Percentage change since 1980 in California’s spending on public universities : –13 On prisons : +436

All this while California has come to spend more on prisons than on higher education.

Credit Krugman for noting that California’s budget is only a “projected” one, but he then fails to mention how unreliable California’s tax revenue projections have been in the past. A recent California Common Sense study showed that, since the recession began, the governor’s projections have overestimated revenues by an average of 5.5 percent. Apply that average to Brown’s 2013 projections and California’s budget would suddenly go from $1 billion in the black to $3.9 billion in the red.

As state’s unfunded pension liabilities more than doubled since 2007-08, most state services shrank as portion of budget. Long delayed but necessary increase in pension contributions will further crowd out spending on classrooms and services.

The nonpartisan research organization California Common Sense has run the numbers to show just how L.A.'s pension plans are devouring the budget for services. In the current fiscal year, the group estimates that pension will eat up 18% of the budget. That's up from just 3% as recently as 10 years ago. Pension costs have grown at an annual rate of 25% over the past decade and politicians have done almost nothing to control them.

Since then, Los Angeles' political leadership has engineered small changes in its budget, such as less expensive pensions for new workers, but that won't generate substantial savings for years. Now a new report issued last week by a budget watchdog group, California Common Sense, says that Los Angeles' current workforce retirement costs alone are so great that reforming then is essential to ‘avoiding insolvency' in the nation's third largest city. Pension costs have gone in 10 years from 3 percent of the city's budget to 18 percent, and even with the increased contributions by the city, its pension debt is growing larger.

California Common Sense (CACS) released a report analyzing the city of Los Angeles’s pension system – the growth of the city’s pension expenses, the causes of the growth, and the challenges the city faces in handling their pension problems. The report comes as Los Angeles faces year-after-year deficits, including a $222 million budget deficit for the current fiscal year and a forecasted $427 million deficit for fiscal year 2014-15. City leaders have raised concerns about the city’s financial difficulties and observers have warned of potential bankruptcy.