Courage lacking to fix state budget shortfall

It seems beyond lawmakers’ ability to creditably balance taxes and spending

- GEORGE SKELTON COLUMNIST CAPITOL JOURNAL

GOV. Gavin Newsom is working on his last state budget proposal.

(MICHAEL M. SANTIAGO Getty Images)

It's almost like slapstick comedy—the budget act that California’s Legislature and governor perform every year.

OK, it’s not really funny.

But it is a joke—all the gymnastics the politicians go through trying to hide their red-ink spending and convince us they've met their legal obligation to produce a balanced state budget.

“Balanced” means having enough money to pay for all the authorized spending. But it’s largely guesswork. And the budget often is balanced only on paper. The state pencils in whatever numbers are needed to “balance” the books.

“They always cook the numbers,” gubernatorial candidate Antonio Villaraigosa told me last spring.

Villaraigosa, former Los Angeles mayor, knows firsthand about “cooking.” He once was in the kitchen as a powerful state Assembly speaker.

“Every finance person does it,” he said. “But there’s got to be a limit. At the end of the day, you can cook [numbers] so much they're not real.”

The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office reminded us of this in a recent report. It warned of a growing state budget deficit for the next fiscal year beginning July.

In polite language, the analyst basically said that the current “balanced” budget — as Villaraigosa might put it — isn’t “real.”

“The budget problem is now larger than anticipated, despite improvements in revenue, and the structural deficits are significant and growing,” Legislative Analyst Gabriel Petek wrote.

“Structural deficit” is governmentese for taxes and spending being out of balance.

“The Legislature faces an almost $18 billion budget problem in 2026-27,” Petek reported. “This is about $5 billion larger than the budget problem anticipated by the [Newsom] administration.”

“Budget problem” is Sacramento lingo for deficit.