Friday, March 12, 2010

Sure Enough...

As if to prove my point in yesterday's post about Meg Whitman limiting herself with regards to those "solutions" she's so sure she's got for California, eMeg gave (gasp!) a press conference at the California Republican Party convention today, addressing her ideas for the budget crisis. Among them? No overall spending cuts to education, $4 billion in tax cuts, and reducing state spending by $15 billion over four years through reducing inefficiencies and waste. (All of this info is courtesy of John Myers, at KQED Public Radio.)

Guess what, Meg? Education spending represents 40 percent of the general fund budget; I don't want to cut it any more than anybody else does, but good luck chipping away at a $20 billion shortfall otherwise. Cutting taxes to the tune of $4 billion - about 0.2 percent of state GDP - won't do squat to create jobs or jump-start the economy, but it will drive up the deficit by another $4 billion or so.

And as for those spending cuts - never mind the question of whether there's $15 billion in "waste" in the state budget to begin with (there isn't). Meg, my friend, sit down. The deficit is $20 billion this year alone. And unless the economy rebounds faster than one of my sinus infections, it will probably be in the $10 to $15 billion range, annually, through the middle of this decade. So $15 billion over four years ain't gonna bring us back to black, as Amy Winehouse would put it. (I tried to say "back in black" so as to make an AC/DC reference, but it just doesn't sound right, does it?)

Wait a minute, I've just run some numbers in my head (the best place to do math, I find) - if she's going to cut taxes by $4 billion per year, that comes out to $16 billion over four years. That's a billion dollars more than she's proposing to cut in spending. Which brings us right back to square one, deficit-wise. Actually, square one plus another billion dollars, give or take.

Hey, media - you wanna stop taking this lady seriously already?

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