The California tax election

As a result of California’s election, the state now faces a $21.3 billion gap between revenues and spending, reports The Economist. Life, which has been no picnic for many in this state since the recession began, is about to get a lot worse. There have already been two rounds of budget cuts since last autumn. A third, savage, round must now follow.

Mr Schwarzenegger has already hinted at the cuts he will propose to the legislature. The easy part is to release prisoners. California’s 33 prisons, with about 168,000 inmates, many of them locked up because of inflexible sentencing laws passed by voters, are scandalously overcrowded. Mr Schwarzenegger is thinking about freeing 38,000 people. Half of them are undocumented immigrants whom he would transfer to federal custody.

But “the real money is where the pain is”, says Jean Ross of the California Budget Project, a research firm in Sacramento. In health care, for instance. Just as Mr Obama is trying to give more people access to medical care, California will be taking it away: by cutting funding for Medi-Cal, the state’s programme for the poor, and changing eligibility rules for another programme so that 225,000 children are likely to lose coverage. And this at a time when many of their parents are losing their jobs and their employer-sponsored insurance.

Other programmes, from help with birth-control and HIV-prevention to counselling against drug abuse and domestic violence, will be made smaller or eliminated altogether. Child-welfare programmes will be cut by 10%. This means fewer investigations into allegations of child abuse and less supervision of foster care, even as more children are likely to be abused in difficult economic times, says Linda Canan at the Napa County Health and Human Services Agency.

Cuts in the education budget will probably shorten the school year by a week, require teachers to be laid off and cause classes to get bigger. The University of California, a network of ten campuses, will face cuts equivalent to 50,000 fewer students and perhaps 5,000 fewer staff.