California has historically had budget problems for decades and resolved things 8 years ago through increased taxes. It also increased taxes by about $2B this year.
As recently as 2017, the state miscalculated the costs of Medi-Cal and had a 1.6B deficit for the year.
The argument that I'm framing is that the state has to continuously dig further into its citizens pockets in order to fund its appetite for spending. It's entirely true.
Listen, CA is a state of big numbers - big deficits and big surplus's (Surplus of $9B in 2018, $7B in 2019). It's a function of being the 5th largest economy of the world Gross State Produce ($3.2 Trillion) larger than India and the UK. It has raised taxes, but mostly in a progressive way targeted at high income earners. At lot of marginal tax revenue comes from IPOs and equity sales. It has intrinsic problems and some pretty bad policies that linger to this day (impacts from prop 13 for example). It's still the best state to live in, has great opportunity for many people and tries to implement long term policies benefitting is citizens and is a global leader.
> It's still the best state to live in, has great opportunity for many people and tries to implement long term policies benefitting is citizens and is a global leader.
This is all good, until we put another element into the equation. How about stability of the system? It turns out it's predicated on your current- and future- (especially future) citizens' productiveness and willingness to cope with ever growing appetites of the state government. It's been accumulating debt since 1990s, and all the growth that you attribute with a "success" tag is predicated on the expectation that the future generations will figure the solution to the ever growing debt problem. What happens in fact is that the government is stealing the future from the generations to come - it's they who will have to pay for the debt of the current government. And they may just rightfully refuse to do it by moving elsewhere.
Listen, the debt problem is still a debt problem that isn't fixed in one year and definitely not this year or the next couple. We aren't near a tipping point on debt so out of all our problems right now that one is sitting very low at the bottom. There are many lenders standing quite happily to provide debt to California for ultra cheap rates.
We aren't getting out of this pandemic financial mess through cutting spending. Literally no republican or democrat is pitching that solution - do you have your own economic crystal ball to read the future? Go look to how that worked out for the austerity measure put in play in the EU or during the great depression.
As well right now debt is ultra cheap so any borrowed money to cover downtime when people can't work to protect their health is likely going to have upside in generation of jobs, general well being and future revenue.
If you want to go take that generational wealth tax fight argument probably better to start with the federal government instead of wagging your finger at California.
And in terms of stability of the system that is a much larger macro economic question. There is a great amount of debate in the academic community on how much debt countries can sustainably support especially with Modern Monetary Theory getting traction. I don't think MMT is grounded in its origins but it has pointed to a greater sustainability of deficit on our countries balance sheet as well as us getting to a higher level of employment in our population than we had previously though.
As recently as 2017, the state miscalculated the costs of Medi-Cal and had a 1.6B deficit for the year.
The argument that I'm framing is that the state has to continuously dig further into its citizens pockets in order to fund its appetite for spending. It's entirely true.