Concord blogger balances California state budget

How hard can it be to balance the California Budget when anyone can do it in less than 5 minutes using the California Budget Challenge (CBC). My budget even includes a $1.5B surplus for a rainy day fund. And I did it pretty much without trashing Prop 98 or Prop 13, raising taxes or breaking the backs of the poor. Most of it was just keeping the status quo with no COLA this year for the prison guards.

Next Ten offers an online simulation of the supposed choices current legislators have to solve the California budget stalemate in Sacramento. It’s an interesting process and worth ten minutes of your time. But don’t expect too sophisticated a model. Many of the questions are over simplistic and paint you into some corner or another. Like when you are faced with reducing education by 10 percent, it gives you only the insane choices available today and no outside the box thinking like fund every child the same and let parents choose education for their children…something simple like that to reduce the state education bureaucracy over five years. Oh no. Just forget it.

And the choices about whether to reduce spending by devolving prison guard duties for low-level prisoners to County Sheriff departments was absurd for it never addressed whether such a mandate would include funding for counties…most likely not if recent history is any indication. The spending choices about the gas tax and global warming spending in California beyond AB32 (no, you don’t get to repeal AB-32) were bizarre to say the least.

Still, like the real thing, it is what it is. That said, CBC offers a fairly clear process; you get a running tally of your choices compared the actual budget. But what is actual anymore when we learned last week that California paid almost $4B more than it thought it had? Good grief.

The problem with promotions like CBC is, that in the end, it all really is a cynical exercise.

The State Assembly will never listen to you when they can listen to special interests that pay their campaign expenses.