[Editor’s Note: This story originated in the Los Angeles Times.]
By John Myers , Melanie Mason, Christine Mai-Duc
By now, it could easily be called Gov. Brown’s budget doctrine — an insistence on modest expansions in state services linked with liberal payments for one-time expenses and accumulated government debt.
In his new $170.7-billion budget proposal to legislators, Mr. Brown is staying consistent with his creed.
“It’s just a matter of balance,” he said at a Capitol news conference this morning where he released the spending plan for the fiscal year that begins in July.
Mr. Brown proposes making an additional $2 billion payment into the state’s rainy-day fund, growing the size of the reserve account to almost two-thirds of its legally mandated goal.
The budget plan crafted by Mr. Brown is built on both another windfall of tax revenues and mandatory payments to both public schools and a new reserve fund. Beyond that, it offers relatively few new morsels of state spending on health and human services — most notably, the first increase in cash payments for the aged, blind and disabled since 2006.
It revamps a controversial tax on health plans to avoid jeopardizing federal healthcare dollars.
It also proposes enough money for the University of California and Cal State University systems to keep tuition at the same levels they’ve been since 2012.
That the governor has been able to instill his vision of state government budgeting is due to another year’s worth of rapid growth in the personal income of California’s wealthiest taxpayers. His new plan assumes $19 billion in unexpected capital gains tax revenues from 2015.
But Mr. Brown insisted again in his budget news conference that several years of good fortune do not justify the increased spending that some, most notably legislative Democrats, have demanded.
“Too many goods, too quickly, become bad,” he told reporters.
