What happened to the billions the state got from the tobacco settlement?
Up in Smoke?
“What happened to the billions the state got from the tobacco settlement?”
They already “smoked” it.
They used the future tobacco settlement income as collateral for a loan--and spent it.
It went the same place this money will go - To Libs pet projects in support of their constituencies and connected buddies.
A real sign of the times that Gov't exploits Smokers and Gamblers to keep up the pace of their waste.
I don't know about CA, but a number of states exchanged the continued payments over decades for a large up front payment. They turned down future revenue for cash to fund their expenditures now.
It screws their constituents in the long run because the smoking related Medicare bills that the settlement was to compensate for will keep coming in long after the money has been spent on new entitlements, and they won't be able to fund those new entitlements in the future either.
So what's their solution? Take a different source of continuous income, such as the lottery, and trade a large portion of the future income from that for a large up front payment now. That way they can pay for more programs now, and be even more screwed in the future than they are now.
However, the Governors that come up with these idiotic ideas figure that when they run out of sources of future income for which they can exchange for up front payments, their terms will be over, and it will be a different governor's problem.
If things get really screwed up, the people will elect a conservative which will make the painful changes that are necessary and they will blame everything on them, and then start over again once the government is back on sound footing.