All Uber, California

by zunguzungu

California’s fiscals are pretty fucked, though you already knew that. And budgets are — felicitously for those who benefit from them — sufficiently complicated as to make it pretty hard to figure out how or why or what one could do instead. And yet… the wonderful thing about money is how fungible it is. $1.2 billion spends pretty much the same no matter where you decide to put it.

So let me just compare this (LAT, 5/14):

The revised spending plan would increase reductions in Medi-Cal, the state’s healthcare program for the poor, to $1.2 billion.

and this (LAT, 5/14):

Brown would largely maintain the $1.2-billion reductions in welfare and childcare funds that he proposed in January.

To this (Sacramento Bee, 5/9):

Various changes have cut corporate tax collections by $1.2 billion compared to what corporate taxes would have been without these changes, [Jason Sisney of the Legislative Analyst’s Office] has said. The breaks come by names that only accountants and lawyers could dream up, like elective single sales factor, the most significant recent change. Corporations pay state taxes based on a formula of their sales, their payroll and their property within the state. The elective single sales factor grants businesses based outside the state the power to choose which method of taxation to use to determine their California taxable income. No dummies, they pick the method that lets them pay the least amount…

Although it was approved as part of Schwarzenegger’s 2009 budget deal, the change took effect in 2011, Brown’s first year in office. Think of it as a housewarming gift from Schwarzenegger to Brown, in reverse. It means Brown must find $1 billion to fill the hole left by the change…