Brown Calls For $8.3B Cuts To Fill $15.7B Gap

(Bloomberg News) California Governor Jerry Brown proposed $8.3 billion of cuts from welfare and medical care for the poor to help close a $15.7 billion state deficit for the year starting July 1.

The revised deficit is 69 percent more than the governor projected in January after tax revenue fell short, spending exceeded projections and some savings were blocked by the federal government, courts and Democrats in the Legislature.

"You never can quite get it right because in our particular free-enterprise system -- a free flow of capital -- stuff moves and it goes up and down," the 74-year-old Democrat said.

"I said in the beginning when I ran for this job, that it's taken a long time, nearly a decade, to get into this mess," he said at a briefing for reporters in Sacramento. "We're not going to get out of it in a year."