Written by Nicholas Vetrisek
Recently, Gov. Gavin Newsom lied about the contents of the state budget for 2020-2021 by stating that it was “balanced” despite operating at a multibillion dollar deficit.
Spending for the next year is expected to exceed revenues by more than $20 billion and much of that money is coming from state emergency reserves. This is a bad deficit even by California standards, yet the governor is attempting to pass it off as balanced.
Naturally, the way Gov. Newsom is attempting to balance the budget is with loans. In other words, it’s still debt—it’s just not today’s debt. Another excellent example of the governor’s masterful cooking of the books is the supposed $2.8 billion in savings from cutting the salaries of state employees. The deal the state made with unions includes having workers work two days a month without pay, while the days considered time-off. The problem is that the deal also has the state—taxpayers—eventually paying that money back and due to doubling the ceiling for time-off pay, the taxpayers will likely pay even more than they were going to originally.
In addition to fake balancing the budget through loans, Newsom has also miraculously managed to get through the worst financial crisis in California history without cutting a single Democrat pipe dream. In fact, $734 million is still going to renovate the state capitol building and Newsom will still be giving $75 million in aid to illegal immigrants. If an individual were to take this balance sheet to a financial planner, there would have been an intervention, yet this is considered fine by Democrats in Sacramento.
The current California budget is a disaster of unbelievable proportions. This is hardly what anyone outside of the Democrat echo chamber would say is “balanced, responsible and protects public safety and health, education, and services to Californians facing the greatest hardships” as Newsom described it. This is kicking the can down the road and even though California has reserve money and the largest economy of all 50 states, this poor spending will catch up to them. Unfortunately, it will catch us first.
