Today marks the deadline for California to finalize their budget and some people have started celebrating a little too early. The L.A. Times reports that strip clubs are among the places where welfare recipients can withdraw cash from ATMs using their state-issued debit cards. This comes days after the report that welfare recipients have withdrawn close to $2 million from ATMs on casino floors in the last eight months.
As I stated in What are the odds?, California's economy is dive-bombing. The outlook is so bad that the chairman of JP Morgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, has recently warned that California poses more of a threat to the US economy than Greece. If lawmakers don't know precisely how tax dollars are used, how can they address the problem of overspending? The state needs to buckle down and address this now before it is too late. Improved auditing and accounting measures are desperately needed to identify waste and that waste needs to be cut from the system. Spending cuts, not tax hikes, are what will set California back on the path to economic stability, and when that happens we all can celebrate.