The Conservative Cave
Current Events => General Discussion => Topic started by: HAPPY2BME on January 19, 2017, 10:54:04 PM
-
Budget staffers said there were, in fact, two mistakes:
- A double counting of state savings from a program that coordinates health, behavioral and long-term care services with local government. That error understated expenses by $913 million.
- A forgotten state government cost from two counties — San Mateo and Orange — enrolling in the coordinated program, which meant missed expenses of $573 million.
Meanwhile, adding insult to injury, Brown's administration allegedly discovered their "accounting errors" several months ago but didn't disclose them to State Senators until last week.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-19/california-governor-jerry-brown-admits-15-billion-math-error-state-budget
-
The AP version of this story (http://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/6563825-181/19-billion-error-adds-to?ref=TSM&artslide=0) pegs the "errors" at $1.9B. I won't quote from the AP-credited articles due to CC concerns with AP snarkiness about quoting their articles, even for "fair use". The article claims the "errors" were discovered and revealed to legislators, so they could make "adjustments" to the current budget (CA's fiscal year begins July 1), but the "discovery" is only being made public some 4 months later, when Brown gave his draft budget for next year to the legislature.
The "errors" all have to do with Medi-Cal: $478M of pharmaceutical company rebates the state had to pay to the Feds the budgeteers "forgot" to include in the budget; $913M due to double-counting of estimated "savings" in Medi-Cal; $573M of costs "under-count" in San Mateo and Orange Counties (one AP-based article said that those two counties had not participated in some part of Medi-Cal, and the budgeteers "forgot" to include the additional cost of their participation to the budget).
[Snark] This is what CA gets for hiring accounting types who learned adding and subtracting by New New Math techniques. [/Snark]
I smell three rats in this.
The first is obvious. I do not trust CA's budgeteers. They've been papering over CA's budget problems for at least 2 or 3 decades using accounting gimmicks, shifting $$ from long-term funds into general fund current use, and under-contributing to pension funds. The $913M over-estimate of "savings" in Medi-Cal especially reeks of budgeteers' fudgery.
Second, huge increases in states' programs like Medi-Cal were built into OhBummerCare. This also reeks of an effort to make OhBummerCare look less awful than it is.
Third, this was revealed to the legislature ~4 months ago, but kept secret till now, after the election. CA's legislature has 120 members, 38 of them Rs (the Ds have super-majorities in both houses), and each member has several staff. None of those hundreds of legislators and staff people said a peep about this, even accidentally, in the past 4 months? That isn't credible. Given that most "reporters" and MSM outlets are basically unpaid D operatives with press credentials (prostitutes are paid!), this reeks of collusion between the local MSM and legislators (possibly including Rs!) to keep a blockbuster budgetary @#$%-up out of public knowledge until after the election.
-
Just add that to the loss of federal funds for all of their Sanctuary Cities, and it looks like they might have a financial crises.
So go ahead snowflakes seperate from the rest of the country. Maybe all those left wing actors will contribute most of their wealth to keep you afloat.
-
I smell three rats in this.
The first is obvious. I do not trust CA's budgeteers. They've been papering over CA's budget problems for at least 2 or 3 decades using accounting gimmicks, shifting $$ from long-term funds into general fund current use, and under-contributing to pension funds. The $913M over-estimate of "savings" in Medi-Cal especially reeks of budgeteers' fudgery.
Second, huge increases in states' programs like Medi-Cal were built into OhBummerCare. This also reeks of an effort to make OhBummerCare look less awful than it is.
Third, this was revealed to the legislature ~4 months ago, but kept secret till now, after the election. CA's legislature has 120 members, 38 of them Rs (the Ds have super-majorities in both houses), and each member has several staff. None of those hundreds of legislators and staff people said a peep about this, even accidentally, in the past 4 months? That isn't credible. Given that most "reporters" and MSM outlets are basically unpaid D operatives with press credentials (prostitutes are paid!), this reeks of collusion between the local MSM and legislators (possibly including Rs!) to keep a blockbuster budgetary @#$%-up out of public knowledge until after the election.
Yeah, there's some magic number-creation in this to do damage control, IMHO.
ESPECIALLY on Number One. The numbers they are quoting are still just ESTIMATES from people with an interest in minimizing them for public consumption, if I lived in Kalifornistan I would have zero confidence that the problem wasn't even larger than advertised.
On Number Three, I'm not so clear that it precisely says 'Revealed to legislators BACK THEN to make adjustments,' as opposed to 'Revealed to legislators NOW so they can make adjustments to the budget they passed awhile ago.'
-
Never send an democrat to do an adult's job.
-
The United States rank fourteenth out of forty countries...............Public education. :stoner: