Buoyed by a soaring stock market and rising home prices, personal income tax receipts are flowing into the state treasury at a rate exceeding all expectations. But one big question looms as lawmakers and the governor consider how to spend the government’s new found riches: what will happen when the music stops?
The rapidly growing cost of state worker retiree health care, a more generous benefit than received by active state workers, soon could be taking a bigger bite out of the state general fund than pensions. As if trading places, a new forecast expects the annual general fund payment for state worker retiree health care, now $500 million less than the payment for pensions, to be $500 million more than the pension payment in six years.
In 2013, the Legislature and the Governor agreed to a restrained state budget for 2013–14, and our forecast of state tax revenue collections has increased since last year. Accordingly, we now find that California’s state budget situation is even more promising than we projected one year ago.
As the debate intensifies over the historic attempt to build an $18 billion tunnel system through the vast estuary east of San Francisco, the stage shifts to the state Capitol, where partisans are taking their case directly to lawmakers.
The Brown administration, saying it wants to protect the fragile Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and
A new report says CalSTRS needs $4.5 billion more a year to fully fund pensions over the next three decades, a 75 percent increase in the $6 billion total annual payments now being made by teachers, school districts and the state.
There is no cheap fix in the report. A final draft, scheduled to
Saying California’s chronic multi-billion dollar shortfalls are over for at least the next five years, Gov. Jerry Brown presented a $139 billion budget Thursday that increases spending for public schools by nearly $3 billion and for higher education by $600 million.
“California came through probably 15 years of great fiscal difficulties. Some of it
The $130 billion budget Gov. Jerry Brown will unveil Thursday will largely be a yawner. Relatively speaking anyway.
There’ll be no deluge of doom-and-gloom denunciations over the draconian measures the Democratic governor proposes as there were two years ago when the state faced an estimated $26.6 billion gap between revenues and spending commitments.
Months before California voters approved new taxes in the Nov. 6 election, accounting practices in the state budget were changed – changes that ultimately could make it much harder to define just how much money the state has taken in or is likely to get.
The changes were approved by the Legislature and governor
Companies spent nearly $100 million an hour to buy carbon pollution credits at California’s first auction under the state’s law to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
Despite the hefty price tag, the final per-credit price was nearly the bare-minimum — $10 each — required by the auction and more than $2 below the per-credit market