According to a new study by the Russell Sage Foundation, in the last decade median household income crashed by 1/3, from $87,992 in 2003 to $56,335 in 2013. The crash started during the Republican Bush administration, but has not been made better by the Democratic Obama administration.

Control of Congress also was roughly half Republican, half Democratic during this period. But until Janet Yellen took over this year, the Federal Reserve Board was run by Republicans Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke. So the Fed inflationism we have suffered, with prices going up as you see every day, mostly must be blamed on the GOP.

Here’s the chart:

So it’s a bipartisan disaster, with Republicans shouldering perhaps 55 percent of the blame, Democrats 45 percent.

At least we found out again, as if we needed to rerun the 1970s, that Fed inflationism and increased regulations (from President George W. Bush and the GOP congresses, as well as from President Barack Obama and the Democratic congresses), plus tax increases and wild spending increases don’t work. And unlike in the 1970s, when deficits were modest in comparison, deficits and debt don’t help, either.

The numbers also show that the “recovery” is a fraud. We’re just in a slightly less bad period of an ongoing recession caused by massive government confiscation and control of the economy.

And take a look at this chart:

It shows that, beginning with the Reagan tax cuts and recovery, wealth grew for every percentile of income except the poorest one (yellow squares), which at least held steady. The growth continued through the 1990s, when Democratic President Clinton first increased taxes, then cut taxes with the help of Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

It was only under Bush that wealth crashed, with the poor getting hurt the most, their wealth being almost entirely wiped out. Obama the didn’t make things any better, except slightly for the poor.

Median wealth now is lower than before the Reagan reforms, meaning the years of progress under Reagan and Clinton have been completely wiped out — and reversed.

This chart jibes with other analyses I have run here showing that the economy peaked around 2000, and the so-called Bush “recovery” was completely phony. What happened was that Fed Chairman Greenspan, re-appointed by Bush and backed by him, panicked after 9/11/2001 and inflated the dollar to record highs, which caused inflation. That’s why gas today costs four times what it did in 2000.

The inflation also goosed stock prices — but it all was fake. The Great Recession didn’t begin in 2007 or 2008, but in 2001.

President Obama and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke only have continued the Bush-Greenspan inflationary folly. And new Fed Chairperson Janet Yellen so far is giving us even more of the same.

It’s mainly Republicans who are responsible for this. Reagan’s tax cuts of 1981 and 1983 sparked the huge increase in the real value of stocks, as with the rest of the economy, as the chart shows. Then in the late 1990s, the Republican Congress, led by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, worked with Democratic President Bill Clinton for tax cuts and budget restraint.

But Bush, Greenspan and Bernanke all are Republicans. And the Republican congresses of the early half of the 2000s — after Gingrich left — also were in charge and could have changed things, for example by putting us back on the gold standard.

Republicans’ campaign slogan this fall should be, “Give us more seats in the House and control again of the Senate so we can be just as irresponsible as we were 10 years ago.”

But if you held an ounce of gold in Alabama in 1864, or in Germany in 1944 or in Zimbabwe in 2010, you still could have bought a great deal of goods and services. And if your descendants still had that ounce today, it would be worth about $1,200.

Notice some things on the chart:

1. On the far left side, we see the tail end of the Nixon-Ford-Carter malaise economy, which struck after Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard in 1971.

2. The huge rise in the DJIA began in 1981, when two things happened. First, Fed Chairman Paul Volcker increased interest rates to kill off inflation. And he pegged gold — unofficially — at $350 an ounce, a price that held, despite fluctuations, until 2001. Second, President Reagan signed his tax cuts into law in 1981.

3. The DJIA stagnated, although it did not decline, in President Bill Clinton’s first term, 1993-96, when he increased taxes and tried but failed to impose Hillarycare, the precursor to Obamacare.

4. The DJIA went parabolic in 1996, when Clinton was running for re-election and signed into law Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s capital gains tax cut. This turbocharged the already revving dot-com boom. Clinton and Gingrich soon produced the first budget surpluses in 30 years. Partisan “gridlock,” decried by most pundits, actually helps the economy.

5. The DJIA crashed after 9/11, not because of the attack, but because of the panicked responses to the attack by Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, who goosed the currency, leading to the rise in the price of gold eventually to more than $1,000; and by “conservative” President Bush and the “conservative” Republican-run congresses of that era going on a wild spending binges, turning the Clinton-Gingrich surpluses into deficits — since piling up to the massive $17 trillion national debt. Bush also imposed massive new controls on businesses by signing the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, and the currency, banking and other controls in the USA PATRIOT Act.

Bush’s tax cuts, because temporary, didn’t help. And his TARP bailout after the Sept. 2008 panic hurt by grabbing money from Main Street and shifting it to Wall Street.

6. Taking office in 2009, President Obama continued the Bush spending binges, raising the deficits to more than $1 trillion during every year of his first term. He enjoyed a Democratic Congress during his first two years, which doubled down his spending. His spending included his own unstimulating stimulus of more than $700 billion in 2009, then Obamacare. He signed into law the Dodd-Frank hyper-regulation of business.

7. The far right side of the chart shows the DJIA rising against gold, but still way below its peak in the 2000-01 period. The ongoing recovery, such as it is, and the reduction of the deficits, albeit still well above $600 billion, also are occurring under gridlock, as the Republican House has clashed with the Democratic Senate backing the Democratic president.

For years I’ve had a Verizon phone. Now it turns out President Obama’s regime grabbed all my phone data without a warrant, and without notifying me.

Am I one of those conservatives and libertarians the IRS has been hassling? Or because I’m another journalist it wants to hassle, as it has AP? No. Big Brother Barack just took everybody’s data:

“Barack Obama’s administration is collecting the telephone records of tens of millions of American customers of Verizon Communications, under a top secret court order.

“The order — signed by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — compels Verizon to give the National Security Agency details of all telephone calls made by its customers within the US and from foreign locations into the US for three months from January 19 to April 25.”

So they have records of everybody I called in my work as a journalist. I write mostly about California. But I also write about the Obama regime and its attacks on our liberties, like this one.

The Fourth Amendment is clear:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

No warrant was issued by Big Brother Barack. I have committed no crime. I’m not even suspected of committing a crime (unless relentlessly criticizing government now is a crime in Americka). Yet the Obama regime perpetrated an “unreasonable” search and seizure of my “papers and effects,” without any “probable cause” whatsoever, and certainly without a “Warrant” issued by a judge.

To be fair, if that’s possible, this whole illegal regime was set up by Republican President George W. Bush when he panicked after 9/11 and shredded the entire Bill of Rights with the unconstitutional USA PATRIOT Act, better called the USA TRAITORS’ Act because it betrays America’s sacred heritage of liberty; and with the Military Commissions Act.

When it came out, I read Obama’s 2006 book, “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.” A former professor of constitutional law, he wrote about restoring the civil liberties lost in the Bush years.

In office, he has done the opposite, taking the violations of liberty up a notch.

By John Seiler

Last week I noted that Sam Donaldson attacked the Tea Partiers for their slogan, “We ought to take back our country.” Actually, I noted, they just didn’t want to keep paying massive taxes to subsidize people like Sam, who has taken massive taxpayer subsidies for his horse farm.

But I’ve done a little more research.

In his 2003 presidential run for the Democratic nomination to oppose Republican President Bush, former Democratic Vermont Gov. Howard Dean wrote a book, “Winning Back America.”

In 2004, Dean wrote with Judith Warner, “You Have the Power: How to Take Back Our Country and Restore Democracy in America.”

In 2012, Daniel Kreiss, Assistant Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, wrote, “Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama (Oxford Studies in Digital Politics).” As you may recall, in 2004 Dean initiated some digital campaign strategies that later were used by other candidates, and mastered by President Obama in 2012.

In 1998, environmentalist Jane Kay Holtz wrote, “Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back.” (The title was ungrammatical. “It” could have referred to taking back the automobile, when she meant taking back America.)

And way back in 1982, Mark J. Green, an associate of Ralph Nader, wrote, “Winning Back America.”

It’s not only Donaldson’s demonized Tea Partiers who want to “take back our country,” it’s almost any political group. It probably goes back to ancient Greece where those out of power said, “Everything is rotten, we need to take back Athens.”

Donaldson, now 78, has been watching politics 21 years longer than I have, so surely he knows that.

Donaldson long posed as an “objective” journalist who was “without bias.” But all along he really was just a left-wing ideologue gulling his viewers.

What all of us need to do is take back our TVs by flipping the channel away from Donaldson.

By John Seiler

People naturally move from depressed countries to thriving countries. That’s especially true when travel between the two countries is easy, as it is between the United States and Mexico.

Because so many Mexicans have come to the United States, pressures have risen to give even illegal immigrants access to tax-funded student loans. A writer I’ve read a lot over the years, Gustavo Arellano of the OC Weekly, writes the paper’s ¡Ask a Mexican! column. I like how he flavors his articles with a few Spanish words, much as H.L. Mencken did with German words a century ago.

In his current column, Arellano writes about the advance of the California Dream Act scholarships last year, whose actual official title is: the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act. And about the federal Dream Act. He quotes the California law’s author, Assemblyman Gil Cedillo, D-Los Angeles, who “ceaselessly supports DREAMers.”

Cedillo explained: “[S]tudents will have the opportunity to receive Cal Grants, Board of Governors Fee Waivers (for community-college students) and other state-funded scholarships.”

But the legislation comes too late. The California and American dreams have turned into economic nightmares, even as Mexico’s economy has turned into the real dream, leading immigrants to return home.

The Pew Hispanic Center’s recent report found:

“After four decades that brought 12 million current immigrants—most of whom came illegally—the net migration flow from Mexico to the United States has stopped and may have reversed, according to a new analysis of government data from both countries….”

Here’s Pew’s graph:

You’ll notice the previous time the numbers dropped: the 1930s. That was during the Great Depression, when many immigrants returned home because U.S. unemployment soared above 25 percent. It was a global depression, so people might not have gotten jobs back in Italy, France, Sweden or Mexico. More people were farmers back then, and a family farm could make us of extra hands.

Curiously, that’s a reason mentioned in this short RT video about current immigrants returning home:

This shows that what America is going through now may not really be the time after the Great Recession, but the middle part of the Greater Depression. Although the official California unemployment rate is 10.9 percent, the real level — including those working part time who want to work more and those who have given up looking for work — is 25 percent, just as during the 1930s, as I have reported.

A difference this time from the 1930s is that Mexico’s economy is not also in a slump, but is a hot tamale:

“First-quarter growth was 4.6 per cent compared with a year earlier, the fastest pace since the third quarter of 2010, prompting several analysts to upgrade 2012 growth forecasts.”

U.S. decline

The Pew study noted,

“It is possible that the Mexican immigration wave will resume as the U.S. economy recovers.”

However, this seems unlikely because U.S. economic growth will remain sluggish for many more years. In particular, residential and business construction, which employed hundreds of thousands of immigrants until the real-estate bust of 2006-07, remains overbuilt. Compared to a year before, home prices in April 2012 declined 3.1 percent in Los Angeles County and 2.3 percent in Orange County; although prices did rise 2.4 percent in San Diego county, and rose in the long-depressed counties of Riverside, 5.3 percent, and San Bernardino, 5.9 percent.

The reason the United States is so underperforming compared to Mexico is because of the nations’ debt loads. Everybody is seeing how high government debt is imploding the economies of Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain (the PIIGS). But consider these numbers of public indebtedness by country. This is a U.S.-Mexico comparision I don’t think anyone else has made.

Debt by percent of GDP (CIA and Eurostat data), least to most:

8.7 Russia
10.1 Hong Kong
30.3 Australia
37.5 Mexico
38.7 Switzerland
54.4 Brazil
43.5 China
69.3 Spain
82.0 Germany
83.5 Canada
86.5 France
103 United States
108.4 Ireland
108.5 Portugal
120.9 Italy
165.3 Greece
208.2 Japan
230.8 Zimbabwe.

Mexican and U.S. debt

Some comments: Japan is an anomaly because it has borrowed heavily to rebuild after the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake and Tsunami. Although its high debt before that had helped retard economic growth during the past two “lost decades” there.

Zimbabwe, of course, is an economic basket case from dictator Mugabe’s socialist confiscation policies. Spain’s relatively low debt, 69.3 percent, means it might fare rather well in the ongoing European crisis.

The big thing to notice is that Mexico’s debt is just 37.5 percent of GDP, a bit lower than Switzerland’s 38.7 percent. ¡Excelente!

By contrast, the U.S. debt is 103 percent. Terrible. That’s more than two-and-a-half times as large as Mexico’s ratio.

A big reason for the U.S. debt is the huge military commitment overseas. By contrast, Mexico has no imperial ambitions. Its war on drug dealers — foisted on it by by Tio Samuel — at least wastes the money at home.

Mexico also has a young population, whereas America’s is shifting into its Baby Boomer retirement phase, in which well-educated Boomers drop out of the work force — and, as they head for the links, start soaking up Social Security and Medicare, not to mention Metamucil.

Government debt is like family credit cards. Suppose your family income is $60,000, which it is for many Californians. A 38.7 percent debt means you own $23,220 on the plastic. Not great, but manageable if you’re frugal.

But a 103 percent debt is $61,800, which is difficult even to sustain, let alone pay off.

It’s true that the U.S. government currently pays really low interest rates. That’s because the Federal Reserve Board is keeping rates low. As my colleague Wayne Lusvardi has shown, artificially low interest rates are devastating the private economy because families, in their private savings, actually are losing money from inflation. So the low interest rates that help the government debt are undermining the private economy that is the foundation of the whole government structure. That’s why I expect the Fed, after the election, will jack up interest rates, just as Fed Chairman Paul Volcker did in the late 1970s to kill the 1970s inflation.

But that will meain higher interest paid on the federal government’s current national debt of $15.7 trillion — and rising.

It’s a Catch 22 that cannot have a good ending.

Recent economic history

Mexico also has had more pro-market presidents in recent decades. President Reagan obviously was pro-market. But his successor, President George H.W. Bush, increased taxes in 1991, crashing the economy. In 1993-94, President Bill Clinton raised taxes and tried to push Hillarycare into law.

But after his actions led to the Republicans taking over Congress in 1995, Clinton switched. He dropped Hillarycare; cut taxes — twice; and enacted welfare reform. The dot-com boom ensued. A mild recession began in 2000. But Clinton left office enjoying the first budget surpluses in 30 years.

In 2001, President George W. Bush panicked after 9/11, and went on a wild spending spree, turning the Clinton surpluses into record deficits. At the same time Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, also panicked over unbased economic worries after 9/11 and debased the dollar, causing the inflation we’ve suffered since then; and kept interest rates artificially low, sparking the boom-bust in housing. (There were other reasons for the housing boom-bust, including shady bank loans and government easy loans to homeowners.)

Bush’s tax cuts would have helped — but they expired in 2010. Since about 2008, this has caused great uncertainty, because no one knows if the extensions since then will continue, so no one can plan for future tax policy.

After the September 2008 financial crisis, Bush also panicked and signed the infamous TARP bailout of Wall Street, paid for by Main Street. He also imposed the Sarbanes-Oxley absurd regulations on business.

President Obama has continued the Bush policies of wild spending, record deficits and hyper-regulation, especially Obamacare and the absurd Dodd-Frank financial reform disaster. Current Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has continued the Greenspan policies of easy money and too-low interest rates.

Although America needs financial and business reform, Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank were bureaucratic monstronsities that have destroyed businesses and jobs.

Republicans are saying that Mitt Romney, if he becomes president, will improve things. That’s unlikely. His Romneycare in Massachusetts when he was governor there was the model for Obamacare. Romney only would tinker with Obamacare, not get rid of it entirely. And he’s not serious about spending cuts. Any reduction in the trillion-dollar deficits must include major cuts to defense spending. But Romney, on his Web site, even attacks Obama’s proposed “cuts,” which really are just a slowing of massive increases that Obama would continue. Romney admits, “This will not be a cost-free process.”

There is little indication that America will veer away from barreling toward a Greek-style crisis.

Mexican history

Now consider Mexico’s recent presidents. The 1994 devaulation crisis crashed the Mexican economy. But the New York Times later reported of new Presidente Ernesto Zedillo, elected that year, “[T]he tight-money policies and fiscal discipline that he imposed after [the crisis] brought the broad economic indicators back to healthy growth in two years.”

Further free-market reforms have been enacted by Presidente Vicente Fox, elected in 2000, and current Presidente Felipe Calderon, elected in 2006.

Let’s compare them: Since 1994, Mexico has had 17 years of economic policies, 1995-2012, promoting free markets. The United States has had only six years promoting markets, 1995-2000, all under Clinton. The Bush-Obama years, 2001-2012, have been 11 years of assaults on the private economy.

Of course, Mexico has its own problems, especially the horrible drug-gang violence. But that was caused because the drug “war” was pushed on Calderon by Bush. In 2007, Bush gave Calderon $500 million in U.S. taxpayers’ money to heighten the war. Calderon should have told the Yanqui caudillo to keep his money. But it’s hard to say no to a bully with 10,000 nuclear weapons. The Bush-Calderon “war” on drugs meant drug-gang retaliation across Mexico. Of course, almost all the dope ends up in the United States. And the drug “war” is pointless, because the dope still is readily available at low prices. Mexico pays the price in blood for Yanquis getting high.

Perhaps Mexico’s next presidente, elected this year, will reverse this process, and even legalize drugs, as has been urged by ex-Presidente Fox.

After Portugal legalized drugs a decade ago, drug use actually declined. Drug addiction has been treated as a medical, not a criminal, problem. With no profit motive, the pushers don’t push drugs on kids, or fight turf wars.

A combination of continued economic growth and ending the drug violence through legalization would turbocharge the attractiveness of Mexico’s economy. Likely millions more immigrants to the United States would return home.

Goin’ South

Not only that. Millions of gringos would head South, seeking jobs and freedom. Among the many ways Mexico is freer than El Norte, South of the border you can smoke and drink most anywhere. And you can buy Cuban cigars legally.

The United States government still imposes an embargo on most Cuban goods, especially cigars, because of fears that the Soviet Union will use Cuba as a base for a Red Army invasion, as in the 1984 movie “Red Dawn.” Except that the Soviet Union dissolved 21 years ago. Now we know who’s been using all the drugs the U.S. government confiscated from Mexican drug gangs.

As millions of gringos move South to pursue the bright Mexican Dream, we’ll soon hear complaints about the Yanquis “taking Mexican jobs.” Yanqui defenders will say they’re only “doing jobs Mexicans won’t do.”

And for their children attending university, gringo parents will insist on the Mexican government passing a “Mexican Dream Act.”

There’s a lot wrong in Mexico. The recent murder spree is one, although that’s largely because the Mexican government is following U.S. government orders to intensify the “war” on drugs. The Mexicans should tell the Yanqui to get lost.

Another part of the murder problem is that honest Mexicans can’t defend themselves against the narcotraficantes because the country has draconian gun control. There’s no Second Amendment right “to keep and bear arms.” Criminals get guns easily — some allowed in by the U.S. government in the scandalous “Fast and Furious” gun export program. But common people are left disarmed.

On the other hand, Mexico’s economy is booming. The latest numbers show Mexico’s unemployment rate at 4.9 percent. By contrast, for June the U.S. unemployment rate was 9.2 percent and California’s was 11.7 percent.

So California’s jobless rate is 2.6 times that of Mexico.

The reason is simple: Despite its problems, for two decades Mexico has been moving away from a socialist economy toward a more capitalist one.

By contrast, the U.S. economy has lurched toward socialism for 10 years, beginning under President Bush and continuing under President Obama. I showed a couple of days ago how the U.S. economy actually went into recession, not in 2007 as commonly reported, but in 2001. This has been a “Lost Decade” for America’s economy, and we’re entering another one.

California also has suffered under socialist governors Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown. Arnold took his campaign vows to advance free markets as seriously as he did his wedding vows. As I have pointed out before, despite his capitalist rhetoric and his praise of America over Austria, his main goal in office was to recreate here the socialist Austria of his youth.

And Jerry Brown, as my colleague Steven Greenhut just reported, remains a hard-core Leftist ideologue committed to destroying “late industrial capitalism.” Brown actually said in 1995: “James Hillman talked about how the root of injustice is taking more out of an exchange than you put into it. If you take enough out of it, you really create evil. Well, isn’t that the system? Isn’t that late industrial capitalism? You want to take out more than you put in.”

That is, Brown believes profit is evil.

Certainly, Mexico’s oil and agricultural sectors have been helped by rising oil and other commodity prices. But oil and agriculture also are large parts of California’s economy. And California has two highly profitable industries unique to the world: Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

Yet almost every other industry groans under the heavy weight of the state’s high tax and regulatory climate.

Up until now, the immigration problem has been poor Mexicans hiking North for jobs. Soon, the problem will be perpetually unemployed Gringos heading the other way.

Maybe it’s time to dust off the Español tapes and head South to open a CalWatchDog.com bureau in the other California — Baja.

August 1, 2011

At this weekend’s convention in Sacramento of the California Democratic Party, Sen. Dianne Feinstein attacked Republicans and Tea Partiers for wrecking the country.

True enough, Republicans bear much of the blame. They held the presidency from 2001 to 2008. And they ran the full Congress from 2003 to 2006, four years of which they also controlled the White House — the whole shebang. They started the wars that have never ended and have bankrupted the country. And they started the wild spending that has brought us $14 trillion of federal debt.

But Democrats also are to blame. They controlled the full Congress from 2007 to 2010. And for two of those years, 2009-10, they also controlled the presidency — the whole shebang. They still control the presidency and the Senate — most of the government. There’s nothing Republicans can do without Democratic approval.

The past two years, while wielding total power, the Democrats didn’t follow through on their campaign promise to get out of Iraq. And they accelerated the Republicans’ spending-and-debt binge.

The Bee reported:

“In the five months since Republicans have taken control of the House they have tried to systematically disassemble the American dream,” she said.

Feinstein praised fellow Democrats and President Barack Obama for standing up to GOP demands to cut funding for Planned Parenthood, but called the budget proposal for next year introduced by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., the “next act in the assault on women, seniors and working people”

She cast the fundamental challenge of the country the conservative Tea Party movement’s “singular mission to cut government so it cannot serve our people.”

“In reality, the Tea Party has no plans for job creation and economic recovery. What they have is a radical, ideological agenda to dismantle the social and economic safety net of our country,” she said….

In reality, the Tea Party is confused on what it wants. It doesn’t want higher taxes and favors cutting welfare. But polls show it also Tea Partiers don’t want cuts in Social Security and Medicare. And there’s no way the debt-and-deficit chasms will be filled without cutting those two immense programs.

Doesn’t DiFi read anything?

Even Rep. Paul Ryan’s proposed budget cuts fall far short of what’s needed to restore fiscal solvency. And neither Ryan nor DiFi wants to cut defense spending much, something also needed.

DiFi herself is extremely rich and has no idea how the common folks — the middle-class that pays for everything, fights the wars and stands in the unemployment lines — have suffered in this long Great Recession thanks to her spend-and-borrow-and-tax-and-war policies, which are virtually indistinguishable from similar Republican policies.

And where in the U.S. Constitution does it say that taxpayers have to fund Planned Parenthood, which provides abortions, something many Americans find abhorrent? Supposedly, the money doesn’t go to abortions. But anyone who has taken an accounting course knows that money is fungible.

In her 20 years in the Senate, DiFi has done nothing to prevent, and much to cause, America’s rapid descent through the sewer pipes of history.

April 30, 2011

The wrangling over the $12 billion in taxes in Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposed 2011-12 budget of $86 billion usually ignores something: All the federal tax money California gets. The Bee reports:

The federal government gave California’s state government $120.7 billion in the 2009-10 fiscal year to underwrite education, health services, welfare grants and dozens of other programs, a very detailed new report from the state auditor’s office reveals.

More than a sixth of the money – $23 billion – may have been a one-time injection of funds, however, because it came from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, otherwise known as “stimulus.” Those funds eased the state’s budget crisis, especially in education finance, and their disappearance has exacerbated the current budget deficit.…

Overall, the federal payments to California involve more than 350 specific programs or “program clusters.”

There area 350 specific programs? That alone explains much of the state’s fiscal problems. The federal government first taxes us, filters our tax money through the vast Washington bureaucracy, then dribbles a fraction of the money back to us in 350 micro-managed “program clusters.”

And it’s just going to get worse as the Obamacare Sovietized medicine scheme is imposed.

Because Republicans took over the U.S. House of Representatives in January, they’re going to cut most of the Obama and Bush (lest’s not forget that Republican president) “stimulus” money of recent years. That money helped California avoid stiffer budget cuts in recent years — cuts that, if made then, would not need to be made now.

But in our calculations on the state budget, we never should forget all that largess coming from the federal treasury after the IRS grabbed it from taxpayers across the land.

March 31, 2011