By Peter Schrag
Among perennial myths about California is the one about how the politicians’ free-spending habits have run us into our chronic fiscal problems – that we’re already a high tax state whose legislators don’t know how to stop.
The other day, in a piece headed “California Still Doesn’t get It,” a Forbes magazine columnist named Todd Ganos gave us yet another installment. The Ganos column relied principally on an old report from the libertarian Cato Institute contending that since the passage of Proposition 13, “State spending had increased 25 percent more than the State’s economy grew during the same period.”
That “orgy of spending occurred under both Democratic and Republican leadership. Beginning in 2008, the State has experienced significant budget challenges each year.”