I saw an interesting article about New York City’s new communist mayor complaining about a $5 billion deficit. He wants a budget for his city of $127 billion for the population of 8 million people. This equates to $16,000 per person! A staggering sum of money.
Conversely, Gov. Ron Desantis from the state of Florida has a $117 billion budget for his state of 23 million people. Or, about $5,000 per person. Since I don’t live in Florida I can’t comment on whether this amount is too much or too little. Anecdotally speaking, though, his state is growing while ours is shrinking, which says something.
In our state, last year’s budget was $321 billion for a population of 39 million. Or, $8,200 per person, which is 61% more than Florida’s budget. One would think for that amount of money our services would be superior, especially given the myriad of other taxes we pay. But that is not the case, as demonstrated by the ongoing exodus.
Recently even Gary Horton was writing in The Signal complaining about another proposed half-cent bump in the sales tax for L.A. County. But as even Gary pointed out, that extra money does not necessarily translate into results. In fact, many times the problems get worse. I’ve written extensively about the state of our state so I won’t rehash it. Instead I’ll just remind Gary and others who have voted for one party rule for decades that this is the bed you’ve made. Instead of voting for the same hyper-woke leftists that you always do, how about voting for a pragmatist? How about voting for someone who proposes, gasp, certain cuts in certain areas of funding? Or how about voting for someone who demands accountability and success for the money we give them?
Nothing is going to get better unless we start voting for different leaders. Not necessarily even Republicans, but that too would be a good start as well.
And finally, Gary could you cite the source of your claim that the federal government is cutting funding to L.A. County? I’ve looked but I can’t seem to find anything to support your assertion. I did find this from the L.A. Times though: “Last month, the Trump administration announced it was slashing the amount that program would distribute for permanent housing and shift dollars to temporary housing options that mandate people enroll in services such as job training and mental health treatment.”
Maybe I’m not understanding this right, but it seems to me that if the government is cutting here but giving it back there, then that’s not a real cut. I could be wrong though.
Brian Richards
Stevenson Ranch
