California Is Reckoning With Its Huge Budget Deficits
The largest and least Trump-y state, California,
has no reason to entertain such unlikely hopes. So word from Governor Gavin
Newsom’s advisers is already going out that the budget picture in the Golden
State is growing dark, as the Los Angeles Times reports:
California’s government faces a $54.3-billion budget deficit
through next summer, according to an analysis released Thursday by advisors to
Gov. Gavin Newsom, the deepest projected fiscal hole in state history …
Newsom’s budget team forecasts a $41.2-billion drop in tax
revenues compared to their estimates from just four months ago. Most of that —
$32.2 billion — would appear in the fiscal year that begins in July. Current
year tax revenues, according to the report, are expected to miss the mark by
$9.7 billion, even though most of the state’s budget year had already passed by
the time the virus became an immediate concern in March.
Expenses are also projected to skyrocket. The fiscal report
released Thursday assumes some $13 billion in higher state costs due to the
pandemic, with a combined $7 billion in higher-than-expected caseloads for
programs such as Medi-Cal, which provides free healthcare, and CalWorks, the
state’s welfare assistance program. As much as $6 billion in expenses are
assumed to be the result of the state’s COVID-19 response.
As CalMatters notes,
this budget ignores any happy-talk assumptions of a quick economic (and
revenue) comeback in the days ahead:
It’s an about-face for a state that began the year with ambitions of
expanding child care for working parents and health care for undocumented
seniors.
Compared to the expansive budget Newsom released in January,
this one has shrunk to reflect decreases in the general fund’s main revenue
sources: a 25% drop in personal income taxes, 27% drop in sales taxes and 23%
drop in corporate taxes.
When Newsom releases an official budget revision
next week, we’ll see how his administration proposes to deal with the sudden
fiscal crisis, and where spending cuts might fall. He’ll also certainly echo
the pleas of other state and local officials for federal assistance — not that
the Trump administration will be among the sympathetic listeners to this
particular state’s problems.
Before you hear any Republican kvetching about
California being a typically profligate Democrat-run state that’s in trouble
because of its big-spending ways, it is important to note that most of the
problem is on the revenue side of the ledger, reflecting Newsom’s decision not
to hope or lie his way into stronger economic assumptions. This is a state,
moreover, that built up a $16 billion
rainy-day reserve — more than enough to deal with any
non-catastrophic set of circumstances — since the Great Recession. It’s not, of
course, adequate to the kind of public-health earthquake and economic wildfires
California’s dealing with now, despite what is generally regarded as a smart and
aggressive response to COVID-19.
Perhaps Newsom’s estimates will turn out to be
excessively grim. But we could see a return to what all but the youngest
Californians likely remember as a long period of
budget gridlock in the state that finally ended when Democrats
achieved enough political power to recast the state’s fiscal policies along the
lines they preferred. An early test of how voters respond to the new climate
could occur in November, when a long-awaited
initiative to remove commercial real estate from the
protections created in the famed (or some would say infamous) 1978 Proposition
13 — sharply limiting property tax increases so long as a single owner (or
family) held a given parcel — is expected to be on the ballot. Without
question, state government will need the additional revenue. But corporate and
real-estate lobbies will argue it’s time to starve, not feed, state government.
Despite the distractions of disease, recession, and a presidential contest, the
so-called “split-roll” initiative could create an epic battle, as I noted last
summer:
While this will mostly be a classic left-right, business–versus–unions
and governments battle, California’s progressive tilt doesn’t guarantee victory
for split-roll. As noted above, corporate types will offer a slippery-slope
claim that once the taxman has feasted on commercial property taxes, homeowners
will inevitably be next. And there are some affordable-housing advocates who fear split-roll
will perversely incentivize commercial real-estate development by making it a
larger revenue generator for local governments.
Preliminary polling shows
split-roll commanding a sparse majority of popular support. But by the time
this expensive slugfest comes to a close, anything could happen.
That’s particularly true now that the state’s
bleak fiscal future has been exposed for all to see.
California Court Green-Lights Newsom’s Illegal Alien Giveaway Program
California Court Green-Lights Newsom’s Illegal Alien Giveaway Program
Executive and judicial abuse on display.
Judicial Watch announced Tuesday that it filed an application for a temporary restraining order (TRO) against California Governor Gavin Newsom and his Director of the California Department of Social Services Kim Johnson. Judicial Watch requested the TRO to prevent the governor’s imminent spending of $79.8 million dollars of California taxpayers’ money for direct cash benefits to illegal aliens present in California. This action followed a lawsuit filed in the Superior Court of California County of Los Angeles by Judicial Watch on behalf of two California taxpayers late last month. “Governor Newsom has no legal authority on his own to spend state taxpayer money for cash payments to illegal aliens,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “The coronavirus challenge doesn’t give politicians a pass to violate the law. If California politicians want to give cash payments to illegal aliens, they must be accountable and transparent, and, as federal law requires, pass a law to do so.”
Judicial Watch said that its TRO application was urgent because the illegal aliens are now able to immediately apply for the cash benefits without a judicial hearing first as to whether Governor Newsom possessed the necessary explicit authority from the California legislature to provide such benefits. “Without a restraining order, those funds will be spent, and there is no way of recovering them after they are distributed,” Judicial Watch’s TRO application said. Not surprisingly, however, the California court sided with Governor Newsom and the illegal aliens, denying Judicial Watch’s request for the TRO.
According to Judicial Watch, “Though the court found that Judicia[l] Watch was likely to succeed on the merits (that Governor Newsom had no authority under law to spend the money), the court found that there was a public interest in sending tax money to the illegal aliens during the coronavirus crisis.” In other words, the California state judge ignored the law and legislated from the bench to help Newsom accomplish a fait accompli.
Newsom was two for two in the California courts on May 5th. A federal judge upheld his ban on church assemblies in the interest of public health during the coronavirus pandemic, throwing aside First Amendment protections of freedom of religious expression and the right to assemble. “Constitutional rights cannot be suspended by a virus,” the church’s attorney, Dean Broyles, said. Evidently, in California they can be suspended along with legal constraints on Newsom’s spending authority.
Governor Newsom rolled out his cash giveaway executive initiative, known as the “Disaster Relief Fund” or the “Disaster Relief Assistance for Immigrants Project" (DRAIP), for illegal aliens on April 15th. His office issued a statement in which it anticipated that approximately “150,000 undocumented adult Californians will receive a one-time cash benefit of $500 per adult with a cap of $1,000 per household to deal with the specific needs arising from the COVID-19 pandemic.” The governor and his social services director also plan to spend an estimated $4.8 million of taxpayer funds overseeing and administering the distribution of those cash benefits.
California became the first state to offer such direct disaster assistance in the wake of the pandemic to illegal aliens. Philanthropic partners, including the Latino Community Foundation, will be distributing the funds through their networks and are raising additional funds on their own for dispersal to illegal aliens. But Judicial Watch is only concerned with the unauthorized giveaway of taxpayers’ money.
As of February 2020, California had $17.5 billion in reserves for economic uncertainties, according to a Legislative Analyst’s Office report issued in April. But the coronavirus pandemic threatens to not only drain this reserve but hurl California into a gaping financial hole amidst a severe recession. Newsom recognized the financial crisis he was facing. “This year I will be doing a May revise looking at tens of billions of dollars in deficit,” Newsom said last Friday during his daily coronavirus response briefing. “We just went tens of billions in surplus in just weeks to deficits.” Newsom wants a federal bailout even though he is squandering the hard-earned money of his state’s taxpayers on a cash giveaway to illegal aliens. The federal individual cash payments program under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, as well as the expanded unemployment provisions that increase benefits by $600, exclude illegal aliens as beneficiaries.
Under federal immigration law, 8 U.S.C. § 1621(a), a state “may provide that an alien who is not lawfully present in the United States is eligible for any State or local public benefit … only through the enactment of a State law … which affirmatively provides for such eligibility. (Emphasis added) Judicial Watch’s complaint alleged that the California state legislature has not enacted any law that affirmatively provides that such unlawfully present aliens are eligible for the millions of dollars of cash public benefits announced by Newsom.
Newsom is likely to argue that he has adequate legislative authority to make direct state payments to illegal aliens under the broad emergency powers that the legislature granted him in March to deal with the coronavirus pandemic crisis. But it makes little sense to assume that such emergency powers were meant to entitle the governor to spend as much money as he wishes on illegal aliens while California’s legal residents are suffering en masse. As state Senator John Moorlach, a Republican from Costa Mesa, said, “I see the state of California and its budget as a house of cards and with this coronavirus-induced recession. I’m just trying to figure out where the money would come from. I would say helping undocumented would be a luxury item.”
The Democrat-dominated California state legislature may well come to Newsom’s rescue upon its return from recess. Democrat leaders in both chambers have already indicated that a relief package for illegal aliens is under active consideration. Their passage of the authorizing legislation necessary to cover his new spending on illegal aliens retroactively is highly likely. California already provides taxpayer-funded health benefits to low-income illegal immigrant adults 25 and younger. California is also a sanctuary sta
Governor Newsom on more than one occasion has referred to California as a “nation state.” At times, particularly with respect to California’s non-compliance with federal immigration laws, California acts as if it were already an independent sovereign nation state. While there are some U.S. citizens who would be more than happy to see the ultraliberal state secede from the union, for now California is still part of the United States of America and does not have the power to nullify federal laws. Governor Newsom should also address the rising resistance to his draconian stay-at-home orders from California citizens rather than go about channeling scarce state funds to illegal aliens.
Kobach:
California Shouldn’t Demand Money from the Rest of Us Only to Give it to
Illegal Aliens
17 Apr 20208,016
3:51
Once again,
California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) has gone to extraordinary lengths to
reward illegal immigration and encourage illegal aliens to stay in the United
States. On Wednesday, he announced that—due to the coronavirus pandemic—California will give
$500 checks to 150,000 low-income illegal aliens. The cost to taxpayers will be
$125 million.
This came a day after Los Angeles
Mayor Eric Garcetti announced that illegal aliens will be eligible to receive $1,500
checks that the city will be handing out to its residents.
What Newsom and Garcetti are doing
is illegal under federal law. In 1996 Congress passed a major welfare reform
act. A crucial section of that law prohibits states and localities from giving
public benefits to illegal aliens. And it remains in federal law today at 8 U.S.C. 1621: an
illegal alien “is not eligible for any State or local public benefit.” Public benefit includes “any … benefit
for which payments or assistance are provided to an individual, household, or
family eligibility unit by an agency of a State or local government….”
We stopped hoping that California
would follow federal law a long time ago; these latest actions continue a
pattern. As I wrote last July, California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) was the
first governor to sign a bill making free health
care available to illegal aliens. The cost of providing those
benefits to illegal aliens was a massive $98 million. That giveaway, too,
violates federal law.
But now Newsom is providing millions
of dollars in checks to illegal aliens while at the same time expecting
the rest of the country to subsidize this spending. California officials
are hoping that the federal
government will reimburse 75% of the state’s coronavirus expenditures.
And Democrats in Congress are
demanding that we federal taxpayers cough up the money. Speaker Nancy Pelosi
(D-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) want the federal government to
provide $150 billion to state and local governments to help absorb their
coronavirus spending.
The audacity of handing unlawful
checks to illegal aliens while demanding that the rest of us pay for it is
breathtaking. Especially when red states have kept their spending under control
and have not been handing checks to illegal aliens.
No state that is handing checks to
illegal aliens, subsidizing free health care for illegal aliens, and offering
sanctuary to illegal aliens – all in violation of federal law – deserves a
penny of assistance from the rest of us taxpayers. Not to mention the fact that
an unprecedented number of low-income Americans are unemployed. Those U.S.
citizens shouldn’t have to compete with illegal aliens for jobs when the
economy reopens. But Newsom and other California Democrats are encouraging the
illegal aliens to remain.
You would think that California
officials would put U.S. citizens first just once, during this time of national
crisis. But you’d be wrong.
Kris W. Kobach is a candidate for
the U.S. Senate in 2020 and is the former secretary of state of Kansas. He is
currently General Counsel for We Build the Wall. An expert in immigration law and policy, he coauthored the
Arizona SB-1070 immigration law and represented in federal court the 10 ICE
agents who sued to stop President Obama’s 2012 DACA amnesty. During 2001-03, he
was Attorney General John Ashcroft’s chief adviser on immigration law at the
Department of Justice. His website is kriskobach.com.
THEY ASSAULT OUR
BORDERS, JOBS, WELFARE LINES AND INSTITUTIONS.
He added, “Illegal
immigration, in particular, drives down wages and inhibits job opportunities
for legal residents, while bringing more low-skilled, low-wage workers to these
states. In turn, this increases costs to state and local governments, and
discourages investment by businesses seeking a skilled labor force and lower
overhead.” PAUL BEDARD
Illegal immigrants cost taxpayers $6.5K a
year each: Report
VIDEO:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/report-illegal-immigrants-cost-taxpayers-6-500-a-year-each?utm_source=Washington%20Secrets_02/06/2020&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WEX_Washington%20Secrets&rid=117930
Illegal immigrants in
growing numbers are flooding into so-called sanctuary cities and states where
they are consuming up to $6,500 in taxpayer-funded services, according to a new
review of costs in 10 small states.
The surge is having an
outsized effect on smaller states and is cutting funds for services to
veterans, children, and disabled Americans, according to the report provided
exclusively to Secrets from the Federation
for American Immigration Reform.
The report said illegal
immigration costs the 10 states $454 million. “To put that figure into context,
that $454 million expenditure is more than 200 times what the state of Montana
budgets for its entire Veterans Affairs program, and it is 2.5 times the total
sum that West Virginia invests in its state university,” said the report.
And, it added, illegal
immigrants cost between $4,000 and $6,500 annually above any tax benefit they
provide.
“In many ways, the
influx of immigrants into less populous areas of the country has an even
greater impact on long-time residents than it does in larger and more urban
areas,” said Dan Stein, president of FAIR. “These areas have neither the tax
base, nor the economic and social infrastructure to accommodate the needs of
the growing numbers of immigrants taking up residence.”
The 10 states analyzed
in the study, Small
Migrant Populations, Huge Impacts, were New Hampshire,
Mississippi, Alaska, Maine, North Dakota, West Virginia, South Dakota, Vermont,
Montana, and Wyoming.
“Many local officials
tout immigration, including illegal immigration, as a remedy to economic
stagnation. However, as this report reveals, the reality is precisely the
opposite,” said Stein.
He added, “Illegal
immigration, in particular, drives down wages and inhibits job opportunities
for legal residents, while bringing more low-skilled, low-wage workers to these
states. In turn, this increases costs to state and local governments, and
discourages investment by businesses seeking a skilled labor force and lower
overhead.”
The report comes on the
heels of a key U.S. Supreme Court decision to let the Trump administration
block entry to immigrants who are likely to burden taxpayers.
FAIR’s report also
showed that sanctuary cities are a growing attraction for illegal immigrants,
especially in smaller states where the costs of living can be lower.
The key findings from
the report to Secrets:
- In each
of these states, each illegal immigrant resident carried a net tax deficit
of between $4,000 and $6,500 annually.
- Some
415,000 foreign-born reside in these 10 states, of whom about 88,000 (or
21%) are illegal immigrants. Additionally, there are about 35,000 U.S.-born
children of illegal immigrants in these states.
- Collectively,
these illegal immigrants and their U.S.-born children cost taxpayers in
the 10 states about $454 million each year for the provision of essential
services such as education and healthcare.
- Local
schools struggle to provide educators and cover the costs of instruction
for 50,000 K-12 students classified as Limited English Proficient.
- A
growing number of sanctuary jurisdictions (29 and counting, including the
entire state of Vermont), and lower living costs are a magnet for illegal
immigrants.
- The
growing immigrant population competes with legal residents for jobs in
economically depressed areas.
“This report highlights
the fact that the adverse effects of unchecked mass immigration, combined with
an immigration selection process that does not choose people based on
individual merit, job skills and education, are now being felt in all parts of
the country. Americans, in every part of the nation, are being affected by
antiquated and unenforced immigration policies, which is why it is at the top
of the list of voter concerns heading into the 2020 elections,” said Stein.
Report: Taxpayers
Forking Over Up to $6,500 per Illegal Alien
By Rob
Shimshock | February 6, 2020 | 12:24pm EST
(CNSNews.com) -- Much of the
media attention garnered by the border crisis typically revolves around states
that border Mexico like Arizona and Texas. Yet a February report reveals the
devastating economic consequences of illegal aliens on taxpayers as far north
as Montana.
Illegal aliens cost taxpayers in the ten states with the fewest
immigrants around $454 million per year, which works out to a net tax deficit
of $4,000 to $6,500 per illegal, according to a report by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).
“In many ways, the influx of immigrants into less populous areas
of the country has an even greater impact on long-time residents than it does
in larger and more urban areas,” FAIR President Dan Stein said in the report's
news release. “These areas have neither the tax base, nor the economic and
social infrastructure to accommodate the needs of the growing numbers of
immigrants taking up residence.”
FAIR examined migration to Alaska, Maine, Mississippi, Montana,
New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming
in its study and found that 88,000 out of the 415,000 foreign-born residents in
these states are illegal aliens, or 21 percent. Around 35,000 others are
citizen children of illegal aliens.
“Many local officials tout immigration, including illegal
immigration, as a remedy to economic stagnation. However, as this report
reveals, the reality is precisely the opposite,” Stein continued. “Illegal
immigration, in particular, drives down wages and inhibits job opportunities
for legal residents, while bringing more low-skilled, low-wage workers to these
states. In turn, this increases costs to state and local governments, and
discourages investment by businesses seeking a skilled labor force and lower
overhead.”
FAIR notes that 29 sanctuary jurisdictions exist in these 10
states, including the whole state of Vermont.
The report also examined the financial implications of
immigrants more generally, noting that more than 50,000 K-12 students in the
ten states examined are categorized as having limited English proficiency
(LEP). FAIR estimated that taxpayers spend $96 million on the education of
these students.
Nationwide, the immigration nonprofit calculated that taxpayers
spent $59.8 billion educating LEP students in 2016, up from $51.2 billion in
2010.
Matt O’Brien, director of research at FAIR, expanded on the
impact of immigration on Lewiston, Maine, a city the nonprofit honed in on in
its analysis, while speaking with CNSNews.com.
Lewiston, which has a population under 40,000, has taken in more
than 7,500 migrants during the past decade-and-a-half. Between 2004 and 2017,
the percentage of LEP students in the town went from five to 30 percent.
“You’re putting all of the kids that have to go through that
school system at a deficit that they have to recover from after they get out of
the public school system," O’Brien told CNSNews.com. “Now they have to
compete with the massive amount of immigrants...as they’re trying to get entry-level
jobs.”
The FAIR report highlighted employers’ preference for hiring
foreign-born workers, who demand lower wages, over American citizens.
“This report highlights the fact that the adverse effects of
unchecked mass immigration, combined with an immigration selection process that
does not choose people based on individual merit, job skills and education, are
now being felt in all parts of the country. Americans, in every part of the
nation, are being affected by antiquated and unenforced immigration policies,
which is why it is at the top of the list of voter concerns heading into the
2020 elections,” Stein concluded in the release.
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