California lawmakers have voted to reduce the size of the state's deficit.
California lawmakers don't know for sure how big their budget deficit is, but on Thursday they decided it's big enough to go ahead and reduce spending by about $17 billion.
State budgets across the country have tightened as economic growth has slowed and states have exhausted the billions of dollars in aid from the federal government during the coronavirus pandemic. The problem is more pronounced in California, where the budget is easily the largest in the country — and in fact the state’s economy is bigger than most countries.
Instead, most of the savings comes from either cancelling or delaying spending that was approved in previous years but hasn’t yet been spent. It also relies on a number of accounting tricks to make the shortfall appear smaller, including shifting paychecks for state workers by one day from June 30 to July 1 so the state can count $1.6 billion in salaries for the next fiscal year.
“We’re trying to make thoughtful choices here,” said Jesse Gabriel, a Democrat and chair of the Assembly Budget Committee. “One of the worst outcomes here would be to make a cut to a critical program that serves our most vulnerable folks and to later realize that you didn’t need to make that cut.”
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