Adam C points out that the Governor now wants spending cuts, allegedly.
Talk is cheap. The Governor had an opportunity in August to join with legislative Republicans in demanding a balanced budget this year.
Instead, he joined with legislative Democrats in attacking and pressuring those Republicans to violate the Constitution and vote for their illegal unbalanced budget, eventually himself having to be pressured by his fellow Republicans to use the line item veto properly in exchange for passing the budget. He then turned around and called for a special session of the legislature for “health care reform.”
Keep in mind this is also the governor who put billions of dollars of new debt on the ballot in lieu of cutting spending to prevent the state from defaulting on any debt.
How bad was his proposed budget this year? With his own projections it had a $2 billion deficit, and his own document says his revenue projections were beefed up. The final budget ended up (after his $700 million in Republican-demanded vetoes) with expenditures $1 billion over revenues (see page 72), with the legislative analyst predicting the structural deficit to balloon this year, not withstanding the Governor’s revenue projections. He and the Democrats are pretending this deficit is legal by doing some accounting tricks of transferring money from other accounts (which will then be transferred back later) in order to pretend that it’s a balanced budget.
Higher spending, steady taxes, budgets full of red ink. I don’t see what’s fiscally responsible about this Governor at all.