We keep hearing from wingnuts and their online apologists that California’s budget crisis is the product of overspending and waste and those people who dare earn a living working for the state. We’ve tracked pretty well the role of our broken state government in producing the crisis as well.
But it’s worth remembering that the #1 cause of the budget mess is the severe recession – as we can see in other states:
The carnage in state budgets is getting worse, a report said Thursday, with places like Arizona being hurt by falling revenue on multiple fronts, like personal income and sales taxes. Other states are having mixed experiences, with some tax categories stable, or even rising, even as others fall off the map….
Hardest hit on the income tax collection front was New York, where revenues were off 48.9 percent compared with the last fiscal year. Corporate income taxes plummeted most in Oregon, down 44 percent, while sales taxes fell most in Washington, down 14.1 percent….
A report issued by the group in April said that spending increases related to the recession, from more people seeking state services, were compounding the impact of a decline in tax revenue. Sixteen states were facing higher-than-anticipated costs for health care, seven were spending more on public safety and four were seeing cost overruns on programs for the poor like food stamps.
Worse is yet to come. The total collective budget gap that the states will have to resolve in the fiscal year that starts, in most states, next month, is $121 billion, compared with 102.4 billion for the year approaching its end, the report said.
It didn’t help matters when Senate Democrats gutted the stimulus and took the all-important state stabilization funds out. It doesn’t help that the California backstop has been framed as a bailout, making the whole notion of federal aid to the states somewhat toxic.
But if the Democrats here in DC (where I’ve been for the week) think that there’s going to be an economic recovery without solving the budget crisis in ALL 50 states, they’re out of their minds. As Paul Krugman predicted, 50 Herbert Hoovers are succeeding in deepening the recession. We know that Obama prefers the path of least resistance, but here he needs to show some bold leadership and help rescue the states.
I devote most of my volunteer time to global warming projects, except that once a quarter I work for a homeless shelter. I support gay marriage. I worked hard for Obama. If necessary I will work for Boxer or the Democratic nominee for Governor. I support the end of exploitation of undocumented workers, decriminalization of many drug laws and a complete reversal of the “tough on crime” insanity that has plagued our state and nation.
I don’t think I qualify as a wingnut or a conservative in any conventional sense of the word.
However, I have worked in California State Government and I know the epic waste that exists in the bureaucracy. I have seen the union contracts and the overtime rules and the pension rules and the disability rules. I have seen the bureaucracy lick their chops when new regulations come that are way overengineered that serve mostly to keep the bureaucracy employed.
I consider myself a progressive, but this meme that we don’t overspend but rather we are undertaxed is pure nonsense.
We are not like Republicans. We can step back and look at our rhetoric and see if it makes sense. Right now, we are not making sense.