California, after years of fiscal upheaval, confronts yet another deficit of $25.4 billion in the current and coming fiscal year, larger than the entire budgets of most states.
Declining revenue coupled with increased spending, a job killing environment, and lawmakers' past reliance on one-time budget fixes have contributed to the recurring deficit.
Governor Brown has proposed a budget that would eliminate a $25.4 billion deficit using a mix of program cuts and higher taxes. The plan assumes that voters will agree to extend tax hikes, providing the state an additional $9 billion to $11 billion annually through 2015. Yet republicans remain firm in their refusal to vote for more taxes, and democrat lawmakers have not yet fully agreed to the terms of the Governor's budget.
So what's to be done?
Senator Harman (R-Huntington Beach) is now pushing an idea that we've been discussing for over a year. In a recent interview on FoxNews by host Stuart Varney the Senator discussed California's budget and the prospect of expanding off-shore drilling as a way for the state to generate revenue.
"This project provides the opportunity to gain significant and much-needed revenues for the General Fund that could help to preserve state programs that it considers to be a high priority," the report states. "Analyzing these potential risks and trade-offs, we find, on balance, that the Tranquillon Ridge project merits legislative approval."
In an era when voters refuse to increase taxes, at the end of the day, the only way out of this crisis is for California's liberal lawmakers to realize if they want to raise the revenues to pay for their social programs, they've got $8 billion of revenues they can tap by developing their own resources right offshore.
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1 comments:
If California allows more drilling for oil... we could end up having a budget surplus...just like North and South Dakota. The new oil finds and work...has increased employment...and income. Wow! what a novel idea!
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