If you close every court, every prison and get rid of every state employee and their pension, you won’t balance the budget.
70% of the budget goes to three things, k-12 education, higher education and health and human services (ie. welfare, medical for the poor).
At some point you need to to realize that prisons, cops, fireman, judges and everything else that pisses you off isn’t where the real money goes, it goes to poor people, sorry.
If you really want to solve the budget problem, put birth control chemicals in the water supply and only give the anti-dote to people who can prove they have health insurance and a certain income. Require parents of students in both k-12 (40% of the state budget) and higher education pay the full expense of their offspring’s education, no sliding scales, no freebies, pay to play, if you can’t afford them don’t have them. You may not agree but the poorer someone is, the more kids they have, and many get free money, more than the employees of the state when totaled up.
Take every pension away, fire them all and you still wont solve the problem. Socially it hurts to admit it, spiritually it hurts as well, but at some point you have to admit that you need to come up with a different system. A system that does not spend ten times the total lifetime taxes collected on a person’s education or health care. We are fooling oursleves to say that we are better. We give out too much free money, we refuse to let poor people die even if it costs us more in a week than we will collect from them in a lifetime.
I hate being the downer, but the OP mentioned “non salary cuts” because the state salaries is but a fraction of the expenditures, the state employee is anectdotal, it makes you feel good to attack it, but that is not where the fundamental problem lies.
And no I don’t have the answer, it hurts my heart as much as anyone to tell poor people that they can’t have that lifesaving medicine or surgery or that poor people can’t have a bunch of kids and send them all to college for free, feed them for free or that economic refugees can’t come here and fulfill a dream like my ancestors did, but you need to realize that the real money is going there, thank god I don’t have make these decisions now that there isn’t enough money to go around.
