California is facing a $68 billion budget deficit, the state’s nonpartisan fiscal analyst announced in early December, signaling a “serious” financial challenge for the Democratic-led government heading into an election year.
The Legislative Analyst’s Office said a revenue decline this year “similar to those seen during the Great Recession and dot‑com bust” was largely responsible for the sobering projection. Absent a sudden turnaround, Gov. Gavin Newsom and his fellow Democrats in the Legislature would face the state’s biggest budget challenge since the early 1990s, undercutting national messaging by the governor, who has depicted California’s emergence from the COVID-19 pandemic largely as an economic success.
California has been in a downturn since 2022, and state finance officials had been warning of a darkening fiscal outlook, the report noted. But the state was late to recognize the full extent of the plummeting revenues because of a decision to delay its tax filing deadline until mid-November of this year to give residents leeway as they recovered from a series of catastrophic storms last winter.
The state’s tax system is prone to wide swings because of a heavy reliance on the taxation of capital gains and the personal income of high earners. For those residents, a steep 2022 decline in the stock markets resulted in heavy losses, which translated into lower tax revenues in returns filed through last month.
Also partly to blame, the legislative analyst found, is the federal government’s effort to control inflation. As the Federal Reserve has increased key interest rates, borrowing has become significantly, and abruptly, more expensive for businesses and homebuyers, which in turn has worsened unemployment and depressed business startups in California.
“Home sales are down by half,” the legislative analyst reported, “largely because the monthly mortgage to purchase a typical California home has gone from $3,500 to $5,400.” Tech companies have also been hit hard, the report found, with an 80% drop since 2021 in the number of California companies that have gone public. (In past years, initial public offerings have provided a noticeable boost to state coffers.)
As a result, the report found, the state has added nearly 200,000 workers to its jobless ranks since last year, and the unemployment rate has risen to 4.8% from 3.8%, nearly a full percentage point higher than the national unemployment rate.
c.2023 The New York Times Company. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
