Here's your latest chance to solve California's state budget imbalance. A site called Next 10 has a clear and thorough program with plenty of good explanatory data to help you make up your mind. The site has been updated with new figures since I was on a panel last October that invited the public to try their hand. You can access my earlier blog on that here. I actually found it was easier for me to balance the budget this time than it was four months ago.
The Next 10 scenario takes you through options issue by issue, first for expenditures and then for revenues in your quest to balance a budget that starts out $19.4 billion out of kilter. (The $25 billion figure you may have read about is for a year and a half.) You typically have three or four choices on each issue, usually including a status quo, one that makes the deficit worse (either through raising spending or cutting a tax), and one or two others that offer spending cuts or tax increases.
Be sure to read the Overview, including the "Frequently Asked Budget Questions" at the beginning to get a good handle on how things in the Golden State stack up. You may be surprised at what you learn. The information is presented concisely and there are some illustrative graphs and pie charts to give you a visual picture too. The whole exercise took me only 10-15 minutes.
If you try your hand at it I look forward to your telling us how you did it and your reactions to the process. I do hope you will chime in with a comment. (You may need to be using Firefox rather than Explorer to comment on the blog. And I do have to moderate and OK the comments to appear after having some spamming trouble.) As Governor Jerry Brown says, California, with a $2 trillion economy and roughly a $20 billion state deficit, has a 1% problem. There are some tough choices to be made, and you can't reasonably do it with only program cuts or only tax hikes, but it is quite doable. Give it a try!
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