I saw two articles and an interactive exercise that would benefit any of us pondering California's budget situation in today's LA Times.  The first article talks in general about Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposals to slash dollars in just about every category including completely shutting down all State parks.  Sheesh!

The second, an opinion piece, is a good primer for legisltors on how to get this thing we call a state budget moving.  I was interested to hear that we have among the leanest state employee figures in the nation, but that's just an aside.  Timothy Hodson, a professor at Sacramento State University (which is looking forward to budget cuts, I imagine) urges Republicans to remember they are in the minority and have been since Hoover.  Partisan solutions should be kept to a minimum in such a case.  He then reminds Democrats that the last time the State legislature really worked well, Republicans were given meaningful committee assignments and invited to participate in the process of legislating by doing more than blocking a 2/3 vote.

The third, and most interesting to me, was a tool to calculate how you would make cuts and/or increase taxes to erase our $24 billion deficit.  Without doing any borrowing or other fancy footwork, I got to within $5 billion with $9 billion in cuts and $10 billion in new taxes.  (I can hear conservative apoplexy from here but I stand by the idea that we are the State, we allowed ourselves to get into this mess, so we need to pay more and spend less both.)

Here's my "package" of proposals.  The only trouble with this tool is that it doesn't allow for more options and more subtlety.  So some cuts I'd be willing to make were too all inclusive for me to include...especially when it comes to health care for kids, elderly and the poor.

Spending Cuts:

Cut Education at K-12 and State colleges (the State college $ can be recouped from the Federal budget): $6.8 billion 
Various cuts in Human Services: $649 million
Cuts in Health $200 million
Cuts in Law Enforcement: $395 million
Transfer 1/2 of Car Tax increase to General Fund (1 time fix): $250 million
Add a 4th furlough day to State Workers: $450 million
Cut the Legislature's Budget in half: $120 million

Tax Increases:

Increase top income tax bracket by .7%: $5 billion
Assess Commercial Properties outside of Prop 13: $2 billion
Increase the Sales tax by including tax on services: $1.1 billion
Tax oil companies for the oil they extract from CA: $855 million
Increase alcohol tax by 5 cents/drink: $585 million
Increase the Corporate Tax rate by .96%: $470 million

I'd love to hear how you would cut the spending and/or increase taxes!  Let me know how your session with the LA Times budget tool comes out.

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