California has a balanced budget. Governor Jerry Brown win or lose? -Christian Science Monitor

Los Angeles

Long journey to California for a balanced State budget is completed.

Skip to the next paragraph

And Governor Jerry Brown (D), which won top honors for his plain talk about the painful measures in store for Californians that they started that way and has spent a lot of his political capital on the road, sign, say analysts.

Ultimately, he has what he wanted?

The rosiest of assessments is that he was as much as he could, but it does not appear to be many. The budget that Parliament approved Tuesday does not include one of the extensions of tax that he wanted to help California meet its shortfall, relying instead on reductions in expenditure and the assumption that economic growth will lead to $ 4 billion in new revenues.

And, in a scenario disaster, if the economic recovery is insufficient, the budget provides for a mechanism of major service cuts offset non-existent revenues. This could indeed be expensive.

"He could not see if good... If the revenues are very optimistic assumptions, [and] cuts as a result be unpopular," said Jack Pitney, Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College. "It's like treating chronic with candy bars fatigue and caffeine."

Republicans immediately focused on this manna of estimated revenue, with the Senate, Vice President of the Budget Committee Bob Huff as a "wand that Harry Potter would be proud to handle," according to the Los Angeles Times.

Governor Brown has been at the Centre of the budgetary debate since the entry into service in January, after winning an election based largely on its promise to turn the State around to economically.

Last week, he made national headlines after veto first budget periods of California in a quarter century. State controller John Chiang then made the first use of proposal 25, a citizen initiative November mandating statutory remuneration for a deadline missed budget.

But estimates of the final budget deal with the appeal in question if it was all applies to Brown.

"Brown out as a winner and a loser," said Robert Stern, President of the Center for governmental studies. Brown is a biggest loser because he and the Democratic majority legislature are "using gadgets to call the budget balanced, and it's a budget of all cuts with no tax extensions", he said.

However, "in view of the requirement to vote of two-thirds [for an increase in the tax] and the intransigence of the Republicans on tax extensions, it is perhaps the best, he could have understood," adds Mr. Stern.

It all depends on what happens to the economy in the coming months. After much speculation that the US economy would certainly improve in the second half of the year, the Federal Reserve last week removed on this assessment.