Failing budget? I get that it's super popular right-wing talking point but it just hasn't been true for years. Prior to COVID (which has decimated state budgets Red and Blue) California had a huge surplus and massive rainy-day fund.
It's been all over the news, including very left-wing sources like NY Times and Politico.
The state _projected_ a surplus and was off by an entire order of magnitude into the red.
The state has been campaigning to Congress all year for about $14B in bailout money.
As recently as 2017, the state miscalculated the costs of Medi-Cal and had a 1.6B deficit for the year.
The argument that I'm framing is that the state has to continuously dig further into its citizens pockets in order to fund its appetite for spending. It's entirely true.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/debt-by-sta...
This is all good, until we put another element into the equation. How about stability of the system? It turns out it's predicated on your current- and future- (especially future) citizens' productiveness and willingness to cope with ever growing appetites of the state government. It's been accumulating debt since 1990s, and all the growth that you attribute with a "success" tag is predicated on the expectation that the future generations will figure the solution to the ever growing debt problem. What happens in fact is that the government is stealing the future from the generations to come - it's they who will have to pay for the debt of the current government. And they may just rightfully refuse to do it by moving elsewhere.
We aren't getting out of this pandemic financial mess through cutting spending. Literally no republican or democrat is pitching that solution - do you have your own economic crystal ball to read the future? Go look to how that worked out for the austerity measure put in play in the EU or during the great depression.
As well right now debt is ultra cheap so any borrowed money to cover downtime when people can't work to protect their health is likely going to have upside in generation of jobs, general well being and future revenue.
If you want to go take that generational wealth tax fight argument probably better to start with the federal government instead of wagging your finger at California.
And in terms of stability of the system that is a much larger macro economic question. There is a great amount of debate in the academic community on how much debt countries can sustainably support especially with Modern Monetary Theory getting traction. I don't think MMT is grounded in its origins but it has pointed to a greater sustainability of deficit on our countries balance sheet as well as us getting to a higher level of employment in our population than we had previously though.
This is Stockholm syndrome.
Are citizens being protected? Because last I checked, the "smart" people have largely outlawed working, destroyed any semblance of normal life, the average person is $5k behind on rent, and all the old people died.
The federal government has all but given up pretending money is a finite resource. Likewise states are much the same. There really is no such thing as fiscal discipline nowadays.
You can't stimulate an economy if no one is allowed to work besides the already well-off that can work from home.
It's just class war under the guise of public health.
All of these state budgets depend on projected tax revenue which isn't coming.
People aren't working. People aren't having kids. People aren't staying in the state.
The cuts MUST be massive.
This is all supposition that says nothing about the horrific costs.
You could be right, but this won’t be apparent for a while and it’d be nice if people at least had the humility to admit they’re making a bet and forcing a plan on people that will destroy their livelihoods.
What makes this particularly offensive is that the authorities have little accountability and skin in the game. The “libertarian” approach at least respects the dignity of people to assess risks they’re willing to take and assume the responsibility for the costs of the measures they take.
Is it a well educated bet based on science? Yes. No one is saying it is proven to be successful, no one has had a pandemic or a virus this dangerous replicate itself globally in an incredibly short period of time. This isn't a panacea it's survival mode. We've been in a pretty unknown unprecedented state since February with some pretty bad information coming from the Feds to sow doubt into the equation.
What is your solution given the benefit of hindsight? Go the Texas approach? If you look at death per capita in CA it's highest in the red counties that didn't do any lockdowns and have the lowest population density. Meanwhile the second most dense city in North America (SF) has an incredibly low rate of mortality and infection with some pretty tough measures in place.
Was it well educated when the surgeon general said don't wear masks?
The takeaway is that practically no one should be feeling sure-footed right now about their understanding of something as complex as the net-effect of a pandemic and counter-measures.
The hubris I see in practically everyone nowadays suggests to me people are more politically devoted to their opinions and defending them.
It is totally possible that lockdown measures will be shown to be marginally effective or net-negative in terms of life-years lost in several years time, factoring in the disruption to everyone's lives, children in particular.
If you are implying that the surgeon general said don't wear masks then yes I would say it was an uneducated statement or alternatively that he was under political duress to appease the president's administration. After all the Surgeon General is a political appointee serving at the whim of the president.
Are there better ways to implement shutdowns? Probably yes. Are those difficult decisions to make? Absolutely. Are they made with imperfect information? Yes.
I'm not politically devoted to my position - what part of my comments have been political?
I'd like to see that scientific research that proved that it's definitely permissible to continue filmmaking in LA County, while dining outside a small restaurant is an intolerable risk.
You are using one locations shutdown rules to make a broad unfounded statement against the broader scientifically proven base of research.
> You are using one locations shutdown rules to make a broad unfounded statement against the broader scientifically proven base of research.
Does it mean that in the context of this particular location and this particular ruling, you condemn Newsom and Garcetti and are willing to inform your elected government representatives about it?
I will wade in here. Lock down measure do restrict the spread of covid - that I won't refute - and that is scientific in nature and if you are of scientific worth you can't deny that. It's merely physics - if people don't see each other there is no ability to transmit the illness. The debate that you are referring to is whether the severity of the lockdown measures are worth the cost. Thats a political calculation. I haven't waded into that in any of my comments and don't intend now.
> Thats a political calculation. I haven't waded into that in any of my comments and don't intend now.
you literally began this thread by posting under the comment that questions the degree of "responsibility for the costs of the measures they [authorities] take", and you proceeded with defending authorities' actions and stating that they have their skin in the game and that they follow the science. Your comment was about politicians making political decisions and enacting certain rulings regarding the lockdown.
> Lock down measure do restrict the spread of covid - that I won't refute - and that is scientific in nature and if you are of scientific worth you can't deny that.
What lockdown measures are you talking about? Generic lockdown measures or particular measures like enforcing "face coverings"?
> It's merely physics - if people don't see each other there is no ability to transmit the illness.
If people don't see each other, there's still a physical world they interact with. They can still pass stuff around and to each other, like food and clothing, right? Or do you live in a vacuum world of abstractions where no one sees nobody and lies still like a rock?
Yes the restrictions work at reducing spread. Literally all of them do reduce the spread of the virus. The question is the efficacy vs the cost not whether they reduce the spread of the virus.
The virus is much less danger than the risk of lockdown.
Yes, i much much prefer to live in place where there are no covid related restriction or lockdown whatsoever.
Lockdown is never needed in the first place.
If the majority of the people dying are at the end of their lives (or at least at the end of their working lives), doesn't that mean we're shutting down society with no return in the future?
Healthy immune systems seem to be able to handle the coronavirus fine. That's the science.
You can't get revenues (or future health/growth) from the dead.
I don't mean this in a heartless way, but if we're going to say we all believe in science, you can't claim future benefits where there are none.
The thought that we could let our older and at risk population get decimated because we didn't think they had economic value is a crass oversimplification and belies a lack of understanding of how our systems work.
No I was explaining the contradiction that you're saying there's some large future benefits from locking everyone inside and essentially halting public life to protect people who are defined by their very much bounded future.
And we've essentially failed to protect the elderly even with lockdowns.
This is California - there will be no cuts, just massive tax increases.
California won't accept that it's destroying its tax base and so will fail.
California is a geographically large state, but the bulk of the population lives in dense coastal areas. Given that, you'd expect California to have a very high death rate from Covid. But it's actually ranked 38th on a per capita basis (where higher is better), right behind West Virginia.
California has about half the deaths per capita as Florida does, another warm climate, fairly dense large state. It has a quarter of the deaths per capita as New Jersey, the densest state.
San Francisco has one of the lowest rates of any city in the country, despite being the nation's second most dense city.
All of it much more manageable and probably many fewer businesses would have had to have been closed, jobs lost, people dying if we just adopted some straightforward measures at the beginning. Super depressing.
That's not a fair comparison!
Florida's age demographic skews elderly because it's an extremely popular retirement destination for folks living along the eastern seaboard.
This census website is a little out of date [1], but it has good proportional data:
* California 62 years and over = 4,253,854 (12.6% total population)
* California 65 years and over = 3,595,658 (10.6%)
* Florida 62 years and over = 3,245,806 (20.3% total population)
* Florida 65 years and over = 2,807,597 (17.6%)
Florida is a retirement home. The reason it has double the deaths is because it has double the old people. That counts for a lot when age is the largest risk factor.
[1] https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/california/demographic-...
California's 2020 budget shortfall is projected at $54 billion.[1] Florida's 2020 budget shortfall is projected at $2.7 billion[2]. In other words, on a per-capita basis, California has ten times the shortfall as Florida.
[1] https://www.gov.ca.gov/2020/06/29/governor-newsom-signs-2020... [2] https://www.heraldtribune.com/story/news/politics/state/2020...
California had the nation's healthiest budget prior to the pandemic, with the highest per-capita surplus, largest rainy day fund.
It's true that California relies heavily on income taxes, which include capital gains, both of which are much more strongly impacted by the business cycle than states primarily funded by property taxes. You can make an argument about that, but California's budget was extremely healthy prior to the pandemic.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickgleason/2019/04/16/no-ca...
Where do you expect California to get the money for $1T in unfunded pension liabilities? California's budget is "healthy" only for as long as they ignore their long-term liabilities.
California's "healthy" finances was a lie that the state told you in order to have a hope of meeting future obligations. The legislation they keep trying to pass where they're going to chase after money of people leaving the state shows you the true picture. They wouldn't have a need for such games otherwise.
I don't want to sugar coat the unfunded pension liabilities, but they are much smaller than you suggest. The official figure for the unfunded liability for CalPERS is about $140 billion and about $100 billion for CalSTRS.
Importantly, this is over a 30 year horizon. And the more we pay now, the less we pay later. Newsom's 2019 budget included $11 billion in pension liability payments. Even if you assume CalPERS and CalSTRS investments return worse than the 7% (or 6.1%) that they calculate, that's still in the ballpark of what is needed to pay the liability.
While this is a big deal, the funding levels in the 2019 budget are sufficient to pay the entire liability.
The numbers are only small on an actuarial basis which assumes positive things about the future like: the number of years employees are likely to keep working, the rate at which salaries are expected to increase, the rate of return on plan assets, the discount rate on future benefits.
When conditions are bad, you have to switch to the market basis.
https://www.pensiontracker.org/ https://www.ocregister.com/2019/09/24/californias-pension-de... https://calmatters.org/commentary/dan-walters/2020/08/califo...
And yes, sorry, technically I did lump in other unfunded liabilities (like bonds) in my calculation, but the number does indeed top $1T and California does its best to ignore these liabilities in their budgeting.
To put this in perspective, even if you assume zero investment returns, that works out to $35 billion/year over 30 years. The California 2019 budget was $215 billion.
Pension liabilities are a BFD, but I don't think it's fair to say the state is ignoring it. The state is actively pre-paying its obligations.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/305287/california-state-...
You see a lot of people talk about the unfunded pension liabilities in apocalyptic terms. And when you hear figures in the hundreds of billions, or trillions of dollars, it sounds insurmountable. It sounds like a bomb waiting to go off that no one is dealing with.
But it isn't. The State is currently over-paying its required contributions. The State is not ignoring the problem. This thread spawned out of the assertion that California's budget is a mess. It started with a discussion of the 2020 budget deficit, and then spiraled into whether the pre-pandemic budget was a fiction which ignores public pensions. My assertion is that the budget was not ignoring the problem, the 2019 budget was funding pension liabilities at a level sufficient to dig out from the hole we are in over the next three decades.
It's also important to point out that the State of California is not the only entity required to fund the shortfall in CalPERS and CalSTRS. The State's liability in CalPERS is about $60 billion. The remaining $70 billion is owed by localities and other special districts.
None of this is meant to claim that the problem is not real. California is going to have to pay an awful lot of money for the next several decades. But that is an awfully long time horizon, with room for an awful lot of economic growth, and if we continue to prudently make payments towards the liabilities each year, it's not apocalyptic at all.
Importantly, the liabilities are owed over a long time horizon, and they don't scale with economic growth, or population growth. They are static. Meanwhile, in the past 30 years, California's real GDP has increased by a bit over 100%. Thirty years from now, it's entirely possible we'll have 2x the 2020 dollars available to pay the liability.
Then again with Jim McGreevey (Democrat) from the right.
It's a very bipartisan issue and both parties have fucked it all to hell.
Not disagreeing with your overall claim that CA does in fact have budget problems, but citing the NYT and Politico as "very left-wing" is a pretty hilarious example of just how far right "center" American thinking has gone.
NYT is a classic example of a centrist/liberal publication that is widely reviled by anyone on the left.
edit: If you think "liberals" are the same as the "left" you are about as confused as someone who thinks that JavaScript is the same as Java.
They are not a worker co-op, they are not a mutual aid-organization, they are not seeking to overthrow the capital class, they are not socialist, maoist, communist, anarchist, etc. therefore they are not left.
The 54B seems to be a projection from May?
I saw stuff like https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-06-29/californ... and https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-aler... which seems like there will be a surplus this year but people aren't sure they're out of the woods just yet, which seems reasonable.
Those are not very left-wing sources.
Edit: to the downvoters, this is objectively true. In actual leftist media NYT is considered conservative. The reality is that they are mostly mainstream.
"Actual leftist"? Nice No true Scotsman you got there.
These are center-right sources by any reasonable standard
If you're a leftist but not as leftist as them, you're a centrist, maybe even center-right which makes everybody on the right to be automatically far-right.
They beat the drums of war for Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as every other imperialist act of war that the US dreams up, breathlessly reports the opinions of the NSA, CIA, and FBI as fact, and generally shills for the corporate-backed opinions of both political parties.
Poll after poll after poll shows these positions to be out of touch with the average American.
The fact that the NYTimes sides more with rich, hypercorporate big-govt Dems more than rich, hypercorporate big-govt Republicans is all part of the charade of choice between the two sides.
I said very left-wing (as in firmly left-wing), not far-left.