Story Comments

What Lisa does not mention as a cause of the problem is the unsubstainable benefits the states hand out using tax payer money. Yes revenues are down, but she should mention excessive spending (gold plated retirements, collecting retirement & working at a state job at the same time, etc) Paying retirement at 30% over their last pay rate is crazy.

I live in California and the details on my State's fiscal situation are entirely misleading. In addition, the residents tax burden just got increased by somewhere in the range of $12-15 billion for this fiscal year. Also, it's reported that the massive swings in revenue are also contributed to by decrease in post-dot.com boom capital gains tax revenue. Lastly, if you truly reported fact from fiction the nearly $25 billion deficit includes proposed year-over-year budget increases that have yet to be enacted so should that be factored into the deficit amount? Based on what i've read it seems like the true deficit for next fiscal year is somewhere in the range of $8-10 billion which can be covered by cuts to government overhead (i.e., union employees!).

"The sales tax here remains relatively low at just 4%." Well, yes, if you leave off the county component. In my upstate county, the total sales tax is 8%. And the county can't really do anything about this, because a huge chunk of the taxes collected by the county is for state mandates. Just as Congress enacts legislation whose burden is passed on to the states, so the states in turn pass it on to the counties. That way, nobody has been seen to raise taxes except for the local guys, and they are expendable.

Posted by: CliffDropOver on reddit.com

Well, somebody has to pay the Rent on Civilization!