How much longer will California’s pretend-and-extend on the budget continue? Every year it’s the same tiresome fiscal train wreck, but nothing changes. The legislature continues its sleepwalking. No lasting solutions are found. The rot and dysfunction continues and worsens.
Californians may be startled to hear that those in other states increasingly view California as a laughingstock and the poster child for government dysfunction. Yes, things are that bad”¦and they just got much worse.
California Governor Jerry Brown announced huge spending cuts on Monday. California’s budget deficit is now $7 billion more than estimated and totals $16 billion. For some reason this huge increase, released as the “May Revise”, was deemed to be unexpected. Just like it is every year, Sacramento haphazardly attempted to balance the budget by making fictional estimates of projected income. But the projected income is a phantom, it doesn’t exist and never did. Now here we are a few months later, with the wet sandbag of reality whacking lawmakers upside the head. Sacramento is realizing it has yet another monumental deficit and no clue what to do.
More on the California budget train wreck on IVN.
Roughly the number of stars in the “known” universe (10 to the 13, ~11B). We used to think of these numbers as “astronomical”. Today they’re merely economic. Adherents to the discipline psycho-history could point out that when the (statistical) population grows sufficiently large enough, it’s behavior can be anticipated. Physicists could tell you a perpetual motion machine is bound to fail. As a Mad Scientist cackles uproariously when entering these characters …Â