California on the brink

last updated 8 January 2015

Los Angeles

Gov. Gray Davis warned last week that California would have to slash health and education spending, and lay off thousands of workers to close a budget gap that could reach $25 billion over the next 18 months. States across the U.S. are suffering their worst fiscal crisis since World War II. California lost a fortune in taxes on stock gains when the dot-com bubble burst, making its deficit the biggest of all. Assembly Speaker Herb Wesson Jr., a Democrat, said it was “mathematically impossible” to balance the books without raising taxes. “If we fired every single person on the state payroll—every park ranger, every college professor, and every Highway Patrol officer—we would still be more than $6 billion short.”