated their revenue by 26 billion for one year. I might suggest this points to incompetence. However it seems more likely that this was not a mistake, rather just an excuse to spend more money. The reality here is that Democrats in general are one or two trick ponies. Every plan they have to solve any problem involves more spending and more taxes. They then criticize the GOP as having no plans because they do not propose tax and spend policies to fix everything. They have a blind spot that suggests that they do not quite understand that anything can be fixed without spending money.
At a Federal level Democrats are spoiled because they can simply run deficits. Today it appears that even a couple of trillion dollars in deficits does not make the run of the mill Democrat blink. But many states require a balanced budget which makes things tougher. A guy like Newsom needs to keep his budget in check. Prior to Covid, California had a budget surplus. All that is gone and then some. Now the question is going to be, what does he do about it?
As they say, governing is all about choices. Or at least it should be. But a good liberal wants to make all of the cheap and easy choices to spend money and the cheap and easy choice of telling people they can pay for it by taxing the rich. Of course California is a prime example of how that works out in the end.
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