Analysis: How did California get in this budget mess? DAVE DOWNEY Staff Writer As lawmakers continue to squabble over the state budget hours before the new fiscal year arrives, it is hard to comprehend how Sacramento got into this mess in the first place. For many, it is a mystery that California government could go from having a $12 billion surplus a few years back to forecasting a deficit three times that for fiscal year 2003-04, which begins at the stroke of midnight Monday. State officials largely blame the problem on the 2001 recession and the dot-com bust, and certainly the economy has something to do with it. But the root causes of the biggest budget hole in state history go far deeper than that. And, incidentally, the problem has nothing to do with the electricity crisis. While it is true that those blackouts rolled across the Golden State about the same time dot-com stocks were plunging

Analysis: How did California get in this budget mess? 1. Deregulation 2. Enron taking advantage of it, and sucking the state treasury dry Game Over

2. Enron taking advantage of it, and sucking the state treasury dry Game Over The problem really was that no new power plants were constructed in the previous 20 years because of the whining environmentlaists even though CA's economy was growing like a weed. Then comes Enron. The jury is still out on whether Enron's dealinings were unlawful, but even if they weren't, they took advatage of a state that didn't plan it's energy needs and was dependent on other states for it's energy needs. Then comes Davis who takes an aready bad situation and make it 100 times worse by making terribly bad energy committments for future periods at high prices. Now the maket has fallen and CA is still on the hook for the higher prices..... Nice....... The Frog +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The multicultural project will never fully succeed if 'diversity' is defined as one's own preferred ideologies and political groups.