Summary
Over the years, as California politicians have contended with income-outgo gaps in the state budget, they have often turned to up- front and backdoor loans, accounting gimmicks, and raids on various pots of money to ease or avoid the difficult alternatives of raising taxes and cutting spending.
The most famous, or infamous, of these "solutions," at least among budget mavens, is ERAF, an acronym that stands for the Educational Revenue Augmentation Fund, devised in the early 1990s as then-Gov. Pete Wilson and lawmakers faced a horrendous, recession- caused budget crisis. The state grabbed several billion dollars in property tax revenues from cities, counties and other local governments and shifted them to schools, thereby reducing the state's constitutional obligation to education.See the full content of this document
Extract
Dan Walters: State Floats Another Tax Idea
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature face another yawning income-outgo gap in this year's already-delayed state budget, and they and the minions the...
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