Community Commentary:

In the current debate over California’s chronic overspending problem, we constantly hear of the urgent need to raise taxes to preserve health, welfare and education spending.

There are two facts lost in this discussion.

First is the fact that California lawmakers enacted the largest tax increase at the state level in U.S. history only last February, making California one of America’s top three-taxed states.

Second is that our entire welfare system is broken and costly.

California has 12% of the American population but 32% of the nation’s welfare cases, according to the federal Department of Health and Human Services. California has the most generous welfare benefits and most lax eligibility criteria of any state. This has resulted in a steadily rising welfare caseload over the past several years while other states successfully moved their welfare recipients to the pride of a paid job.

It may be useful here to illustrate the burden that this places upon the individual California taxpayer. About 15.8 million Californians filed an income-tax statement in 2008 out of a state population of 36.7 million. In the same year about 1.2 million Californians were receiving welfare from the CalWORKs program. Were recipients of other welfare programs, including programs for food and/or health care, added in, the total would rise significantly.

This means each welfare recipient is supported by about a dozen California taxpayers who pay three times more than taxpayers of other states — a remarkably concentrated ratio that doubtless worsens when one considers that of the 15.8 million Californians who filed an income-tax statement in 2008, not all actually paid income taxes.

What we have in California, then, is a narrow base of taxpayers supporting a comparatively broad base of welfare recipients. That the number of those recipients is so high is often blamed on California’s problem with illegal immigration. This is a contributing factor but not the driving cause, as California is not the only border state, nor is it the sole destination of illegal immigrants. For instance, Texas has a welfare rate less than one-seventh that of California’s. The primary cause of California’s high welfare case load, and narrow taxpaying base to support it, is overreaching and over-spending state government.

This “generosity’ with other people’s money impels Sacramento lawmakers to give such large sums of working Californians’ money to non-working Californians that it inevitably results in less of the former and more of the latter.

This is simple economics, and it’s a shame that it escapes the architects of our state’s governance today. The bottom line: When one of the world’s top 10 economies has America’s largest welfare case load, things have gone terribly wrong.

Assemblyman Chuck DeVore represents District 70.