In a previous post I railed about the California budget, and how we were valuing prison systems over education. In the meantime, the governor has released the May Revise of the 2012-13 Budget. The general fund expenditures are $92.6 billion. Here are how the allocations are broken down into the major components:

This shows that K-12 and higher education takes up more than 50% of the entire budget, versus 9.4% for corrections. This illustrates that the legislature does not have much choice and leverage when it is faced with a projected $16 billion shortfall this year. It can’t raise taxes in the current political environment, so it has to cut something. If it cuts proportionally, every sector in this chart faces deep cuts, and eduction is more than half of it.

This makes one thing clear. We may have a spending problem, but we also have a revenue problem. Collecting more taxes in California seems inevitable if we want to get out of this mess.