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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SilentZ who wrote (473669)	4/20/2009 8:01:02 PM
From: steve harris	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576881

Ah yes, the Sacramento Bee, who's parent company is McClatchy. No end justifying the means there for sure.....

To: SilentZ who wrote (473669)	4/20/2009 11:01:42 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Respond to of 1576881

Z, I take issue with some of his numbers: > Total state spending over the decade 1998-99 through 2008-09 ... Total spending grows over this period from $72.6 billion to $128.8 billion-an average annual growth rate of roughly 6 percent... > After adjusting for inflation, real spending has grown by roughly 18 percent over the entire period, or an annual average growth rate of roughly 1.7 percent. If you do the math, this leads to an annual inflation rate of 4.2 percent, which is very high: inflationdata.com From this web site, I get the following numbers for CA's state and local per capita spending: usgovernmentspending.com FY 1999: $6,450.50 FY 2009: $11,414.90 Annual rate of increase: 5.9% Assuming a more realistic annual inflation rate of 3%, that still leaves 2.9 percentage points of actual annual government growth. One discrepancy in the numbers could be state vs. state and local, but in digging for info I also found the following: realcostofprisons.org Too much info in that link alone to summarize here, but I do agree that one of the biggest impacts to the budget are prisons. A double-whammy of increasing prison population and overly generous benefits for prison guard unions contributed. Other contributors include public health spending and paying off bond measures which voters gladly approve of without considering the costs. (Not sure why the link includes Arnold's vehicle tax cuts, since that's more accounting than spending increase.) Tenchusatsu