Posted on 02/17/2009 11:27:08 PM PST by americanophile
LOS ANGELES — The state of California — its deficits ballooning, its lawmakers intransigent and its governor apparently bereft of allies or influence — appears headed off the fiscal rails. Since the fall, when lawmakers began trying to attack the gaps in the $143 billion budget that their earlier plan had not addressed, the state has fallen into deeper financial straits, with more bad news coming daily from Sacramento. The state, nearly out of cash, has laid off scores of workers and put hundreds more on unpaid furloughs. It has stopped paying counties and issuing income tax refunds and halted thousands of infrastructure projects.
Twenty-thousand layoff notices will go out on Tuesday morning, Matt David, the communications director for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, said Monday night. “In the absence of a budget we need to realize this savings and the process takes six months,” Mr. David said.
After negotiating nonstop from Saturday afternoon until late Sunday night on a series of budget bills that would have closed a projected $41 billion deficit, state lawmakers failed to get enough votes to close the deal and adjourned. They returned to the Capitol on Monday morning and labored into the evening but still failed to reach a deal. They planned to reconvene at 10 a.m. Tuesday to go at it again.
California has also lost access to much of the credit markets, nearly unheard of among state municipal bond issuers. Recently, Standard & Poor’s downgraded the state’s bond rating to the lowest in the nation.
California’s woes will almost certainly leave a jagged fiscal scar on the nation’s most populous state, an outgrowth of the financial triptych of above-average unemployment, high foreclosure rates and plummeting tax revenues, and the state’s unusual budgeting practices.
“No other state is in the kind of crisis that California...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
“Another One bites the dust!”
“GO FOR BROKE! GO FOR BROKE!”
With luck, this will be the event that topples California from the #6 position on world economies. (To be replaced by former #7 Texas, of course.)
Democrat Run, Democrat Ruined.
I bet if I wrote them a nice letter and asked them to apply my tax refund to my car registration, I wouldn't get very far...
I think they’ve laid off the ‘letter readers’ too! lol
They are not proposing to kick out illegals, deport illegal criminals and stop all aid to illegals...no, they want a 2.5% income tax hike and a 1% hike in sales tax.
Tax and spend Liberals are the end of CA and the US.
Watch ObamaCarter do it with the complicit Congress.
And there lies the problem. The State of California has something like 240,000 employees... and they've laid off only "scores" and furloughed "hundreds." That's a drop in the proverbial bucket.
Never, that would be inhumane! We have to pay for their medical, public services, education, etc. Millions of them.
Nah. It’ll be a week before the overfunded but undermaintained road network out there starts to fall apart.
About a week after that, you’ll have riots.
The perpetual program state will eventually collapse at some point in the future, with this utter lack of leadership, so better now than when it’s a lot worse. I hope the Repubs hang tough and vote no.
That’s why I’m hoping for collapse. I really want to see it happen.
Arnold made his fortune by creating a hypermasculine caricature of a man in the movies—also in real estate—he was a real-estate multimillionaire before he made his first movie. Good for him.
But he has shown what a real man he is not. He is pro-abortion—and the antithesis of masculinity is a man who stands by sucking his thumb while babies are murdered. He is clearly pu%%y-whipped on AGW, the sodomy lobby, and countless other liberal frauds. He has been unable to stand up to the Democrats in the legislature, unable to sell the people on less government, unable to resist any of the retrograde forces at work in California.
A wimp. A cipher.
Oh well, it will give me a chance to use my guns around the neighborhood.
There are Hollywood tax breaks in that CA plan....during a record revenue (Jan and Feb 09) period...
It seems like the pols dont have the stomach to pass the bad bill.....KFI said the state has hired 8 new positions per day for the last 8 years...or something like that
Agreed. Though in fairness, California’s governorship was hobbled years ago. Aside from the interests groups you mention, especially the omnipotent public employee unions, there is so much mandatory state spending based on horrendous statewide initiatives that uneducated voters have passed that it’s an ungovernable nightmare.
I believe it. The state’s revenue has increased 40% in the last five years. 40%! The commies in the legislature still can’t make it work. California’s government has DOUBLED in size since 1990.
The NYT talks $143,000,000,000 deficits, and “scores” of layoffs in the same paragraph. What’s a score? 20?
As I understand it, 20,000 were notified but 10,000 were actually laid off. Better to whip up the union members that way?
Speaking of unions, Michigan’s UAW sure is more vocal and “intransigent” with regard to their members employed by Ford, GM, & Chrysler. Who pays these California mob bosses anyway?
In California, there is a sales tax exemption for Race Horse breeding stock... but not for working horses or riding horses.
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