FWIW this makes it clear that Newsom it totally unqualified to be President. The POTUS has to deal with a deficit 40-50 times bigger than this.
What you subsidize, you get more of. California has been subsidizing corruption, crime, and indolence for more than a generation.
Sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money.
Politico: California’s budget deficit swells to record $68B as tax revenue falls.
“California’s budget deficit has swelled to a record $68 billion after months of unexpectedly low tax revenues, a shortfall that could prompt the state’s deepest spending cuts since the Great Recession.
The latest deficit figure — calculated by the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office and released Thursday — far exceeds the $14.3 billion estimate from June. The shortfall, which is the highest in dollar terms but not as a percentage of overall spending, threatens to upend the upcoming legislative year by forcing Gov. Gavin Newsom and lawmakers to make spending cuts on a scale few term-limited elected officials in Sacramento have faced.
While not minimizing the shortfall, state budget analysts said California has options to address the deficit — including the use of cash reserves, one-time cuts in spending and changes to the way it funds education — that it didn’t have in previous downturns.
“The state remains in a good cash position, and that really wasn’t the case back at the start of the Great Recession,” Legislative Analyst Gabriel Petek told reporters. “We don’t face the same kind of liquidity challenges that we had at that time, and so I would stop short of describing it as a crisis.””