Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) is blaming the state’s budget deficit on climate change in an attempt to explain how it went from a $100 billion surplus to a $28 billion deficit in just two years.
Newsom recently announced that California’s budget deficit is $7 billion worse than he initially proposed, totaling nearly $74 billion.
During a press conference, Newsom was asked how the state “moved from a hundred billion dollar surplus to such a significant deficit in just a matter of a few years?”
In response, he blamed thunderstorms and other weather events for the state’s financial crisis.
Let me can explain it $349 billion of unprecedented capital gains — 11.6%, when traditional capital gains are around 5.18%, on average. It’s almost double. So you have massive volatility. You have requirements under Prop 2; the Gann; you have requirements under Prop 98 which require that set-aside we use 93% of our surplus, which is — I want to be careful — either on the higher end or without precedent for one-time purposes. So we anticipated — because we didn’t want that surplus to go to ongoing commitments — we anticipated that shortfall What we didn’t anticipate is these rain bombs in December, January, February, and March, these atmospheric rivers that led to a federal declaration that led to FEMA and the IRS moving in a direction where we couldn’t collect our taxes until, I believe November 16th, as opposed to April 15th. And so therein lied this blackout period that beguiled all of us the LAO, finance, economists, experts — and interestingly, I mean there been at the White House recently, [it] had an impact in terms of the IRS collections as well with their estimates because there were other states that had similar delays in their taxes related to weather events. If there was any indication that climate change has impacts well beyond those that are often promoted, I would consider our financial delays as just another example of why we need to tackle them, another reason I’m looking forward to conversations that we’ll be having next week in this space. Via CBS News Sacramento
In 2022, Newsom signed a $301 billion budget into law, bragging about a $97 billion surplus that earmarked millions of dollars for so-called “climate change” initiatives, homelessness, and education.
Republican vice chair of the state budget committee Roger Niello accused Newsom of helping to create California’s budget deficit by offering no real solutions to the issue.
“He is eliminating positions that don't have people in them, so it's budgeted spending that's not going to be spent," Niello told Fox News Digital. “I would put that under the category of a gimmick. But beyond that, in terms of real budget solutions, we had three or four years prior to the current budget year of tremendous and unsustainable surpluses, even by the governor's own account.”
Next month, Newsom is slated to travel internationally, emitting carbon emissions which Democrats say is a driving force for climate change to give a speech at the Vatican in Rome on global warming.