Well, not yet, but the State of California is functionally broke. According to an article in today's Sacramento Bee, the State is "almost out of ways to "pay bills, [and] fund programs", at least according to our state's Fiscal Controller, John Chiang. Chiang, by the way, has my undying respect for being seemingly one of only a handful of people to call Ah-nuld's bluff during our budget crises, including a refusal to implement a pay cut for part-time university workers last summer.
Quoting the Bee:
since [July 12, 2007] California has been living on borrowed money.
As in $21.5 billion worth of borrowed money, according to state Controller John Chiang: $16.5 billion borrowed from some of the state's 1,000-plus special funds, plus $5 billion in "revenue anticipation notes," which are basically money borrowed from private investors.
But, Chiang, whose office writes the state's checks, says California is about out of stopgap tricks to pay its bills and keep all its programs running.
It's Chiang's job to wrestle with the state's day-to-day cash-flow problems while legislators and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger haggle over the best way to close a humongous $40-billion gap between state spending plans and projected revenues over the next 17 months.
The controller says California is down to Plan D on its checklist of paying bills. Its cash reserves are piddling; the special funds it borrows from are tapped out, and no one in the private sector is going to lend it any cash at a reasonable interest rate.
(h/t to Calitics, which brought this to my attention.)
Accordingly,
[t]hat leaves what in state government circles are called "payment deferrals" and what in real life is called "stiffing your creditors."
So what would this mean to an unemployed college student like myself? Among other things:
- A halt in financial aide payments
- Enrollment caps in the schools to which I've applied
- Cuts in the General Education classes I would need to get my Associate Degree
Of course, this is all small potatoes compared with the problems faced by anyone in California who is un(der)employed, anyone who relies primarily on services like Healthy Families (like my parents do) for their children's medical bills, anyone who relies on CalWorks or the Employment Development department to help them find work (as I have in the not-too-distant past), not to mention all those who are employed on our state's myriad public works improvements (the Cypress Avenue Bridge up here in Redding is just one example of projects to be affected).
And for high-speed rail enthusiasts like myself who supported ardently and voted for Proposition 1A? Well, we won't be seeing that anytime soon, either. Not to mention local light-rail networks like BART which are currently mulling either service cuts or fee hikes.
FC Chiang was quoted in the Bee article as saying that the painful decision not to pay out US$3.7 billion in state checks is the equivalent of "pulling the trigger."
And how does the California Yacht Party, and the Assembly Yacht Partisans respond?
By holding out for tax-cuts that can't even theoretically be made. They've gone from wanting to cut bone to wanting to harvest vital internal organs.
But so long as the state's two-thirds rule for passing a budget remains in effect, this is what we'll get.
It should be evident to everyone in the state (yes, even the bloody fiscal dead-enders who populate the state) that after the past eight years, but especially the past six, the Republicans aren't fit to run so much as a corner store.
Thanks a lot, Ah-nuld. Thanks a lot, Yacht Party. Thanks for deferring the dreams of so many.