It might be noted, by the way, that the state's Dept. of Finance has not produced official figures for either the past fiscal year or the current one. Surprisingly, that lack of information is due to the fact that the budget for the current year which began July 1 still isn't quite cooked.
Those who can remember back to the Schwarzenegger era and before will know that when budgets weren't finished on time, an unfolding crisis began to occur. Suppliers to the state weren't paid. Courts got involved. But then the voters approved Prop 25 which required the legislature to approve a budget on time or lose a day's pay for each overdue day. More importantly at the time when Republicans still controlled at least a third of the seats in one or both houses, Prop 25 changed the required vote for a budget from two thirds to a simple majority, allowing the Democrats to approve budgets without dealing with the Republican minority. On-time budgets resulted.
But - after some litigation - courts ruled that it was up to the legislature to determine what a "budget" was. So the majority could pass something called a budget and meet the standard. What has emerged was a practice of passing something by the mid-June deadline and then continuing to negotiate with the governor. This time it seems, the negotiations have continued but enough of a budget was passed to keep the state in business, paying its suppliers, etc. For more on this process, see:
https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article252689888.html
Now, let's look at the controller's data.
How much cash did the state have on hand in case of emergencies? Note that cash on hand includes not just official reserves connected to the general fund but also monies sitting in myriad earmarked funds outside the general fund that the state can borrow from if needed, so-called "unused borrowable resources" shown on the chart below:
What the chart shows is that we closed fiscal year 2020-21 with substantially more cash in hand than we had a year before or that we were forecast to have, either in June 2020 or January 2021. Some of this extra cash is a reflection of the above-mentioned limited ability of the state to dump cash out the door quickly. State government is better at creating policy ideas than at actually implementing them.Monthly data from the controller are available at https://sco.ca.gov/ard_state_cash_fy2021.html.
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