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

To: tejek who wrote (485933)	6/5/2009 4:08:08 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577143

The oft-cited waste and abuse are problems, but the deficit is bigger than the state bureaucracy. California could fire every state employee — including those well-paid prison guards and university professors — close every government office, stop all travel and cease the purchase of paper clips without closing the $24 billion budget gap. The government would be gone, but the deficit wouldn't. If it fired every employee there would be no one left to process and mail transfer program checks or even payments on bonds, so the deficit would be gone. $0 spending with $0 income, zero deficit. (And also zero services, default on debt, etc. I'm obviously not arguing for such a plan). Waste and abuse aren't limited to, and are unlikely to be mostly about, state employee salaries. So the whole "fire every employee and you still have a deficit argument is rather silly and irrelevant. Those "basic services" talked about in my next quote from that Times article are also connected to "waste and abuse". The runaway spending is caused largely by a growing group of Californians making use of basic state services as the cost of those services escalates. More than just basic. CA provides more services per person than many states. The richest 1 percent of residents contribute half of all the personal income tax the state collects. As soon as the economy takes a dip and the stock market stalls, the money stops flowing and the state plunges into a crisis. That's a good point. CA relies too much on the wealthy for its income, so when the income of the wealthy drops with server market corrections and financial difficulties, the state's income drops. To a lesser extent this is a problem for the federal government (which relies more on the wealthy than most other rich countries do), but it just runs a deficit during bad times, when CA technically isn't allowed to (I say "technically" since they do use certain gimmicks to run deficits, but even with these gimmicks and scaling down to account for CA being smaller than the whole country, CA still can't run deficits to the extent the US government can) End the two-thirds rule I'd be against such a move, but OTOH its not like I'm in CA or the new taxes would directly effect me. What CA really needs to do is cut its spending. Some of this would be from spending in more efficient ways, but some of it would have to come from reducing the services it provides. CA's had its spending grow faster than population growth plus inflation for a long time. Its time to finally get some control over it. Build rainy-day fund When your not allowed to (or really don't want to) run a deficit, and your income is potentially volatile, than a rainy day fund makes sense. But can the politicians keep their hands off of it?