Meg is 100% Right
On Thursday, columnist George Skelton of the Los Angeles Times wrote a piece analyzing Meg Whitman’s new radio ad. Skelton’s analysis gets the facts wrong. What’s even more puzzling is that the conclusions he draws are directly opposite the facts reported by his own Times colleagues.
Meg Whitman states in her new radio ad that government spending has increased 80 percent in the last ten years. The Department of Finance numbers are clear: General fund spending grew from $57.8 billion in 1998-1999 to $102.9 billion in 2007-2008. Meg used that ten-year period, from fiscal years 1998-1999 to 2007-2008, because they are real numbers. The state’s fiscal books have been closed for that period. The numbers can’t be recalculated or changed.
Logic and government accounting schedules tell us that there will be no reliable numbers for the 2008-2009 fiscal year that ended June 2009 for at least another few months, and likely much longer. Since the start of the 2008-09 budget through today, there have been three separate budgets passed, and there could be a fourth one before June 30, 2010. The books are far from closed on the current fiscal year.