To: TimF who wrote (486042 ) 6/5/2009 7:15:14 PM From: tejek Read Replies (1) | Respond to 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. 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. 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. 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
