

Brown Says California Budget He Proposes Next Week Will Be `Painful' - chailatte
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-03/brown-says-calif-budget-he-proposes-next-week-will-be-painful-.html

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anamax
Here's an idea (1) Look at past spending plans.

(2) Throw out all plans that would result in more spending than 95% of the
current revenue.

(3) Pick the best of the remainder.

(4) If you want to spend money on something that wasn't in the "best" plan,
you have to pay for it by throwing out things that were in said plan.

(5) Monitor short-term. If spending exceeds revenue, eliminate spending in
newest-started first order until it doesn't. If you want to keep a new
spending item, keep going down the list and eliminating items until revenue
exceeds spending.

(6) Monitor long term. If at the end of the year you don't have 5% more
revenue than spending, start over with 94% as the goal and so on. If, on the
other hand, you have more than the goal, congrats, you get to narrow the
margin by 0.5%.

Note that the above is not "painful" unless you think that CA was painful
several years ago.

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dantheman
It's going to be painful because money was promised in the past.

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anamax
You get to take that up with the folks who made the promise.

Note that many such promises aren't what most of us would consider promises.

For example, I promised myself a nicer car last year. Am I in pain because I
didn't get it?

I regard a govt department's plan for increased spending in much the same
light.

