Another Gift from California to the Nation: You Can’t Have Diversity and a Balanced Budget, and Under Diversity, Even Honestly Analyzing Budget Deficits is a Thought Crime!

By Nicholas Stix

Look at the two items below. The California economy only ever gets worse, and no one will say why!


AP: California Faces Imminent Insolvency; Immigration Not a Factor
By Nicholas Stix
May 24, 2009
(At the time, I published this at VDARE, but somehow forgot to publish it here!)

According to Associated Press reporter Judy Lin, the State of California is running a projected deficit of $24.3 billion deficit for the current fiscal year, “roughly 25 percent of the state's general fund,” but immigration does not factor into it.

Lin quotes state Controller John Chiang arguing for the necessity of unspecified,“immediate and real fixes” to balance the once-golden state’s books, but nowhere in her 521-word article do the words“immigration” or “immigrants” appear.

Failure to balance the state's books quickly will trigger a financial storm much greater than the one the state endured this past winter, when it stopped infrastructure projects and delayed payments to vendors and refunds for taxpayers, state Controller John Chiang told lawmakers at a budget hearing Friday.

“No matter how bad you thought February was, without immediate and real fixes to the state's finances, sometime next year we will have a cash crisis that is four times as broad as what it would have been this fiscal year,” he said.

Based on April 15 tax collections, Chiang said the state's treasury will be $2.1 billion in the red in July. The projection does not include the rejection during Tuesday's special election of five budget-related measures, which increased the deficit by $6 billion. It also does not include billions of dollars the state has borrowed from internal funds and must repay.

Chiang urged state lawmakers to pass a budget by their June 15 constitutional deadline. If they don't act quickly to cut spending or raise revenue, Chiang said the deficit will hit $14.3 billion by December.

It is projected to be $24.3 billion for the entire fiscal year.

Illustrating how quickly revenue has dropped, the state Board of Equalization on Friday cut quarterly sales tax payments to local governments by $122.8 million. The total is nearly 20 percent less than what they had anticipated to hand out.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's finance department had estimated sales tax collection would drop 7.4 percent, but actual receipts for the first quarter were down more than 18 percent.

“Prior to this year, we haven't seen this type of broad-scale reduction statewide,” said Anita Gore, a spokeswoman for the Board of Equalization.

It's too early to tell what effect the state's temporary 1 cent sales tax increase will have since it took effect April 1. Schwarzenegger and lawmakers agreed to the two-year hike as part of a February compromise.

They also raised the state's personal income tax rate and vehicle license fee.

Schwarzenegger issued a revised budget proposal last week that called for laying off 5,000 state employees.

Chiang said the deficit is only part of the state's financial problems. It also owes payments on the borrowing lawmakers have used to make ends meet.

It's been nearly two years since California has had more money coming in to its treasury than it pays out, he said. [tripled in one year. Thus is the reader left mystified, rather than enlightened.

The answers to the mystery, reported in excruciating detail over the past nine years by VDARE.com, are that:

1. California’s rise, since 1980, from 24 million to 37 million residents, has been entirely immigration-driven. During the same period, millions of native-born Americans have fled the state;
2. In a report two years ago, Philip J. Romero, who had been economic advisor to California Gov. Pete Wilson, determined that “The average illegal immigrant receives $8-to-$12 in public services for every $1 they pay in taxes. Annually, this amounts to a special “tax” on legal Californians of tens of billions of dollars perhaps totaling 20 percent of the entire state budget. (Summary by The Social Contract’s Wayne Lutton);
3. In his report, Romero estimated illegal immigrants ate from $9.6 billion-$38.2 billion out of the state tax base annually. If we split the difference between Romero’s low-ball and high-ball numbers, we get $23.9 billion. Adjust that two-year-old figure for inflation, and the projected budget deficit is erased entirely, with tip money to spare;
4. Legal immigrants are also net tax eaters, rather than net taxpayers;
5. In 1994, California voters overwhelmingly passed Prop. 187, which was then illegally sandbagged by liberal United States District Judge Mariana R. Pfaelzer and killed by Gov. Gray Davis;
6. The state’s fiscal problems derive from its illegal policy of offering sanctuary to criminal foreign invaders, and will never be solved, or even limited, as long as that policy is not reversed. In April 2008, economist-statistician Edwin S. Rubenstein, wrote in his VDARE column,

Inescapable conclusion: Deport California’s illegal immigrants and the current $8 billion budget shortfall would become a $13 billion budget surplus.

Diversity dictates that one never identify the central facts of public life, thus ensuring that problems become insoluble crises, and that public policy debate be replaced with a combination of silence, euphemisms, non sequiturs, outright lies and race-baiting. With Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger denying, even as a lame duck, that immigration has anything to do with California’s budget woes, the state’s economic collapse is inevitable.



Schwarzenegger to California Schools, Counties: ‘The Dog Ate My Budget’
 
Don't look for the Governator to fall on his sword anytime soon. 
By Nicholas Stix
August 24, 2010
WEJB-NSU/VDARE

Faced with a $19 billion budget deficit that won‘t go away, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is robbing Pedro to pay Pablo.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the state controller and treasurer decided Monday to delay $2.9 billion a month in payments to school districts and counties sooner than expected so the state can meet debt and pension obligations.

The leaders issued a joint letter notifying state lawmakers of their decision to begin withholding the payments in September instead of October.

The move reflected the limited resources the state has to work with as the impasse over California's $19 billion budget shortfall has dragged on for nearly two months.

Controller John Chiang has warned that the state could again issue IOUs, perhaps as soon as the end of August.

The Legislature gave authority in February to the three officers to delay $2.5 billion a month in payments to schools and $400 million in monthly payments to counties during October, November and December to help manage cash flow.

The step came on top of a July deferral of $2.5 billion for schools and $700 million for counties….

“California to delay payments sooner than expected,” by Anonymous, Associated Press, Aug. 23, 2010.

Once Schwarzenegger is done robbing the schools and counties, look for a massive release of cut-throats, thieves, drug dealers and other upstanding "citizens," some of whom even know some English, from California’s state prisons, making the Golden State even more vibrant than it now is. And after that, whatever state-funded services are left will be on the block. Police? Fire Departments?

Some may say that those are necessary services, but the only services that are necessary are those which primarily serve illegal immigrants, such as hospitals, welfare, and food stamps. At this rate, eventually the state will stop making pension payments, because those mostly go to a bunch of old white people.

The lame duck—and thus invulnerable—Governor has repeatedly insisted that illegal (or legal, for that matter) immigration has played no role, whatsoever, in the explosion of unpayable state deficits (see also here).