Today?

We’re in a hole. A deep hole. The state recovered much less tax revenue than expected this year. (Remember the tax payment deferrals during the pandemic? Budget planners and legislators had to guess how much they’d eventually collect. They guessed wrong. Good times.) That, plus inflation, a volatile year for Wall Street, and a weakened Silicon Valley left the state an estimated $28 billion in the red – and that’s on the low end of the estimate. That means Gov. Gavin Newsom and state legislators are making unpleasant, unpopular cuts in fiscal year 2024-25, including an across-the-board 7.95% reduction in funding for nearly all state departments. 

If you are in the arts, or have attended arts events, or are vaguely aware of the word “arts,” you know that the cuts will hit that field particularly hard. An across-the-board reduction means exactly that, shared pain with no exceptions, but considering the impact the arts make on the state economy – an estimated 740,000+ jobs and 7.7% of the state GDP – the field routinely subsists on a very tiny slice of a very large pie.