Coronavirus outbreak reveals big financial shortcomings

The rapidly expanding COVID-19 pandemic threatens the lives and livelihoods of Californians, but it also lays bare some multi-billion-dollar shortcomings in state government finances that have been ignored for decades, despite many warnings.
The most obvious is the state budget’s unhealthy reliance on taxing the incomes of a relative handful of wealthy Californians. Income taxes generate about 70% of the state’s general fund revenues and about half of those taxes are paid by the 1% o