The Good, the Bad, and the Bad – Orange County Register

The governor’s budget is a story of the good, the bad, and the ugly. We won’t see the real state budget until it emerges from the smoky back room following the May amendment, but that hasn’t stopped Governor Gavin Newsom from excitedly telling reporters how he want to spend other people’s money. in a 400-page “summary” presented last week.

Here are the good, bad and bad sides of his proposal.

Good.

The governor’s budget puts more money in reserve accounts, speeds up payments on state retirement debts, eliminates some budget debt, and allocates 86% of discretionary surpluses for spending one-off instead of the continuous liabilities that have often occurred over the years.

That’s good because the good times don’t last forever. While the budget projects healthy profits over the next few years, it notes that “[s]The forecast remains for cyclical (non-pandemic) downside risks, including challenges of aging populations, reduced migration flows, lower birth rates, higher housing and cost of living, and increased inequality and stock market volatility. ”

That matters because the top 1% of California taxpayers pay more than 50% of their revenue from state income taxes. The state currently appreciates the stock market returns of the wealthy, but when the Federal Reserve starts raising interest rates, the party could soon end.

Bad people.

The bad thing is that an already bloated bureaucracy is getting bigger and bigger. As required by Proposition 98, the increase in spending on public schools and community colleges would be dramatic, and as has been said extensively in these pages recently, California’s public schools should not harm the public. cash today.

According to the federal government’s National Center for Education Statistics, in inflation-adjusted constant dollars, spending per student in California on public elementary and high schools during the 2017 school year -18, the most recent year for which statistics are available, was $13,129, the highest ever.

Under the governor’s budget, schools will have more than $20,000 per student, putting California in the top five states for education spending — with little to no avail.

Worse is the fact that there is little budget to address waste, fraud and abuse in general, not just in education. Nothing can prevent another failure like we saw with $20 billion in scams paid for by the Employment Development Bureau; there is still no accountability with the bullet train project and in fact the boondoggle is growing by billions of dollars.

Ugly.

Now for the ugly people. A few weeks ago, this column talked about how part of the fury in 1978 that led to Proposition 13 being passed was Governor Jerry Brown’s admission that California was running a massive surplus. Jesse Unruh, the California state treasurer at the time, labeled it “obscene”. People losing their homes to high taxes while the state collected more money than needed is simply too much for California voters to bear.

California’s budget now stands at a record $286.4 billion and includes a $45.7 billion surplus. This is more than double the surplus that Californians were furious with in 1978. The budget envisages that Gann’s Spending Limit, a constitutional provision that requires the surplus to be returned to the people. taxes, will be exceeded in the 2020-21 and 2021-22 fiscal years.

The problem, however, is that through their cover games, the Legislature can avoid returning that money to taxpayers.

Jon Coupal is the president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.