$4B of anticipated revenue now looks unlikely to materialize
by Brian Leubitz
The budget was always something of a hope and prayer exercise. Well, with today’s cash figures from Controller Chiang’s office, you better start praying harder:
“While July’s revenues performed remarkably similar to last year’s, they still did not meet the budget’s projections,” said Chiang. “While we hope for better news in the months ahead, every drop in revenues puts us closer to the drastic trigger cuts that could be imposed next year.”
Income taxes were above projections by $89 million (2.9 percent) in July. But sales taxes were down $139.4 million (-12.5 percent), and corporate taxes were down $69.5 million (-19.3 percent) in the same month.
Unfotunately, we need to exceed projections by quite a few bucks every month to get to the hopeful goal of $4b of “additional revenue.” With this latest setback, we are down $538.8 million from where we need to be to avoid the triggers.
And at this point, we can’t even get enough money from new sources soon enough if we thought we could pass a ballot measure. The next election, in June, comes at the end of the fiscal year, too late to really help.
Of course, those triggered cuts would further devastate the California economy, our schools and our services. Unless we get that revenue soon, this fiscal year could be a lot bleaker than we thought.
while i have a hard time believing that they do or will, given their past fecklessness, this is what they ought to do:
1. write up a tax/revenue hike broadly popular with the electorate (i.e.. millionaire tax hike, oil tax, possibly split roll for prop 13)
2. write up and get to work on a clean majority tax/revenue initiative for november 2012, to be done through signature gathering
3. go full court press in the media and through unions and other liberal orgs in the community to get the GOP to sign onto #1, and make it clear to the electorate that the GOP is holding CA hostage the same way the tea baggers did to the debt ceiling.
4. if the GOP passes the hikes, hooray. if they don’t (and they won’t), hang the crash loudly on the GOP and stoke public outrage against this tired hostage drama to get those signatures for november 2012 when a more liberal electorate will be at the polls. you trade hard times in the summer/fall in exchange for never having to go through this again.
Very shortly the GOP representatives will use the decline in corporate tax revenues to show that businesses are fleeing California.
this issue is important.this time budget is not according to hopes of peoples.these figures are highlighted and government think about it.i like to read informative blogs and this blog is also so good and helpful.thanks for taking time to discus this topic..
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