I think houses here in California (SF Bay Area) could drop in price by 50% and they would still be overpriced.

I work in healthcare IT and I can tell you that a large amount of state money is used to cover uninsured illegal aliens. Emergency room are overwhelmed by "immigrant" families.

California is completely f----ed.

There is no political will to raise taxes a penny on anyone or anything.

This leaves employment cuts. The poor will be first to go to the wall, the subsidized services they have access to -- schools, community colleges, libraries, medical care, transportation -- will be reduced.

Gov't will have to cut back payroll and vendor payments.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-statebudget-fl,0,95571.htmlstory

I cut K-14 education back, eliminated community colleges entirely, cut gov't pension and health benefits, added two furlough days a month, eliminated "affordable housing" subsidies to LLs, made the State Park system pay-for-play . . . $15B in cuts, still need to find $8B more, and what's left is really marrow.

$15B in cuts divided by $15K per cut is a million cuts. A million lives or livelihoods impacted, often severely.

All the tax options available on that page make perfect sense to me, but then again, I'm a liberal.

PLEASE DONT RAISE MY TAXES ANYMORE. IM ALREADY PAYING ALOT OF INCOME TAX AND 10% SALES TAX, HIGH RENT AND THE LIST GOES ONNN... IS WORKING IN PRIVATE SECTOR IS BAD?

Big difference between CA and Greece. Greece's debt is around 150% of their GDP so even austerity measure in iteslf would not cure their problems. In, CA all they need to do is get expenses to around the 80B level and the issue is done.

Greeces GDP is 400B and they have been deficits in the 40B-50B range.
Califronia's GDP is 1.85T and they have decifits in 20B range.

A little growth will solve CA's problem whereas the Greece situation is a lot less hopeful.

I hope CA take this opportunity to refocus their resource and decide what their value are and how much they are worth. It'll be great to get CA's spending back to the 80B level, that amount is sustainable. But it'll end up around 90B anyways.

Suggestions:

*10% across the board cut, no exceptions, (It works in the private world, just have the threat of layoff in place as well) excluding education. Education resource needs to be more efficient. downstream responsibility to local levels.
* perhaps cut city college altogether. There are private educators that can fill this void and get specialized education, not some useless generic education that nowadays get you nowhere.
*20% cut across the board cut for prision and health. Perpetaul overtime is unacceptable and there should be consequence for manager's that can't manage costs.
*cut in home service by 50% as the state should not be in the business of providing a nanny for the elderly, except for extreme cases. (A daughter should not be paid to care for their own mother). cut/consodidate unncessary state programs or agencies
* reform pension to share the risk as opposed to loading all the risk to taxpayer's.

Vechicle license fee restored to level prior to rollback
increase fee for service.
this is the time to get tough on out-of-state companies like Amazon who exploit the CA market and pays nothing in income and sales tax (on behalf of their customers). Physical presense model of commerce clause is outdated and does not reflect current environment, time to fight that in court.

Troy, that was a lot of fun. I managed to balance the budget!

I have no problems increasing taxes on cigs/alcohol/gas/high earners/commercial RE. No problem also releasing people from prison that don't need to be there, or sending illegals back to their home countries. We also need to deal with the pension and benefit problems, I had no idea how bad it is, and how taken advantage of by people, until I started working for a semi-govt agency. We also really need to evaluate how much CASH we simply give to people, especially the cash payments to people having more and more children..

I am also all for eliminating section 8 housing, it only helps to pervert the housing market and create scum-lords. We have a section 8 house on our otherwise lovely block, it's an eyesore. Let the market become truly market rate. The section 8 benefits the wealthy landlords more than the people...

In contrast to Greece, CA still has world-class profitable industries (e.g. SV and Hollywood). But curiously enough, Socialism is as well-rooted here as in Greece, with fabulous benefits for those who do not deserve it.

All the noise about "horrible budget situation/absolutely terrible cuts" is patently absurd PR. In reality you can see millions of Mexicans who are doing just fine even without English and any paperwork, 60+ years old plywood boxes sold for anything from 700K (East Bay) to 1M (decent zips in SV), the Democrats winning every single time. So apparently people are happy with the way things are around here.

California is fine, no worse than NJ and AZ. It just appears to be bad because they never took the courage to just cut spending and get it over with, hoping that a recovering economy smoothes things out.

Greece has lots and lots of shipping companies, but CA's economy is pretty diverse.