The LA Times came up with a great interactive chart where you can balance the California budget by cutting state programs and raising taxes.  I assume they developed this to show the average Californian how hard it is to balance the budget.  If this assumption is correct, then their plan has backfired.  This was way easy.  I pretty much wiped out medi-Cal, sorry poor people who can’t afford insurance.  Looks like you are going to have to go back to healing your sicknesses the old-fashioned way: prayer or your immune system.

I also let most of the convicts in the prison system go and pretty much wiped out rehab programs and substance abuse problems.  It is now up to the surrounding states to make sure all of these drug-addicts and criminals stay in California.  I hear there are a lot of vacant homes, so I am sure they will find somewhere to squat.  The one exception, however, is the illegal immigrants in the prisons.  They will have to be deported.  I am a little disappointed that cutting prison programs was the only option to solve this problem.  Outsourcing criminal detention and drug rehab to countries like China, Cuba, Russia, or Mexico would be a cost effective way of dealing with criminals.  It would also be a pretty good deterrent to prevent crime.  

I also cut all the excess education programs.  Sorry, community colleges.  You were a nice idea, but this state has bigger problems.  I have good news for kids.  They get an extra week of summer.  I also cut Calgrants.  Sorry students, you will just have to go get some more student loans.  I am sure there are plenty of those to go around.

I wiped out most of the welfare programs.  The good news here is that by giving up these programs, California gives up over $3 billion in federal funds.  This will be a nice windfall for Obama, whose economic team is working relentlessly to try and cut $100 million from his $1.75 trillion budget – keep up the good work gentleman.  

I did a few one-time fixes.  Mostly the ones where the state government takes money from local governments.  I think California needs a little infighting.  

With the state workers, I didn’t do anything that was possibly illegal.

I got rid of all the general government expenses that I could.

I enabled tax witholding for independent contractors and raised taxes on alcohol, and …drumroll please…California now has a $289 million surplus.

This activity is a little flawed.  California recently passed extensive tax increases to cover the budget shortfall.  Not surprisingly, increasing taxes actually reduced tax revenues coming into the state, thus widening the shortfall.  I was a little disappointed that this interactive game didn’t have an option for tax cuts.  There are far more historical examples where tax cuts increase tax revenues than there are examples where tax increases increase revenues.

You can play the balance the budget game yourself here.