Really?
Ideas about budget deficit
The state budget is based on assumptions about future revenue: According to California's 2004-2005 state finance director Tom Campbell, the source of the long-term problem is that assumptions of future revenue are unreliable, and when they prove wrong, the spending has already been committed.[36]
Productivity drain: According to Devin Nunes, a congressman from California, one source of the problem is that the "entrepreneurs, investment capital and the hardy workers who made it a global leader in agriculture, technological innovation and scientific research" are fleeing the state because it has an unattractive tax and regulatory burden. California has the sixth-highest tax burden in the country.[17]
Significant increases in compensation of state and local government employees: Michael Haley of the Napa Valley Taxpayers Alliance points out that the funds required for the expanded pension and compensation of government employees that began in 2000 "are more than we can ever hope to collect in taxes, even with large tax increases, and it centers around the state’s main expense, employee compensation". Haley also notes that during the Gray Davis tenure, pension promises were unsustainable: "Safety personnel can now retire with 90 percent or more of their highest salaries at age 50, and other employees can retire with 75 percent or more at age 55."[37] Drop in revenue: The immediate source of the short-term problem is that state revenues declined by more than 8 percent from September 2008-December 2008. State Controller John Chiang said on January 16 that unless additional cash is forthcoming "the State will be $346 million in the red at the end of February, and $5.2 billion in the red in April."[38]
Increase in spending: California's state spending has ballooned in the last decade at a rate much higher than the rate of inflation and rate of population growth in the state. According to Tom Campbell, California's finance director in 2004-2005, if the 1999-2000 budget of former California governor Gray Davis had been increased over the next decade by a factor representing the inflation rate and California's population growth in that time, California would now be experiencing a budget surplus, rather than a deficit even with the recent revenue decline due to the state's economic recession.[36] Instead, California has had a 50% spending increase over the past five years.[39]
http://sunshinereview.org/index.php/California_state_budget
And more
Approximately 85% of the state's 235,000 employees (not including higher education employees) are unionized. As the governor noted during his $83 billion budget roll-out, over the past decade pension costs for public employees increased 2,000%. State revenues increased only 24% over the same period. A Schwarzenegger adviser wrote in the San Jose Mercury News in the past few days that, "This year alone, $3 billion was diverted to pension costs from other programs." There are now more than 15,000 government retirees statewide who receive pensions that exceed $100,000 a year, according to the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility.
Many of these retirees are former police officers, firefighters, and prison guards who can retire at age 50 with a pension that equals 90% of their final year's pay. The pensions for these (and all other retirees) increase each year with inflation and are guaranteed by taxpayers forever—regardless of what happens in the economy or whether the state's pensions funds have been fully funded (which they haven't been).
A 2008 state commission pegged California's unfunded pension liability at $63.5 billion, which will be amortized over several decades. That liability, released before the precipitous drop in stock-market and real-estate values, certainly will soar.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703699204575017182296077118.html
And an interesting video here
http://www.californiapensionreform.com/?p=701
AND MORE
Municipalities around the state are also buckling under massive labor costs. One city, Vallejo, has already filed for bankruptcy to get out from under onerous employee salaries and pension obligations. (To stop other cities from going this route, unions are promoting a new law to make it harder for municipalities to declare bankruptcy.) Other local California governments, big and small, are nearing disaster. The city of Orange, with a budget of just $88 million in 2009, spent $13 million of it on pensions and expects that figure to rise to $23 million in just three years. Contra Costa’s pension costs rose from $70 million in 2000 to $200 million by the end of the decade, producing a budget crisis. Los Angeles, where payroll constitutes nearly half the city’s $7 billion budget, faces budget shortfalls of hundreds of millions of dollars next year, projected to grow to $1 billion annually in several years. In October 2007, even as it was clear that the area’s housing economy was crashing, city officials had handed out 23 percent raises over a five-year period to workers.
http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_2_california-unions.html
The CALPERS pension benefits have increased 2,000% since 1999.
So, you are correct. The comparison to Greece is way off. California is much worse.
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