Is Brown Giving Us His Daddy's Government? Or Reagan's?
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Ronald Reagan
Mark Paul, visiting scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley (and full disclosure: my California Crackup co-author), has crunched the numbers on the two options Gov. Jerry Brown is offering voters with his budget plan.
And so here's the choice: if voters back Brown's plan -- including the extension of temporary tax increases -- they will be returning the size of California government -- expressed as the size of the general fund compared to the size of the economy -- to what it was in the 1973-1974 budget year, when Ronald Reagan was governor.
If voters reject the tax extensions, California's government as a share of its economy will be the same size it was in the 1966-67 budget year.
That was the last budget signed by Brown's father, Gov. Pat Brown.
Read the whole thing here, via the California Fix.
