California Budget Part Deux

I was unable to easily find a California budget from 1989, but I found a summary of the 2000-2001 budget. Turn to the summary charts near the end. Expenditures for the top 5 Depatments, in billions, from 2000 to 2009, and the percent increase:

K-12 Education 32.4 -> 40.7 +26%
Higher Education 10.9 -> 13.1 +20%
Health & Human Services 24.6 -> 38.0 +54%
Business, Tranport, Housing 7.2 -> 12.0 +67%
Corrections 5.2 -> 9.9 +90%


Now, we have to recalculate inflation plus population increase (CPI+P), since we are starting from a different year than my previous post. The CPI increased from 175.1 to 211.1, which is 1.21X. From schedule 6 of the main budget, we see that population increased from 34.1 million to 38.6 million, or 1.13X. The total CPI+P factor is 1.36X. So, to keep pace with population and inflation, expenditures should have increased by 36%.

For K-12 and Higher Education, the increases of 26% and 20% respectively lag the need. But for the three other departments expenditures are way up.

• Health and Human Services (HHS) is up by 54%, which is 1.5X the CPI+P.
• Business, Transport and Housing (BTH) is up by 67%, nearly double the CPI+P
• Corrections are up by 90%, 2.5 times the CPI+P.

What would happen if these departments were brought into line with CPI+P.

• California could save 4.5 billion in HHS.
• California could save 2.2 billion in BTH
• California could save 2.8 billion in Corrections.

In total, this is 9.5 billion in savings, roughly half of the California budget gap. (I've seen numbers ranging from 16 to 24 billion for the gap.)

I realize that some of these increased expenditures may be necessary, but surely these areas and departments would be a good place to start cutting.