California’s Priorities

California’s Budget simplified:

The data is straight from the Governors Budget documents.

Education is very important. But “53% of the total General Fund” important? “$48 Billion dollars” important? It leads to a lot of questions.

Completely setting aside the issue of priorities, the Governor and Legislature are fundamentally unserious about addressing the problem. The Governors office balances the 12-13 budget by anticipating a $10 Billion increase in revenue, even though this years budget has grown a $16 Billion dollar deficit, 70% of it since January! What’s worse? The 12-13 budget actually increases expenditures by $5 Billion dollars. Fundamentally unserious defined. And we haven’t even touched on debt, with figures ranging from $60 Billion to well over $250 Billion dollars depending on how it’s calculated.

Just how unserious is California’s leadership? According to Assemblyman Donald Wagner:

I serve on the Budget Committee and thought we had scraped the bottom of the procedural barrel last year. The committee hearing on that final budget lasted only about 45 minutes before the committee chairman cut off questioning to take a vote so that Democratic members of the committee could “catch airplanes.”

But we hadn’t hit bottom. This year, incredibly, the process was worse.

For example, the Budget Committee never even held a hearing and vote on the budget we passed on Friday, so I guess last year’s 45 minutes wasn’t bad. Instead, we had an “informational” presentation of a budget “framework.” In some news reports, Sacramento’s ruling Democrats called it a “concept” for the budget. In any event, there was no vote, even on the “concept” for this year’s budget. Moreover, the language of the budget – the legal words that go into the bill we are supposed to vote on – was not made available to legislators.

Finally, and most amazingly to me, during this informational hearing there were no actual dollars attached to the various budget items. We had broad categories of spending, but the individual amounts on each of the various programs were nowhere in any of the documents the committee had to consider. Indeed, so lacking was this “framework” in basic details – like how much money do we plan to spend this year? – that I had to ask of the witnesses questions like, “So, how much money do we plan to spend this year?”

Believe it or not, I was told that the state’s financial professionals not only did not know, but could not know, the total amount. That’s right. They said they couldn’t calculate the amount of state General Fund spending until after the legislature actually took action. Remember Nancy Pelosi and her infamous comment on ObamaCare that “we have to pass the bill to know what’s in it”? Well, the California state budget apparently also requires a vote before we can know how much we intend on spending.

You can’t make this stuff up.

His words, not mine.

And here is where it got very interesting.

I was told that the General Fund spending for fiscal year 2012-13 is expected to be about $92 billion. So I then asked the next logical question, what was General Fund spending for the last fiscal year? The answer: $86.5 billion.

Wait: $92 billion is more than $86.5 billion. The Democrats plan to spend over $5 billion more this year than last year?! We’ve been hearing for months that the state has a roughly $17 billion General Fund budget deficit and needs to cut spending. Where are all of the cuts everyone is talking about?

Now, had any of my Republicans colleagues been involved in the budget writing process I might have been able to ask them to help explain how a growth in spending of more than $5 billion is a cut. Perhaps they could also answer why a growth in spending, no matter what you call it, is a good idea when we face a supposed $17 billion deficit. But, of course, no Republican was involved in the crafting of this spending plan.

Remember when Jerry Brown was on “Face the Nation” lamenting the partisan divide and Republican ideology that had all the qualities of a cult? Yea, good times, good times.

The governor certainly plans to have the money, and he knows how to get it. All of this bloated spending is to be fueled by a massive $45 billion tax increase while absolutely no effort is made whatsoever to reform our out-of-control pension problems. And if the tax increase fails, education takes the overwhelming brunt of the Democrats’ retaliation. Education, which should be a priority, remains under threat from the Democrats for massive so-called “trigger cuts.”

I’m sure they’ll find a way to blame Republicans.