Then candidate Brown promised potential voters that lowering California’s debt will be the highest priority if he were to get elected. His plan consisted of raising taxes temporarily so that if California were to enter a rainy day we would be okay.
“Annually, as Brown presented his budgets to the Legislature, he would display charts and graphs to punctuate his dire warnings about the potential impacts of recession and backed them up by insisting on directing extra revenues into reserves.”
When Governor Brown was re-elected for his second term, the economy was doing so good and the anticipated recession never came. Before Governor Brown left office, he added $18 billion dollars to the state reserve.
Fast forward to today, Governor Newsom’s budget plan on paper looks well; however, analysts state that there is a great danger of spending every dollar and barely adding anything to the reserves.
“By proposing a budget with very small operating surpluses,” Petek writes, “the governor eliminates a key tool of recession preparedness. In a still-growing but now mature economic expansion, supplementing the state’s fiscal resilience by preserving a larger operating surplus would be prudent.”
Governor Newsom is more progressive than Governor Brown, and while it might be nice to have important things funded, experts state that if a recession were to hit, the state budget is not well protected so the economy would stumble.
