California’s Budget Deficit Keeps Growing While the Tax Burden Keeps Climbing. Someone Should Ask Where the Money Is Actually Going.
A state with one of the nation’s highest tax burdens should not also have one of its largest deficits. Both facts are true simultaneously, and that combination deserves more scrutiny than it gets.
CALIFORNIA – California enters this fiscal year carrying a real, structural budget deficit even as the state maintains among the highest combined state and local tax burdens in the country, a combination that should, on its face, draw more sustained scrutiny than it typically receives in mainstream coverage of the state’s finances. A state that taxes this aggressively and still cannot balance its books is not obviously suffering from insufficient revenue. It is worth asking, plainly and specifically, where that revenue is actually going, and why the return on it has proven so difficult to demonstrate.
Part of the answer sits in plain view across the specific stories this outlet has documented this year alone. A high-speed rail project originally budgeted at $33 billion now projected to cost as much as $231 billion, with zero completed track between its two headline endpoint cities after nearly two decades. A housing regulatory apparatus so extensive that development approval and site costs alone can mark up a new home’s price by 40 percent or more before a single unit reaches market. A cap-and-invest and Low Carbon Fuel Standard regulatory stack adding close to a dollar per gallon to gasoline, layered on top of an excise tax that has already climbed 253 percent over recent decades. Each of these represents billions of dollars flowing through state and local government with results that, measured against the original promises attached to each dollar, have consistently underdelivered.
None of this is an argument against government spending as such, or against the specific policy goals, high-speed transit, more housing, cleaner air, that each of these programs was originally designed to advance. It is an argument that a state collecting this much revenue owes its taxpayers a considerably more rigorous accounting of why the resulting infrastructure, housing stock, and environmental outcomes have consistently cost multiples of their original projected price while frequently missing their original delivery timelines by years or, in high-speed rail’s case, decades.
Separate investigative findings this year alleging tens of billions of dollars in state program fraud, spanning multiple agencies and benefit programs, add a further dimension to this accounting that deserves independent verification but should not be dismissed reflexively simply because of who first publicized the figures. A state with genuinely tight fiscal margins, running real deficits even at high tax rates, cannot afford the kind of loose oversight that allows fraud losses to accumulate at scale, regardless of which political constituency first raises the alarm about it.
The honest, nonpartisan fiscal question California voters deserve a straight answer to is not whether the state should tax and spend at all, a settled question any functioning government answers in the affirmative. It is whether the current combination of tax burden and spending outcomes represents a reasonable return on the money actually collected, measured against what comparable states with lower tax burdens have managed to deliver on infrastructure, housing supply, and basic program integrity over the same period. On the specific, documented evidence available this year, that comparison does not currently favor Sacramento’s current approach.
A genuinely accountable state government would treat each of these individual failures, the rail overruns, the housing cost stack, the fraud allegations, not as isolated news cycles to be managed and moved past, but as data points in a single, coherent pattern demanding structural reform to how large public programs get approved, budgeted, and audited before the next multi-billion-dollar commitment gets made on the same trajectory.
Comparisons to lower-tax states are frequently dismissed in Sacramento as ignoring California’s unique cost drivers, its size, its housing market, its wildfire and seismic exposure. Those factors are real and deserve acknowledgment. They do not, on their own, explain a high-speed rail project overrunning its original budget by more than 700 percent, or a homelessness program that spent five years and $24 billion without building basic outcome tracking. Those are not California-specific cost drivers. They are ordinary program management failures that happen to be occurring at California-specific scale.
A taxpayer footing this bill has every right to ask a simple, nonpartisan question before authorizing the next round of borrowing or the next tax increase: what, specifically, did the last round buy, and is there a credible plan to spend the next round more effectively than the last one was spent. On the current record, that question remains, across multiple major programs, still substantially unanswered.
Independent, nonpartisan fiscal watchdog groups have repeatedly recommended a standing, cross-agency audit function specifically tasked with tracking major program cost overruns in real time rather than waiting years for a legislative audit request, a structural reform that would cost a small fraction of what a single year of overruns on any one of the programs documented here already amounts to.
That kind of standing infrastructure, unglamorous and unlikely to generate a single dramatic headline on its own, would nonetheless do more to prevent the next decade’s version of this same accounting than any individual spending fight currently dominating the legislative calendar.
For related commentary on public spending and the gap between promised and delivered outcomes, see Humorous News Headlines and Best Comical News Stories, along with further reading at Hilarious News Stories.
Additional coverage at Satire And Politics.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
