California’s budget had “math errors” that covered up a $1.5 billion dollar budget deficit. The deficit was discovered by Governor Jerry Brown’s office months ago, but the mistake was only recently shared with the public and California Senate.
They should just print more money to make that debt go away. Oh, wait </sarcasm>
Budgeting can be difficult, particularly for expansive state budgets that require a ton of inputs to support 1,000s of line items each of which can result in massive variances depending on the development of various economic indicators like interest rates, commodity prices, etc. throughout the year.
That said, while forecasting variances are inevitable, we, as taxpayers, generally rely on our expensive budget office employees to at least present annual budgets that reflect sound mathematics and accounting principles. Unfortunately, that seems to be too much to ask of the math-challenged administration of California Governor Jerry Brown which decided to double count certain cost savings and simply “forgot” to incorporate other expenses altogether. Per the LA Times:
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.