California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed new budget would cut funding for police as the state struggles with a massive deficit of at least $45 billion.
Last month, the Democrat unveiled his budget for the next fiscal year, admitting that “difficult decisions” are needed to address the state’s deficit, including a 1.6 percent reduction in overall funding for the Justice Department. state.
The proposed budget includes a cut of $97 million to trial court operations, $10 million to the Justice Department’s Law Enforcement Division and more than $80 million to the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, it was reported. FoxNews.
Newsom’s plan comes as major national stores and local businesses in California say they continue to face rampant theft. Videos of large-scale robberies, in which groups of people brazenly enter stores and steal products in plain sight, have often gone viral.
Crime data shows that the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles saw a steady increase in shoplifting between 2021 and 2022. Statewide, shoplifting rates increased during the same period, but still were lower than pre-pandemic levels in 2019, while commercial burglaries and robberies have become more frequent in urban counties.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed new budget would cut funding for police as the state struggles with a massive deficit of at least $45 billion.
Meanwhile, the number of homeless people rose 6 percent to more than 180,000 people in California last year, federal data show. And since 2013, the numbers have skyrocketed by 53 percent, with the state accounting for one-third of the entire homeless population in the United States.
The state’s criminal justice record, in which the number of violent crimes increased 27 percent between 2013 and 2022, and pickpockets doubled.
This is the second year in a row that the country’s most populous state faces a multimillion-dollar deficit. State revenues have continued to fall amid rising inflation and a slowdown in the state’s generally strong technology industry.
Officially, Newsom said the state’s deficit is $27.6 billion. But in reality, it’s closer to $45 billion if you include previous spending reductions that Newsom and the state Legislature agreed to in March.
Including reductions in public education spending, which Newsom has not included, the deficit would be even billions of dollars more, according to a recent analysis by the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office.
Newsom’s plan comes as major national stores and local businesses in California say they continue to face rampant theft and crime.
A spokesperson for Newsom told Fox News in a statement: ‘The budget proposes numerous ways to make government more efficient and reduce costs for taxpayers, including cuts to inmate spending.
“Since Governor Newsom took office in 2019, the state has made record investments in law enforcement, including $1.1 billion to fight crime, support police, and hold criminals accountable.”
So far, Newsom has not gutted some of his most striking policy gains, including free kindergarten for all 4-year-olds and free health insurance for all low-income adults, regardless of immigration status.
But as Friday’s proposal showed, Newsom is willing to undermine some of those promises to balance the budget.
While Newsom has not taken away anyone’s health insurance, he proposed that the state stop paying health care workers to care for about 14,000 disabled immigrants in their homes. That would save the state $94.7 million. While he has not withdrawn the state’s commitment to expanding kindergarten, he proposed eliminating $550 million that would have helped school districts build the facilities they need to teach all those additional students.
After promising to pay for child care for another 146,000 children from low-income families, Newsom on Friday proposed stopping that expansion at 119,000. And after promising to increase the amount of money doctors receive to treat Medicaid patients, Newsom on Friday proposed canceling $6.7 billion that had been set aside for it.
Crime and high rates of homelessness persist in San Francisco, especially in the surrounding downtown area and the nearby Mission District. This year a man is seen sleeping outside the shopping center
In total, Newsom proposes $32.8 billion in cuts over two years, including eliminating 10,000 unfilled state jobs and an 8 percent cut in state operations, including things like eliminating landlines. He promised there would be no layoffs, furloughs or pay cuts for the state’s more than 221,000 state workers.
The size of the deficit matters as it will shape the national prospects for Newsom, who is a top surrogate in President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign and who is widely believed to harbor presidential aspirations of his own.
Newsom has spent much of his time in office basking in the glow of historic budget surpluses that allowed him to vastly expand state spending. But back-to-back budget shortfalls (and more are on the horizon) are testing California’s commitment to those increases.
Newsom had enjoyed record surplus budgets of more than $100 billion during the COVID-19 pandemic. But the past two years have saddled him with a pair of multimillion-dollar deficits, a less welcome position for a governor seen as a potential future Democratic presidential candidate.