The budget accord that top lawmakers and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger have struck would rely on cuts to public schools and reduced state worker pay, optimistic revenue assumptions and more than $5 billion in help from Washington -”“ far more than previously estimated -”“ to eliminate California’s $19-billion deficit.
The details of the spending plan, released in a report of the Legislature’s joint budget conference committee Wednesday morning, come less than 24 hours before the Legislature is scheduled to vote on the package. The budget, for the fiscal year that began July 1, is 98 days overdue and already the latest in modern state history.
The agreement avoids the deepest cuts that Schwarzenegger had proposed, such as the elimination of California’s main welfare program and child care for 140,000 children of low-income families. But it would roll back a pension boost that state workers received at the height of the dot-com boom. The new, lower pension levels would only apply to future employees.
I object in the strongest terms to any of my money going to bail out California. They, and we all, need to stop spending, especially on illegals and their totally out of control state welfare and pension systems.
I think that California would be happy to just get back what we put in the Federal pot.
Federal Tax Dollars Received Per Tax Dollars Paid Per State
New Jersey receives 0.61 for each tax dollar paid. Nevada receives 0.65 per tax dollar paid. Connecticut receives 0.69 for each tax dollar paid New Hampshire receives 0.71 for each tax dollar it pays. Minnesota receives 0.72 per tax dollar paid. Illinois receives 0.75 for each tax dollar it pays. Delaware receives 0.77 per tax dollar paid. California receives 0.78 per tax dollar paid.
New York receives 0.79 per tax dollar paid. Colorado receives 0.81 per tax dollar paid. Massachusetts receives 0.82 for each tax dollar it pays. Wisconsin receives 0.86 per tax dollar paid. Washington receives 0.88 per tax dollar paid. Michigan receives 0.92 per tax dollar paid. Texas receives 0.94 per tax dollar paid. Florida receives 0.97 for each tax dollar it pays. Oregon receives 0.98 per tax dollar paid. Rhode Island receives 1.00 per tax dollar paid. Georgia receives 1.01 per tax dollar paid.
Indiana receives 1.05 for each tax dollar it pays. Ohio receives 1.05 per tax dollar paid. Pennsylvania receives 1.07 per tax dollar paid. Utah receives 1.07 per tax dollar paid. North Carolina receives 1.08 per tax dollar paid. Vermont receives 1.08 for each tax dollar it pays. Iowa receives 1.10 per tax dollar paid. Nebraska receives 1.10 per tax dollar paid. Wyoming receives 1.11 per tax dollar paid. Kansas receives 1.12 for each tax dollar it pays.
Arizona receives 1.19 per tax dollar paid. Idaho receives 1.21 per tax dollar paid. Tennessee receives 1.27 per tax dollar paid. Maryland receives 1.30 for each tax dollar it pays. Missouri receives 1.32 per tax dollar paid. South Carolina receives 1.35 per tax dollar paid. Oklahoma receives 1.36 per tax dollar paid. Arkansas receives 1.41 per tax dollar paid. Maine receives 1.41 per tax dollar paid. Hawaii receives 1.44 per tax dollar paid. Montana receives 1.47 per tax dollar paid.
Kentucky receives 1.51 per tax dollar paid. Virginia receives 1.51 per tax dollar paid. South Dakota receives 1.53 per tax dollar paid. Alabama receives 1.66 per tax dollar paid. North Dakota receives 1.68 per tax dollar paid. West Virginia receives 1.76 per tax dollar paid. Louisiana receives 1.78 per tax dollar paid. Alaska receives 1.84 per tax dollar paid. Mississippi receives 2.02 per tax dollar paid. New Mexico receives 2.03 per tax dollar paid.
Visual Economics: United States Federal Tax Dollars | http://www.visualeconomics.com/united-states-federal-tax-dollars/#ixzz11cNYCZf6
http://www.visualeconomics.com/
deaconmark
That has always interested me, how much each state pays compared to what they get back. In looking closer, I have more questions. What is included in taxes? Income Tax, FICA, Medicare, excise taxes, gas tax, etc.? What is included in dollars received? Does it include FICA, Medicare, Retirement pay, highway funds, military pay, money for military bases. Then there is also who benefits. For example, I’m against farm subsidies, but that makes the price of food at the store lower for everyone, so should farm subsudies be credited to the state where they go or to the states where the food is bought? The interstate system also benefits more people than just those in the state where they are spent. Also, if the money is spent in one state, but the company being hired is in another, both states benefit. It would be interesting (and a whole lot of work) to see a more detailed cost benefit analysis. I wonder if things would even out or get even more skewed?
Another interesting point would be to do this on a congressional district basis.
It gets very complicated, doesn’t it. I’ve read there is a professor in Colorado who advocates cutting all federal aid to basically the “Great Plains” because he says that it could not survive economically without federal aid. He believes the area should never have been developed. I’m not advocating such a thing…just there so many opinions out there.
I am from California, and like you, David Keller, I object to the high-living spending of our legislature. More to the point, I object to public employee unions’ holding us hostage, and by example I mean the Correctional Officers’ Union and the SEIU. I also object most vehemently to the high cost of our state’s legislators’ retirement pension benefits. No legislator should earn more retirement pension than professionals in the private sector, yet many do……and often after only one or two terms in office.
Most of them are in one of the professions [i]before[/i] election to public office, and don’t need the pensions to which they’ve come to feel entitled when they leave office. I’m in favor of gradually reducing them by half…..and the same goes for the rest of the state’s employees.
#4. The point is that most States have made unpopular but prudent cuts to balance there budgets. Most Americans are doing the same thing. Its painful! Why should California be rewarded for its failure to discipline its spending? or Illinois? Its insane, but not as insane as Washington DC’s out of control deficit spending in the last two administrations. People are fed up with it. That model doesn’t work.
I hear you on the sense of pension entitlement, Cennydd. I was listening to the AG debate last night. Cooley nearly had me until he announced, gruffly and without hesitation, that he intended to draw his LA pension because he deserved it and that it would supplement the meager AG’s salary. I reserved judgment on that until this morning, when my research turned up that the AG’s salary is about $175,000/year. He just lost my vote. (Not that I like Harris either, I may go 3rd party this year for whatever that will be worth).
As for the state tax figures, there is a pattern there that might make our friends in conservative states blanch. [i]The West Wing[/i]’s President Bartlet once said to an opponent essentially “You don’t like Federal taxes, fine, but your state gets more than it pays. So on behalf of the rest of the country – Can we have our money back?”
Palagious, the point of those figures is that liberal coastal states are subsidizing the conservative southern and central states, which is probably making it easier for them to cut their own budgets, etc… And the last I checked conservative states like Texas and Arizona were having budget problems of their own.
I think most states would be better off if the tax money went straight to them and not through the federal government. I think less would be wasted on buracracy and better decisions on where it was spent would be made. Even better let, the people decide how to spend their money.
#1 might be right if the state could control those categories. But immigration is the province of the federal govt. Witness the backlash against AZ trying to step into the vacuum of Federal non-enforcement.
The problem with welfare is the Supreme Court decision that threw out residency requirements for welfare. So the states either pay a reasonable benefit to all (which draws welfare folks to high states, at least until they feel the cost of living). Or the states reduce benefits to starvation levels, which may drive out immigrants but penalize real state residents and may be tossed by the courts.
CA is not getting its fair share? How about Stimulus funding? Does that factor in? http://www.recovery.gov/Pages/home.aspx
#10–To some degree you are correct. But California spends way too much on government, welfare, Medicaid, colleges/universities and especially pensions. All of those can be cut. What I resent is when I had a bad year two years ago, nobody bailed me out. I had to cut expenses. Also, a state can declare bankruptcy. Maybe its time–doing so would let California void all its public union contracts which would solve a lot of problems.
I wholeheartedly agree with David Keller. It’s time for California to declare bankruptcy — and do what GM and Chrysler and any number of banks should have done, but were not allowed to do solely in order to bail out failed unions and leaders who ran their businesses into the ground.
Prior to bankruptcy, California could offer to settle certain portions of their debt — sometimes that works, when the debtees understand that the looming Final Option is bankruptcy.
California suffers from the same problems most other states do, just to a much higher degree. The unhappy truth is that if states and the Federal Government were held to the same accounting standards that private businesses are, most of our legislators, governors and all of our recent presidents would be in prison for fraud.
Re: California declaring bankruptcy…
Unfortunately the current bankruptcy code makes no provision for a state declaring bankruptcy.
Unfortunately.
I have made this suggestion before – to all sorts of people, alas, but I think I will make it again. A graduated income tax should be local.l The state, now that all municipalities are taxing by the same means, should tax the municipalities. And the US government should tax the states because they are all speaking the same tax language. I won’t list the advantages to this – there isn’t space – but such a system would get rid of the bulk of the IRS. Just think of the money that would be saved by having the IRS taxing a mere 50 entities! Larry