By: Chriss W. Street
The State of California was already facing a $19 billion budget deficit, had shorted K-12 public schools $8 billion and are releasing imprisoned rapists into “community probation” when the California Legislature’s Democratic majority voted last week to approve selling $4.6 billion in new state bonds to build 130 miles of railroad track through some of the most uninhabited farm country in Central California.
The arrogance of leveraging the already insolvent state caused a volcanic public outrage, but the Legislature and Governor Jerry Brown were desperate to get their paws on $3.3 billion in federal grants from the Obama Administration. But in a shocking development, Moody’s Investor Services, who was expected to provide the credit rating to justify selling the debt, may have just torpedoed the state’s credit rating by tripling their estimate of California’s unfunded public pension liability from $38.5 billion to $109.1 billion liability and raising the annual cost of state pension funding by $7.3 billion. Continue reading