CA Gov. Gavin Newsom presenting 2024-25 budget. (Photo: gov.ca.gov)
Will Gov. Gavin Newsom Face a Reckoning with His $73B Deficit in the $330 Billion Budget?
When are budget cuts not really budget cuts?
By Katy Grimes, April 9, 2024 12:00 pm
When are budget cuts not really budget cuts? When they are in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget.
Last week Newsom and elected legislative Democrats released details of their plan to cut more than $17 billion in spending:
“The package includes solutions that would enable final budget negotiations to focus on closing the gap and protecting core programs, and agrees to aim for using approximately half of the reserves this year,” Gov. Newsom said.
But let’s back up.
It is important to remember that when Gov. Jerry Brown was (re)elected in 2011, the state budget was $98 billion. The state’s population was a little over 38 million. Brown doubled the budget to $199.3 billion in 8 years – with no measurable increase in population. Gov. Gavin Newsom inherited Brown’s $199.3 billion budget, and has grown it to $330 billion in 5 years – while losing population.
When Gov. Jerry Brown was elected in 2011, the state budget was $98 billion. The state’s population was a little over 38 million. Brown doubled the budget to $199.3 billion – with no measurable increase in population. Gov. Newsom inherited Brown’s $199.3 billion budget, and has…
— Katy Grimes (@KATYSaccitizen) December 5, 2023
Where is all of that new spending going? And how exactly will the governor and Democrats cut $17 billion in spending?
Here’s how, from Gov. Newsom’s Early Action Agreement Overview:
“There is agreement between the Governor and the Legislature on an Early Action
budget package that will reduce the budget shortfall by approximately $17.3 billion.
High-level details of this Early Action agreement are outlined below.
The Early Action agreement includes $17.3 billion in a mix of solutions, which are
primarily a subset of Governor’s Budget solutions:”
Reductions are actual reductions. The rest – borrowing, delays, fund shifts and deferrals – are just budget trickery, other than more borrowing, which is rarely good. These are the proposed reductions:
Reductions – $3.6 billion – Significant Issues Include:
Salary Savings Sweep from Vacant Positions – $762.5 million.
Withdraw Elimination of Two-week Fee-For-Service Checkwrite Hold – $532.5
million.
School Facility Aid Program – $500 million.
CalWORKs Single Allocation Partial Reversion – $336.6 million.
UCLA Institute of Immunology and Immunotherapy Project – $300 million.
Watershed Climate Resilience – $206.5 million.
Broadband – Loan Loss Reserve – $150 million.
Climate Innovation Program – $100 million.
Foreclosure Intervention Housing Preservation Program – $85 million.
It was only in January when Gov. Newsom put on quite a budget show, feigning indignation over the Legislative Analyst’s Office’s update on the state’s actual budget deficit, which the LAO put at $68 billion, and then increased to $73 billion. Newsom claimed the LAO was wrong about the size of his budget deficit.
By January 10th, Newsom’s $330 billion budget was whittled down to a svelte $291.5 billion – but no cuts to his climate agenda. Notably, Gov. Newsom made a truly strange comment: “Extreme weather patterns led to extreme budgeting.”
The most preposterous statement Gov. Newsom made may be, “Belt tightening – “we did what you do at home.”
Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher wasn’t buying Gov. Newsom’s claims of belt-tightening, much less on the early action budget deal.
“This deal is a swing and a miss from Democrats. California’s budget has major league problems and Newsom is proposing JV solutions. With a $73 billion deficit, this gimmicky agreement is not the home run Gavin thinks it is. The emotional, real truth of this budget is visceral to the Californians who will pay the price for Newsom’s delusions and exaggerations.”
“The economic slowdown, caused by the state’s highest unemployment in the nation after recent data revealed that job growth in the Golden State was much lower in 2023 than previously believed, is largely to blame for the shortfall,” Fox News reported. “The exodus of businesses and residents from the state for more tax-friendly states is also a contributing factor. California relies heavily on income taxes for its revenue.”
The U-Hauls leaving California in 2023 marked the fourth consecutive year the once Golden State finished on top of the U-Haul Growth Index – meaning more Californians rented one-way U-Haul trucks to leave the state in 2023, than residents of any other state, the Globe reported in January.
In 2022, 817,000 Californians moved to other states.
California also lost a net of 407,000 residents to other states between July 2021 and July 2022, including a greater share of those with a college degree and residents at all income levels than in the past.
The $300 billion budget is going to take a lot more reductions. A good place to start is with homeless spending and taxpayer funded entitlements for those in the state illegally.
A new state audit reports that California has also spent more than $24 billion on the state’s drug-addicted homeless vagrants, growing the homeless population to more than 181,000.
As the Globe recently reported, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s final expansion of full-scope Medi-Cal went into effect Monday, January 1, 2024, making more than 700,000 illegal immigrants residents between ages 26 and 49 eligible for full health care coverage – at a very precarious time with his $68 billion budget deficit.
If Gavin Newsom and the state’s Democrats – who surely flunked basic math – are trying to bankrupt the state, they are going about it correctly. This latest expansion of Medi-Cal will cost $2.6 billion annually on top of the $330 billion budget.
And notably, California is the only state in the country to fund health care for illegal immigrants. As California Congressman Kevin Kiley says, “California is a model of exactly what not to do when it comes to managing a state’s finances and managing its tax system and spending.”
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And to what effect? Problems with homelessness, mental health, addiction, lack of affordable housing have gotten worse. Education captures 1/3 of the budget but 48% of K-12 students are proficient in English/Language Arts. Only 334% are proficient in math. Forget about science.
The argument is made that 80% of the spending is mandated. True enough. Unmandated them. Try something else to solve these problems instead of throwing more money at them. Of course, that will entail taking on the established interests which are quite powerful. It would be nice to make these corrections before the doom loop destroys CA but I’ll have to settle for afterwards.
That list should include cancelling the $50 million that former Assemblyman Rudy Salas siphoned to the Kern Community College District to establish the so-called California Renewable Energy Lab ( https://www.kccd.edu/crel/index.html ). The only thing CREL does is “raise awareness” about renewable energy.
Salas announced the $50 million during his 2022 congressional campaign, which he lost. This also came at a time when Kern CCD chancellor Sonya Christian was padding her resume to become state chancellor of the California Community College system, which she won. From the Bakersfield College student newspaper: https://www.therip.com/news/2022/10/09/kccd-gains-50-million-in-state-funding/
When CEO’s “fund positions” that are not filled, they basically created a slush fund for themselves to dispense that money elsewhere.
Who’s counting the small stuff, once the final budget gets passed. It all become fungible once approved. And no one is really staying on top of each and every dollars. Which has to be the case, since both the LAO and the Gov are so wildly out of balance on their numbers.
So at least Newsom did put his private little slush fund (unfilled positions) on the chopping block, at least on paper.
This cannot be emphasized enough:
Katy Grimes writes:
(1) It is important to remember that when Gov. Jerry Brown was (re)elected in 2011, the state budget was $98 billion.
(2) The state’s population was a little over 38 million. Brown doubled the budget to $199.3 billion in 8 years – with no measurable increase in population.
(3) Gov. Gavin Newsom inherited Brown’s $199.3 billion budget, and has grown it to $330 billion in 5 years – while losing population.
———-Raid the treasury and hire the relatives – guaranteed recipe for instant third world status. Conduct a nepotism audit on all Newsom administration hires.
Jaye nails it again. Read carefully and memorize if possible. 🙂 All their destructive sins and crimes are here in a nutshell.
2011 (Jerry Brown:) $98 billion
>>>> $193 billion
>>>>>$330 billion
2024 (Gavin Newsom)
The Million Dot High School Competition
My husband tells the story that he and his friend, bored STIFF in high school sophomore geometry class, decided to compete to see who could make a million dots first. Both knew a million was a very big number, but were confident they could accomplish it. They used their geometry workbooks, which had enough empty spaces throughout to complete the task. The honor system rules were that they could do it in class or out of class, but in the end they mostly did it while in geometry class (because nobody wanted to spend their Saturdays making dots, lol). They marked rows of dots in tens and kept columns of the totals. Both boys were extremely competitive and determined, and spent most of the school year, fall to spring, diligently making dots during most of their class time to be the FIRST to get to a million dots. By April (my husband recalls) they both gave up the competition as hopeless; both agreed it was an impossible task, and neither one could even stand to do it or look at it or think about it anymore. My husband’s estimate is that, in the end, they had probably only reached a total dot count of between 200K and 250K.
Maybe someone should initiate a BILLION-Dot Tiktok Challenge —— then perhaps people would begin to understand how much money has been wasted and secreted in the State of California under these Dem/Marxist crooks.
Good thing we have this report from Katy Grimes in black and white about what is REALLY happening with this year’s California budget —- and its fake “CUTS” —- to counter the usual amazingly delusional fantasyland blather from Gov Gavin. To the extent I was listening to him at all, he lost me at “We are able to meet this challenge thanks to our responsible fiscal stewardship over the past years.” Wow. Sometimes he even surpasses himself with the bald-faced lies he tells, and that is really saying something.
His act is almost comic in its absurdity, but of course it’s NOT FUNNY, is it. We’re in deep doo doo, Gavin. Aren’t we. Can we presume the rest of the budget “cuts” will follow the same phony formula that has been concocted in this example? Oh GREAT! And gee, by the way, I’m no state budget expert but I really doubt that our state reserves were meant to be spent papering over a gargantuan failure like this one. As if those reserves will even touch it!
Between Katy Grimes’ report and Asm Leader James Gallagher’s great comments, probably nothing else really needed to be said about Newsom’s stunning budget train wreck and the lies and tricks that accompany it, but I’m so beyond angry at this point at this horse’s ass of a Worst Governor Ever and his sidekick super-majority Dem/Marxist legislature and all the rest of his ridiculous aiders and abettors I really couldn’t help myself.
Hair gel Hitler Newsom’s insane comment that “Extreme weather patterns led to extreme budgeting” proves that he’s one of Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum’s globalist stooges and doing their bidding? Climate change isn’t a major concern for most Californians? The only reason that he’s still in office is because of pervasive Democrat voter fraud and rigged voting machines? If he isn’t held accountable for the hell that he’s created for California in this life, hopefully he will get what’s coming to him in the next realm?