My good friend Kennita Watson (occasional candidate for various unsexy offices) sent me this column/speech by state senator Tom McClintock (R, Thousand Oaks):
Three numbers tell the entire story of California’s fiscal meltdown: 21, 28 and 36. Understand them and you will have transformed the Byzantine mysteries of the state budget into precise mathematical order.
In the last four years, population and inflation have grown at a combined rate of 21 percent. California general fund revenues have grown 28 percent. General fund spending has grown 36 percent.
The spending lobby insists that California got into its budget mess by irresponsibly slashing car taxes, thus leaving the treasury dangerously vulnerable when the recession struck and state revenues plummeted.
The facts paint a quite different picture. AFTER taxes were cut and AFTER the economic bubble burst, general fund revenues have still outpaced combined population and inflation growth by fully one third during this administration. Obviously, California isn’t suffering a revenue problem.
What it has suffered is a monumental spending problem: growing 36 percent in four years.
Not that we’ve seen a 36 percent increase in highway construction or school construction or water storage or electricity generation or anything else that government is responsible for providing. We’ve paid for it. We just haven’t gotten it.
I don’t actually believe in my bones that voting Republican will help much.