Posted by Ray Haynes at 12:00 am on Apr 24, 2007 1 Comment
Rumor abound around the capitol that revenue is falling short of
projections in last year’s budget. The May revise, coming
soon, is said to be gloomy, although no one has said so publicly
yet. Capitol bean counters have an interesting method for
determining what receipts from income taxes will be. If you
will recall on your tax form, you send your return to one address
if you owe money, to another if you get a refund. By counting
the trucks going to each address, the estimators know, within a
couple of million dollars, exactly how much the state is going to
receive.
That being said, it appears that the state is on the verge of
another budget crisis.
I survived two such crises during my fourteen years in the
Legislature. The first began in 1991 and ended in 1994, after
several years of increased spending, an average of 11 percent per
year in the late 1980s. Governor Deukmejian tried to stave
off the crisis by returning surpluses to the taxpayers, as he did
in 1986, with the billion dollar rebate. The CTA responded
with Proposition 98, which required any surpluses to be spent on
education, and put all education spending on autopilot.
The… Read More