Today we are formally calling on Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to declare a state of Fiscal Emergency for California state government. The long and short of it is that the anticipated revenues for California for THIS FISCAL YEAR are falling billions short of projections. While it is laudable that the Governor has instructed his agency and department heads to start to look towards cuts for the FY 07-08 budget, which will be very helpful in terms of helping to provide a starting point for massive shortfall that is projected for next year’s budget, what we have is a TODAY problem. Hence the need for a call for Fiscal Emergency.
With the passage of Proposition 58, the Governor has the power to make this declaration, lay out a plan to immediately trim government spending, and call the legislature into session to act on the parts of his plan that cannot be done unilaterally. This would show leadership, and would acutely focus the attention of all of our policy makers on dealing with a very real problem — we don’t have enough income to support all of our spending!
Now I know that the Governor would prefer to keep the focus on his health-care proposal, or his one-man assault against the rising temperature of the earth. But the reality is that both of these public-policy pushes actually make our state’s fiscal crisis WORSE not better. We’ve seen what government can do with bureaucracies like the U.S. Postal Service — can you imagine state government wading into healthcare in a Soviet-style regulatory fashion and the results being anything other than a disaster, not only for the quality and availability of healthcare, but in terms of economic chaos? And the regulations being put into effect because of AB 32’s requirements for reducing carbon emissions here in California are extremely damaging to the economy.
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November 28th, 2007 at 12:00 am
AB32 should be shelved for a few years (decades?). It has a financial double whammy no one has calculated. Besides CARB and other agency direct costs, the loss of industries, jobs and the tax revenue that they would have created will sink all current revenue projections. The Guv needs to take off his rose colored glasses. Moreover, since all the AB32 expenditures and lost revenue will have absolutely no effect on global warming, maybe it is one of those luxury expenses we can delay until say China gets worried about it.