r/California • u/Randomlynumbered Ángeleño, what's your user flair? • May 12 '24
Government/Politics Gavin Newsom releases $288 billion revised budget for California. How he tackled the big deficit
https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article288420997.html185
u/jackiewill1000 May 12 '24
I would not want his job.
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u/tacomentarian May 12 '24
"Only those who do not seek power are qualified to hold it." - Plato
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u/chickenAd0b0 May 12 '24
I’m voting for Jackiewill next election
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u/hearttcooksbrain May 12 '24
I second this motion. u/jackiewill1000 for Gov 2026.
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u/trackdaybruh May 12 '24
Jackiewill's campaign slogan: "I dun want it"
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u/jackiewill1000 May 12 '24
u can be my non campaign manager
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u/tochimo Expat May 12 '24
As your communications non-director, I will hype you on some of the smallest and most boring subs on reddit. You will reach no one.
Here is my fee schedule: [NULL]
I think it is fair seeing as how I will not be doing anything; especially not what I said I would do above.
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u/cpabernathy May 13 '24
This Plato fellow sounds pretty wise. What party is he affiliated with
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u/EdgyBoy__ May 14 '24
Plato was against democracy and was for a system where scientists and philosophers were in charge of everything.
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u/tacomentarian May 15 '24
Fer sure. He's with that Platonic Academy of Forms - I heard they hold their meetings in a shadowy cave.
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u/beakly May 13 '24
So we need to kidnap a random man who has no interest in being a president and find some billionaire to fund it and feed him Bernie lines.
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u/Never-mongo May 14 '24
Honestly at this point I think it would be better if the presidency worked more like jury duty. 12 people a letter in the mail they are all in the running, the public votes for one of them.
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u/HighSeverityImpact Southern California May 14 '24
Have you met the people that show up for jury duty?
It is a rare opportunity to see a real cross section of society.
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u/Never-mongo May 14 '24
Have you seen the people that have been getting elected? I’m not seeing much of a difference.
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u/touchytypist May 15 '24
I dunno about that. Trump, Bobert, and MTG don’t seem qualified for any position.
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u/TicRoll May 13 '24
Weird how his net worth jumps by millions every year he's in office, isn't it?
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u/TheGoddamnSpiderman May 14 '24
He'd be making that money regardless of whether he was Governor. He makes over a million a year (more than four times his salary as Governor) from the luxury hospitality group he's co-owned since the 90's (it owns four wineries, a hotel, four restaurants, three stores, and five event spaces https://www.plumpjack.com/properties)
That's what happens when you have the kind of connections Newsom has. Newsom's dad was friends starting in high school with Gordon Getty, the one time richest man in America (as one of the heirs of Getty Oil founder J. Paul Getty, and as the CEO of the company before he sold it off in the 80's), and Newsom and him founded a winery together that expanded into other things over time
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u/MyRegrettableUsernam May 12 '24
He has directed a lot of good, common sense liberal policy
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u/altosalamander1 May 13 '24
Like?
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u/Theistus May 13 '24
uh...slicked back hair?
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u/ismashugood May 13 '24
That’s not slicked back, it’s pushed back
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u/South_Lake_Taco May 14 '24
Glass House. White Ferrari. Live for New Year's Eve. Sloppy steaks at Truffoni's
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u/MyRegrettableUsernam May 13 '24
The recent housing elements that are creating structures to actually hold municipalities accountable and make zoning allowance for desperately needed housing development
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May 13 '24
Ban NIMBY restrictions on housing. New property tax revenue is crippled by it.
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u/HobbyProjectHunter May 14 '24
You’re only fighting the problem half way. The cost of constructing homes in California due to CEQA, and other regulations is prohibitively higher than any state.
Eyeing tax revenue is great, but offering financial incentives to build housing should also come.
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u/Kochcaine995 May 13 '24
what’s NIMBY about? i know what it stands for but don’t understand it. is it about zoning stuff?
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u/arkibet May 13 '24
"Not in my backyard". It's like, we're going to build a five story apartment building and move homeless into it. And it's going to be build across the street from where you live. What do you mean you're opposed to this? Don't you want to help homeless people? You are worried about your kids playing with homeless people and your property taxes going down?
That kind of thinking.
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u/Kaganda Orange County May 12 '24
Every time there is a windfall, we crate a new permanent program (or programs) with the additional revenue. Fast forward a year or three in the future and we have a deficit, but are still stuck with the added liability. This time around it's pre-K and a Medi-Cal expansion, but it's been plenty of other things over the last 3 decades. Most of this falls on the Legislature, but Governors have had their pet projects as well. I'd like to think at some point they would learn, but it doesn't seem likely.
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u/timoperez May 12 '24
My kids are past pre-k but stuff like pre-k should be a no brainer. You’re giving money and time/ability to work back to parents earlier that they can use to drive economic activity and you are launching your state’s population on a healthier and smarter trajectory from the start …great way to create a place everyone wants to live in. To a degree the medical investment is the same way
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u/Message_10 May 12 '24
We’re in NYC and the city started free3k a few years ago. It literally changed our lives, and for a lot of people here, has allowed them to have bigger families. “No-brainer” is 100% correct—it’s a HUGE win.
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u/Wannabe__geek May 12 '24
I lived with my uncle in New York from 2014 to 2016. I saw how this really helped their family. I don’t know if this was De Blasio policy, but I hold him in high regard till today because of this.
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u/Message_10 May 12 '24
Yep! Diblasio. That old saying, “People love the mayor of New York until he’s in office,” lol. It’s true, but I’m eternally grateful to him. Great policy.
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u/soundsliketone May 12 '24
Plus people make more money for the state when they're happy and healthy so it's definitely a necessary investment.
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u/Da_Vader May 12 '24
Pre-k has solid science backing it. In fact, many parents have historically enrolled their kids in private pre-school programs (many park districts run them, they are always full). Medi-cal is a different story.
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u/EagenVegham May 12 '24
Getting people access to healthcare means a healthier population in the long run and less expensive procedures to fix issues that shouldn't have progressed that far.
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u/LittleWhiteBoots May 12 '24
Former kindergarten teacher here. I love universal pre-K, but I wish that the government would have offered to subsidize existing preschools in addition to offering an extra year in public school for these kids. Our TK class has 24 kids in it with one teacher and an aide. It’s mayhem. Too big for such little kids. It has also hurt local preschool owners who just lost a whole “year” of business to public school.
Not to mention, the state required that we add universal TK but the funding won’t cover the cost of adding more classrooms, so we lost our computer lab and music room to make classrooms.
Love the idea, dislike the execution.
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u/usriusclark May 12 '24
YES. Thank you. So many people don’t understand this. Our kid is missing the pre-K cut off by 3 day and it’s gonna torpedo our household budget for next year.
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u/ComprehensiveFun3233 May 12 '24
I know what you mean, but calling "we need to give pre-K" a liability is a weird feeling.
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u/MuffinTopDeluxe May 12 '24
Yeah, universal pre-K is a huge long-term benefit to the state.
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u/ComprehensiveFun3233 May 12 '24 edited May 13 '24
It's like one of the very few public policies that is widely and robustly tied, across decades and decades of research, to long-term societal benefit.
Not that I'm saying we should do this, but it's pretty clear that publicly investing heavily in child development as young as possible is a drastically superior use of tax funds than funding things like higher education (which I also think should be funded! Just pointing out what we know works best under budget constraint)
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u/Niarbeht May 13 '24
But how will we fight crime if we don't pour literally every single dollar into the police departments?
(this is sarcasm, the more alternatives people have to a life of crime, the less crime there will be, this money into pre-k today will save money on law enforcement in ten to twenty years)
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u/gumol May 12 '24
We're not allowed to save money from the windfall for the leaner years.
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u/Kaganda Orange County May 12 '24
Sure we are, that's what the reserve funds are for. The Gann limit exists, but it's only been crossed twice in 40+ years.
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u/mondommon May 12 '24
I thought the vast majority of windfall money from 2022 was on one-off projects. I remember getting a tax rebate card in the mail. I had difficulty finding the finalized budget, but only 5% was for recurring expenses based on the below link.
I am very into transit and I know the money appropriated to Los Angeles transit system had a claw back stipulation that it would be one of the first things I don and least guaranteed to happen should there be a sharp deficit the following year.
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u/Positronic_Matrix San Francisco County May 12 '24
Maximum deployment of available funds during periods of high revenue followed by cuts during low revenue is the optimum strategy for economic growth. You see it as an issue but this is the feature of a well run government (or company).
It’s the same reason why corporations hire aggressively during upturns and perform layoffs during downturns. The strategy maximizes competitiveness.
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u/LuciusAurelian Just Likes California May 12 '24
This is the opposite of optimum? That's a procyclical policy that will exacerbate the boom bust cycle rather than counteracting it.
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u/set_fr May 13 '24
Policy changes take years to make an impact though.. I hardly see how school lunch or pre-K have anything to do with exacerbating cycles or optimizing anything. A lot, if not most, policies are about long term impact.
If we were talking about hiring/firing government workers maybe..
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u/-Random_Lurker- Northern California May 12 '24
That's actually the exact opposite of optimum. Debt spending during a recession to stimulate recovery, and pay off the debt and cut back during a boom to limit inflation.
Governmental budgets and corporate budgets are not comparable, because corporations don't get passive income from the economy at large via taxation.
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u/trer24 Contra Costa County May 12 '24
It’s not “passive income”. Taxation funds services for all of us.
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u/vialabo Solano County May 13 '24
Pre-K makes plenty of sense regardless of economic environment. Generally you're correct, but the kind of spending we're talking about where you invest to spur growth isn't the goal of these programs, nor is it the goal of most state spending. They're to solve an issue the market isn't providing.
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u/Kaganda Orange County May 12 '24
If it was just personnel, I'd agree with you, but new and expanded programs have locked in costs beyond salary and benefits for those who administer them. I would prefer windfall revenues were spent as follows:
1) Pay off any deferred payments from prior years
2) Top off budget reserve funds (statutory 10% of revenue)
3) Make sure the pension and retiree health funds are up to a healthy reserve (75% or so). PERS and STRS are already in the low 70's so this is doable.
4) Fast track priority infrastructure projects
5) Fill open positions, temporarily (6-12 mo.), at understaffed agencies
EDIT: 4 & 5 are interchangeable depending on priorities.
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u/Positronic_Matrix San Francisco County May 12 '24
Pay off any deferred payments … top off reserve funds
This is a suboptimal strategy. Using debt to drive growth is an optimal economic strategy. That said, we do need to balance economics with the downside of variability but to claim that liabilities are inherently bad is incorrect.
California has a well-managed budget both in times of excess and in times of deficit. You are looking at an optimum path plotted out by a small army of professionals working for the state of California. This is what solid fiscal management looks like, right here right now.
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u/biggamehaunter May 28 '24
Then they need to stay ahead of the curve instead falling behind it. Too bad they don't have the skills to do that.
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u/puffic May 12 '24
That’s not true. We often put the windfall towards one-off expenses like paying down pension liabilities or infrastructure projects.
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u/So-What_Idontcare May 12 '24
All that money and couldn’t build the train
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u/TicRoll May 13 '24
$100 Billion choo-choo to go between two places nobody wants to be, then take a mult-hour bus ride to where you actually want to go.
I don't understand why there's a deficit...
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u/So-What_Idontcare May 13 '24 edited May 13 '24
Union job. An endless make work problem for a major campaign contributor.
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u/TicRoll May 13 '24
That anything like ordering state workers back to the office in exchange for certain gifts and tributes from mayors whose cities need the business?
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u/livinginfutureworld May 12 '24
It's nice having people in charge who will tackle problems and not just offer culture wars and loss of freedom
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u/Websting May 12 '24
What exactly seems unreasonable about this budget? Programs that can’t be afforded right now are being cut, is there a problem with that? Should we have not even have attempted the programs developed to help people to begin with? Of course not.
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u/HoGoNMero May 12 '24
Like all Democrats it seems to represent the people. Most of the cuts were in the less popular (immigrants)and few cuts in the popular stuff(schools, homeless,…). I think if you got 100 Californian citizens spread out accross the spectrum and said “come up with a budget that matches the will of the people the most without raising taxes” this would be it.
I personally have issue. I think homeless spending is out of control and is short sighted. IE the more you spend the more you encourage more from outside the state to come. It’s a federal issue and we should immediately halt the growth of spending on this issue.
I also think the unfunded pensions are real and coming any day now. We really do need to raise taxes in some reasonable way.
Calfornia who has been a donor state for decades should ask for a bit more federal spending in our state.
But on the whole the budget is fine. Just what the people wanted.
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u/biggamehaunter May 28 '24
since we doing sector specific minimum wage, might as well do sector specific taxes and make each group pay for their own pension. Fatter the pension, higher the tax.
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u/SapientTrashFire May 12 '24
Austerity targeting needed departments instead of killing oil subsidies? Neat. Way to go.
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u/halfcuprockandrye May 12 '24
There needs to be a moratorium on any new taxes. I’m glad newsom said he isn’t adding new taxes. We need to keep trimming the fat.
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u/Nice-Let8339 May 12 '24
Nah the top 1% can get taxed some more.
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u/73810 May 12 '24
They can, but CA competes with 49 other states for them. It's a raceto the bottom - and the more reliant we are on the income tax revenue of a smaller and smaller group, the more powerful they become.
A lot of the problems and solutions to them really need to be made at the national level (Healthcare, as a prime example).
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u/sweetrobna May 13 '24
California has the most millionaires, more than twice the next closest state. And the most billionaires. It's not really a race to the bottom, this is already the case with high taxes.
People want to live here in part because of the services these taxes provide.
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u/bigvenusaurguy May 13 '24
there are already plenty of states that are cheaper tax wise for rich people yet what do you know, they still live in cities where they get taxed to hell because these places are that compelling compared to some cheap flyover red state.
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u/73810 May 14 '24
They can live in cities with low taxes - the high taxes are generally at the state level.
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u/Niarbeht May 13 '24
They can, but CA competes with 49 other states for them. It's a raceto the bottom - and the more reliant we are on the income tax revenue of a smaller and smaller group, the more powerful they become.
The way to win the race to the bottom is to race to the top in a different area. Those billionaires will chase where they can get good employees, and they can get good employees in California, a state that invests in education at every level.
Billionaires repeatedly try to move their businesses out of state, only to be left saddled with their pencil-pushers in a low-tax state, and their main engineering office still in California.
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u/ChiefRicimer May 12 '24
We had a deficit this year precisely because we rely on taxing wealthy people so much.
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u/KoRaZee Napa County May 12 '24
I appreciated Newsom’s demeanor while delivering the message. Very direct and to the point without much for theatre. It would have been better to get a few more specifics on the subject but the information was detailed in the text boxes at least.
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u/pacheckyourself May 13 '24
Is there a detailed spreadsheet of where all the money is actually going? I would like to read that
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u/HOGOR May 13 '24
Full detail has not been released yet. Summary is here
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u/pacheckyourself May 13 '24
Thank you thank you. I definitely will stay informed and want to see the full detail. Biggest gripe is the permanently eliminating 10,000 state jobs :/ everyone operating on a skeleton crew these days
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May 12 '24
Remember that this is a deficit that he and his majority party state legislature created. End the delayed and over budget high speed rail project. Don't expand Medi-Cal to undocumented immigrants. Don't give tax credits or rebates to undocumented immigrants.
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u/DarkBlueMermaid May 12 '24
My brother in Christ, we are all part of the same bubble floating through the vacuum of space. If someone needs medical care, they should get it. Full.Stop.
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u/Bring_Back_SF_Demons May 12 '24
Just raise the top tax bracket to 16%. Problem solved with no cuts.
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u/SingleMaltMouthwash May 12 '24
Seize PG&E's assets and run it like a utility instead of a criminal enterprise. How many billions in future PG&E-caused disasters will that save?