Posted 2:30 PM by Floyd

Depressing California budget news from Daniel Weintraub: The state is $35 billion in the hole and legislators still can't cut spending!

...on paper, state general fund spending will shrink only from a high of $78.1 billion last year to $70.8 billion next year, a drop of $7.3 billion.

And even that is an accounting fiction. Actual spending won’t drop by nearly that much, if at all. More than half of the reported spending reduction is actually a tax increase -- the $4 billion tripling of the car tax. State bookkeepers count that as a cut because the car tax is a local revenue source, and when it was reduced several years ago, the state started reimbursing the cities and counties for their loss of revenue. Now that the tax is going back up, the locals will get their money directly from motorists, so the state reimbursement is no longer needed. The state books that as a budget cut, but the government will still be spending exactly the same amount of money. Other items booked as cuts include a $1 billion accounting shift in Medi-Cal that will have no effect on actual spending, and a $2 billion infusion of federal money that will relieve the state of some of its obligations in health and welfare programs. When you add all these and other measures together, it’s possible that actual government outlays in California will rise, not fall, in the year ahead.

Weintraub is a Sacramento Bee columnist. His blog, "California Insider", is well worth your time. (I found the link via Mickey Kaus.)