The California Budget is a mess. That is bad news but the really bad news is that this mess is really complicated. And then the Assembly wants us – the voters – to somehow make sense of things and make the hard decisions.<\/p>\n
I tend to think that the problem with the California State Budget is spending. But I haven’t been able to find out exactly what all of this increased spending is going for. So I worked up some numbers – based on the data from the Legislative Analyst’s Office web site (they are reputable aren’t they?) and put together the following information so I can understand it better.<\/p>\n
I am not sure if you were here in California back in 1998. I was – right here in Burbank – and I thought things were going pretty good back then. I didn’t get the feeling that the state government was in financial trouble. Things seemed to be moving along smoothly. Back then, here is what the state was spending for me (and for every other Californian) out of the General Fund at that time: <\/p>\n
California Government Department
\n
1997-98 Per Capita Spending<\/p>\n
Criminal Justice $158
\n
General Government $132
\n
Health $258
\n
Higher Education $202
\n
K-12 Education $648
\n
Resources & Environmental Protection $25
\n
Social Services $189
\n
Transportation $7
\n
Total $1,619<\/p>\n
Next I checked to see how much they were spending for me in 2008:<\/p>\n
California Government Department
\n
2007-08 Per Capita Spending<\/p>\n
Criminal Justice $343
\n
General Government $146
\n
Health $523
\n
Higher Education $311
\n
K-12 Education $1,047
\n
Resources & Environmental Protection $52
\n
Social Services $248
\n
Transportation $37
\n
Total $2,707 <\/p>\n
Then I calculated how much more the state government decided to spend for me in 2008 than they were spending for me back in 1998 (remember that is when I thought things were going just fine):<\/p>\n
California Government Department
\n
2007-08 less 1997-98 Per Capita Spending<\/p>\n
Criminal Justice $185
\n
General Government $14
\n
Health $265
\n
Higher Education $109
\n
K-12 Education $399
\n
Resources & Environmental Protection $27
\n
Social Services $59
\n
Transportation $30
\n
Total $1,088<\/p>\n
Wow, what a difference 10 years makes! Maybe they needed $185 more for combating crime and building all those new prisons. It still sounds like a lot. I won’t complain about spending $27 more for the environment. And even the extra $30 for transportation might be okay. The $14 extra for general government is not worth fighting over either but I don’t think they deserve any increase the way they are running things.<\/p>\n
But did they really need to go spend another $265 for me on Health? I don’t get the feeling that the health care system in California is all that much better than it used to be. How about the extra $109 for Higher Education? Did the universities and state colleges get 50% better when they got 50% more money in the past 10 years? Are there 50% more students? Did the other schools (K-12) improve 60% when they decided to spend 60% more on them? I know they didn’t get a 60% increase in enrollment since the total population only increased 16.5%. They got $399 more to spend than they had back in 1998 from each Californian. Now I think education is important, but there needs to be a connection between spending more money and having better schools. We should have some amazing schools with that sort of money. Social services got $59 more. I didn’t see exactly where this went – it is just labeled as “Department of Social Services” in the detail I found. I like to think of California as being progressive, so that could be okay by me, but it does add up to an additional $4 Billion. <\/p>\n
So in total, the people that run California decided to spend an additional $1,088 for me in 2008 than they spent for me in 1998. Like I started out, I thought things were going pretty good back in 1998. If the California government just spent for me today like they did back then, I would be happy. And that would mean that the state would spend almost $42 billion less ($1,088 x 38 million Californians). Hey, doesn’t that number sound familiar? Isn’t that the original projected deficit? Maybe it is just a freaky coincidence. <\/p>\n
My numbers are in constant 2008 dollars, so I can’t explain the extra spending on inflation. The New America Foundation presentation on the same topic is impressive, but they base their analysis mostly as a percentage of Personal Income – which has undoubtedly grown in the past 10 years. My point is that no matter how much we are earning, why should we be spending so much more?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The California Budget is a mess. That is bad news but the really bad news is that this mess is really complicated. And then the Assembly wants us – the voters – to somehow make sense of things and make the hard decisions.<\/p>\n
I tend to think that the problem with the California State Budget is spending. But I haven’t been able to find out exactly what all of this increased spending is going for. So I worked up some numbers – based on the data from the Legislative Analyst’s Office web site (they are reputable aren’t they?) and put together the following information so I can understand it better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2663,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[117],"tags":[3121,60],"class_list":["post-8683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-117","tag-3121","tag-60"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pvhz-2g3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2663"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8683"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8683\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}