California budget deal prepares books to hide a large deficit

From And WaltersCalmness

This comment was originally published by CalmattersS Register about their ballots.

Legislative leaders would make us believe that Budget Agreement 2025-26 They forgers with governor Gavin News this week is remarkable – even heroic – a response to financial problems caused by factors beyond their control, more special tariffs of President Donald Trump.

A Summary of the $ 321 billion agreement Issued by the State Senate states: “Through the work of the legislature and the governor, the budget was again stabilized again, with the governor offering a budget on January 10 without needing new decisions. Unfortunately, from January, the circumstances have changed, and California is now facing significant budget shortages.”

“First,” the summary continues, “the policies of the new Federal Administration – more specially, the policies to increase tariffs – have caused economic forecasts around the world to be significantly reduced.”

He continues to quote, “to a modest extent, the main cost of key programs-Medi-Cal-Cal, scaled faster than predicted … and third, to a lesser extent, the devastating fires of LA had a negative economic impact and led to an increase in state costs.”

This scenario has been invented, designed to mask the fact that Newsom and legislators have overcome the revenue of three years since the governor mistakenly stated that the state had almost $ 100 billion excess – long before the fires hit Los Angeles and Trump.

The alleged surplus lit a multi -billion dollar from new expenses in 2022, which continued. Thehe The administration finally admitted a year ago that it overestimates estimated revenue of $ 165 billion over four years.

Thehe Initial budget 2025-26 This Newsom, proposed in January, had a total difference in the $ 11 billion fund between revenue and expenses. His processed budgetIssued in May, it had a deficit of $ 19 billion even with a number of cost cuts, most of all in services for the poor and the elderly. The budget deal extends the deficit to $ 21 billion.

Newsom’s revised budget has started Accusation syndrome-of-Trump And legislative leaders quickly accepted it to explain their chronic inability or reduce costs, or to increase income balancing taxes and exceeding, a condition known in Capitol as a “structural deficit”.

In this way, all versions of the budget, including the semifinal, discovered this week, will fill the gaps for another year with delay, loans, accounting tricks and reserves attacks that meant reducing the effects of real emergencies.

Direct and indirect loans for the overall budget of the fund come from special funds set aside for specific purposes, and after three years of cost deficit, the state has accumulated many billions of dollars in domestic debt that will have to be paid somewhere.

The accounting trick takes several forms, as a delay of $ 2.3 billion in payments to support colleges in the Community and local school systems, which are due in June 2026 to a month later, thus transferring them from one fiscal year to another.

Officials call such maneuvers “solutions”, but they do not decide anything. They just stop at the day of reading when the official meeting expires from tricks. This day will probably come after Newsom has left the government and may be running for president.

In fact, the state has adopted the same approach to hiding PEA in the budget that the Federal Government uses, which has led to a national debt with a lot of trillion dollars. By the way, it seems that Trump continues this practice that is not paid with his practice with his “A big beautiful account” This will further increase national debt.

Were a private corporation to cook its books as the government of the state, its Leaders could wind up in prison for fraudS For some strange reason, however, voters in California continue to tolerate the chronic fiscal abuse of Capitol.

This article was Originally Published on CalMatters and was reissued under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Noderivatives License.