Posted on 07/30/2010 8:31:04 PM PDT by americanophile
Governor Schwarzenegger of California on Wednesday ordered furloughs for 156,000 of the state’s 237,000 employees. The estimated savings from these furloughs is $150,000,000 per month — only $80,000,000 of which comes from savings in general revenue — a drop in the bucket compared to the overall state deficit which stands at $19,000,000,000.
If the furloughs were permanent, the annual savings to the State of California would be $1,200,000,000, which means that it would take over 15 years of furloughs to close the state budget deficit. The furloughs will begin in August, but an earlier state furlough just ended in June. Schwarzenegger has offered, during the budget impasse, to pay state employees the federal minimum wage, but that offered has been rejected by Democrats in the State Assembly and state employee union leaders.
The Governor has also hinted that he will not sign a state budget at all unless the legislature enacts pension, spending, and tax reforms. John Chiang, the State Controller of California, has indicated that in the next couple of months his office will start issuing IOUs if the budget crisis continues, and Chaing also notes that the state will run out of cash in October. Democrats in the State Assembly have blamed Schwarzenegger for the crisis, and have vowed to protect education and welfare programs. Shannon Murphy, a spokesperson for State Assembly Speaker John Perez, states: “It’s shocking that every single one of the governor’s budget moves deliberately hurt people.”
Patty Velez, president of the California Association of Professional Scientists, blames the Governor for taking “another punitive measure” against state employees. The sentiment of Californians, however, seems to be against the tax increases that are virtually the only way to pay California
(Excerpt) Read more at thenewamerican.com ...
“Too big to fail.” Get your checkbooks out, folks.
The author doesn’t know “total meltdown.”
Cali’s got a long way to go before the problem is even serious.
If California implodes between now and November, we may have to cancel the fall elections. That would be a shame.
Here comes the big government bail out - it pays to be a rich, liberal friend of Obama. :)
Can't let a perfectly good crisis go to waste.
It's likely.
Whitman has very little support in the base of the state GOP.
Can’t pay the active workers caise the mo ey is earmarked for retirees.
Don’t worry 0 will get the whole country there in no time.
This should be a lesson to those who seem to think that those on the government dole are going to be fat and happy indefinately. They indeed will not!
Even in Obama’s dream world of an ever growing Federal Worker utopia, there MUST be a private sector that can support it! As we can see from the microcosm of California...IT CANNOT BE SUSTAINED!
It’s only a matter of time before the State and Federal Slugs (I don’t mean all government workers of course!) begin to turn on their master!
Just sayin’
The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates Hispanic illegal immigrants are a net cost to the country as a whole of $45 billion. FAIR estimates that the net cost to state and local governments for the education, incarceration, and emergency medical care of illegal aliens is $36 billion. The net cost to California is $8.8 billion, or $1,183 per native household, and for Texas it is $3.73 billion, or $725 per household.
In California alone, the heavy cost of free medicine for illegal aliens - the overwhelming majority of whom are Hispanic - forced 60 hospitals to shut down between 1993 and 2003; many more are on the verge of collapse.
SOURCe Madeleine Pelner Cosman, “Illegal Aliens and American Medicine,” Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Spring 2005), p. 6. John D. Kasarda and James H. Johnson, Jr., “The Economic Impact of the Hispanic Population on the State of North Carolina” (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise, 2006), p. ix.
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National Review Online: Stop Illegals, Save CA
NPR | 24 August 2009 | Alex Alexiev
FR Posted on 08/30/2009 by Bob017
California's financial unraveling has prompted a long-overdue debate about taxes, regulation, and government spending, but the state's media and government continue to ignore what could be an even greater problem: the irreparable damage to California's human capital that nearly 30 years of unrestrained illegal immigration has achieved. This is not an immigration problem, or even an illegal-immigration problem, per se.
A strong case could be made that, in terms of educational achievement, industriousness, and entrepreneurial acumen, Asian immigrants to California have proven superior to white natives of the state.
Therefore, if California were to experience a wave of mass immigration from Asia, its long-term economic prospects would be improved. Today's Hispanic immigrants would probably have the same effect if they came from the top 10 to 20 percent of their society according to those same measures of human capital rather than from its bottom rungs. But the influx has instead been composed mainly of the poorly educated, the unskilled, and the illiterate.
Such immigrants will likely soon dominate the state's overall population and politics.
In 2005, the California K12 school system was 48.5 percent Hispanic, compared with 30.9 percent white. By now it is above 50 percent Hispanic. Two-thirds of kindergarten students were Hispanic, most of them unable to speak English.
For a closer glimpse of what's in store for California, look at the Los Angeles Unified School District, the largest in California and the second largest in the country. Of its roughly 700,000 students, almost three-quarters are Hispanic, 8.9 percent are white, and 11.2 percent are black. More than half of the Latino students (about 300,000) are "English learners" and, depending on whether you believe the district or independent scholars, anywhere between a third and a half drop out of high school, following significant attrition in middle school.
A recent study by UC Santa Barbara's California Dropout Research Project estimates that high-school dropouts in 2007 alone will cost the state $24.2 billion in future economic losses.
Even those who graduate aren't necessarily headed to success. According to one study, 69 percent of Latino high-school graduates "do not meet college requirements or satisfy prerequisites for most jobs that pay a living wage." It is difficult to see how the majority-Hispanic labor force of the future can provide the skills that the sophisticated Los Angeles economy demands. Already studies show that as many as 700,000 Los Angeles Latinos and some 65 percent of the city's illegal immigrants work in L.A.'s huge underground economy.
The unhappy picture in Los Angeles is replicated to one degree or another across much of California and is taking a huge toll on the state's economic competitiveness and long-term prospects. California's educational system, once easily the best in the country, is today mired in mediocrity near the bottom among the 50 states as judged by National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests in math, science, reading, and writing.
And for the first time in its history, California is experiencing an increase in adult illiteracy. In 2003, it had the highest adult illiteracy in the United States, 23 percent nearly 50 percent higher than a decade earlier. In some counties (Imperial at 41 percent, Los Angeles at 33 percent) illiteracy approaches sub-Saharan levels.
Perhaps even more important than the collapse of educational achievement among the lower strata is a deterioration of the higher education that was for decades the basis of California's preeminence in science and technology. California currently ranks 40th among the 50 states in college-attendance rates, and it already faces a significant shortage of college graduates.
Studies have shown that the economy will need 40 percent of its workers to be college-educated by 2020, compared with today's 32 percent. Given the aging white population (average age, 42), many of these new graduates will have to come from the burgeoning Latino immigrant population (average age, 26).
By one estimate, this would require tripling of the number of college-educated immigrants, an impossibility if current trends hold.
The state's inability to improve the educational attainment of its residents will result in a "substantial decline in per capita income" and "place California last among the 50 states" by 2020, according to a study by the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems.
The mediocre education system, along with the unfriendly business climate and confiscatory tax regime, is driving educated, middle-class Californians out of the state. Between 2000 and 2005, more people with college degrees left California than came in, according to research by the Hewlett Foundation.
Since then this trend has accelerated, and the state lost 2.2 million members of its young, educated, tax-paying middle class between 2004 and 2007.
IRS data show that of recent migrants from the Golden State to places like Texas and Oklahoma, who average 29 years of age, 58 percent have received at least some college education and 53 percent own their homes.
In short, we are witnessing a highly advanced and prosperous state, long endowed with superior human capital, turning into the exact opposite in just one generation. What can be done to stop this race to the bottom? The answer is simple: California and Washington need to enforce existing immigration law. Unfortunately, it is difficult to convince the public that this is necessary, so deeply entrenched are myths about illegal immigration.
One myth is that because America is a country of immigrants and has successfully absorbed waves of immigration in the past, it can absorb this wave. But the argument neglects two key differences between past waves and the current influx. First, the immigrant population is more than double today what it was following the most massive previous immigration wave (that of the late 19th century).
Second, and much more important, as scholars from the Manhattan Institute have shown, earlier immigrants were much more likely to bring with them useful skills.
Some Hispanic immigrants certainly do integrate, but most do not. Research has shown that even after 20 years in the country, most illegal aliens (the overwhelming majority of whom are Hispanic) and their children remain poor, unskilled, and culturally isolated they constitute a new permanent underclass.
Perhaps the most disingenuous myth about illegal immigrants is that they do not impose any cost on society. The reality is that even those who work and half do not, according to the Pew Hispanic Center cannot subsist on the wages they receive and depend on public assistance to a large degree. Research on Los Angeles immigrants by Harvard University scholar George J. Borjas shows that 40.1 percent of immigrant families with non-citizen heads of household receive welfare, compared with 12.7 percent of households with native-born heads.
Illegal immigrants also increase public expenditures on health care, education, and prisons. In California today, illegal immigrants' cost to the taxpayer is estimated to be $13 billion half the state's budget deficit.
The state should stop providing welfare and other social services to illegal aliens as existing statutes demand and severely punish employers who break the law by hiring illegal immigrants. This would immediately remove powerful economic incentives for illegal immigration, and millions of illegal aliens would return to their countries. Instead, with President Obama in the White House and the Democrats controlling Congress, an amnesty for the country's 13 million illegal immigrants may be soon to come.
Milton Friedman once said that unrestrained immigration and the welfare state do not mix. Must we wait until California catches up with Mexico to realize how right he was?
Ahhhhnald to his credit HAS tried to bring fiscal accountability to Ca. The unions, majority voters and Ca. legislatures fail to enact the responsible measures. When he leaves and Moonbeam gets elected it’s going to be a BIGTIME budget disaster encore. A complete state economic meltdown just might be unwelcome therapy but its their own damn faults. Pity the decent people of the state.
Cool, a race. So place your bets, Illinois or California. I’m betting on Illinois, while California beats us in waste and frivolous regulation, Illinois has a nearly insurmountable lead in corruption.
“Whitman has very little support in the base of the state GOP.”
She had enough support to win the primary resoundingly.
That said, I’m gonna hold my nose and vote against former Gov. Moonbeam.....Meg will be bad, but Jerry will be worse. I suspect that there will be many others in that line.....
I disagree. She had enough support to win the primary. In any case, the election will be decided by the people in the middle. Fewer voters than ever are affiliated with either party. And Whitman is running a very media saavy campaign, using Browns own attack ads against him. The one where they show a freeze frame of an attack ad against Whitman with all the fine print of who sponsored it, then rearange the letters into “government employee unions and democrat special interests” is maybe the best TV ad I’ve seen since the Reagan ads in 84. She is far from my ideal candidate, but she knows how to fight. She hammered away nonstop at Poisner for a year prior to the primary, and is doing the same to Jerriatric Brown. I predict she will clobber him.
I’ve been reading about a California “meltdown” for at least three years.
Melt down already..
It’s amazing. Every few months they manage to come up with some new accounting fraud (along with tens of billions from Obama’s stimulus stash) to avoid complete default. Then that comes apart, and they are on the brink of the cliff again, and this time they really, really, mean it. One of these days they will run out of tricks and OPM.
Well, this can’t be good news for the Babs Boxer Campaign and all the Congressional Dems. Am I right or wrong?
Congressional districts are so gerrymandered they can only one or two are competative. All the Dems are Pubs are pretty much safe.
As for Box-of-rocks, she has never had a competent opponent. It will be interesting.
As long as the welfare and medicaid checks clear there ain’t no meltdown in the eyes of the great unwashed who keep electing these jerks.
The day that the mail doesn’t come, the banks are closed, or the lights go out, they will maybe catch a clue as to how seriously screwed we really are.
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
MEg is worst than Arnie.
I am writing in Pete Wilson
A question:
Let’s say the Bush tax cuts expire. Let’s say you are a CA state employee, furloughed for X number of days without pay.
As far as I know, the fact that you don’t get paid doesn’t mean your salary has been decreased. So, you could still make $60,000 on the books, but only get $50,000 due to furloughs.
Might you have to pay taxes on the 60K purported income? Seems to me you might, since your pay rate hasn’t been decreased, but my tax knowledge is a little rusty. If this is the case, people are going to riot if they have to pay taxes (and increased taxes at that) on income they never received. Good times.
I wish I had the chance to live in CA years ago; I hear it was a really great place.
I'm a conservative in California. Listen closely, America. DO NOT BAIL US OUT. Don't you dare! Let us learn this lesson however we have to learn it . . .do not bail out these political thugs and their union bosses! Not a penny. No Sir. Not a one.
Melt downs are all the rage for the fall.... As california goes... so goes the rest of the nation. We are trend setters ya know.
Who would spend millions trying to get the job of Governor? It’s like being at the head of the Soviet Duma. The only way to lead would be from the Left, headed Left. (I’d like to know how Christy in NJ got $11 billion in cuts to their budget)
Cali’s got a long way to go before the problem is even serious.
Why do you claim it is a long way away if the figures in the article are true? According to the article it appears that the crisis is here and now. Just askin’
Heard the pension benefits for CA state employees is a $500 Billion unfunded liability. The only way out of this is hyperinflation.
Bankruptcy is the only answer. Should have been done 5 years ago.
California by itself is like the 8th largest economy in world, gonna take a lot to beat it down but give libs enough time and.......
At least Arnold has shut up about creating a mini health care system of free services for all, idiot.
The problem is a long way off because the state still has financial options as well as a President in DC who would dearly love to be the state’s eternal hero for saving them.
“I am writing in Pete Wilson”
Why? I lthought that Pete was a good Gov.Gov. and remember his fights with the Dem. legislature that he often won (plus he is a former Marine Officer which puts him high on my list), but remember he made radio ads supporting Meg....I think he’s losing it.
Impossible. Green jobs saved California. I read all about it! Millions of new jobs created.....or was it saved????
/s
Years away from a default serious-enough to strip public lands away from the state or lay off half of the state’s public employees or even vaporize state pensions.
On the otherhand it has already reched the point where if power companies in Texas arent paid on time, Cali will be cut off immediately.
Wishful thinking. Give me a date that Cali will be busted by. A hard date.
We trough gray davis out of office, we can do the same to brown.
As soon as the bills don’t reach Texas in time. Not wishful thinking. And the timing is pretty much it Cali’s court.
Think of it as Texas supporting Arizona.
Don’t wuss out on me. Give me a calendar day that you believe there is no way that Cali can survive past.
Next month? Next year? Next decade.
Be specific.
The ‘Total Meltdown” was the democrats and idiot RINOs destroying California for 10 straight years.
What is happening now is a return to health.
California is in detox from liberalism.
Don't go al "Ebonics is your primary language" Southhack.
The principle is simple even for the simple minded.
When the bill isn't paid, the power goes off.
Sad, the state of education nowadays. Simple sequences of cause and effect used to be understandable to kindergarteners. Sorry your teachers failed you so badly.
You’re getting all defensive because I’m making you prove my point.
You won’t name a date that Cali will go insolvent. You’ve got this cop-out of a line that their power will go out sometime.
Yet you won’t even give a calendar date for that time.
...this is because deep down you know that I’m right...that Cali is a long way from disaster.
Did anyone even notice lack of public service???
Well... ok... if you insist!
Rome took a long time to fall. From the peak in the second century until the Visigoths sacked the city it took over 200 years.
‘Bankruptcy is the only answer. Should have been done 5 years ago.’
States can’t declare bankruptcy.
If you put down your crackpipe, and drop a few less qualudes, you might be able to read what I posted.
I never claimed to have a date when Cali would be completely insolvent.
That is simpl;y you trying to insert things into my post.
I simply posted that Texas is not extending Cali any credit extentions on electricity. Payment past due will result in a cutoff.
You’re getting all defensive because I’m making you prove my point.
No. I am ridiculing your intellect, because you attempted to insert a proposition I never made into my post, and then have me defend that
Of course I am making fun of you.
It is the rational responce to your lunacy.
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