About that half-billion dollars

CW's John Howard has a great story today about what happened to a half-billion dollars promised in the budget by legislative Dems and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger at the depths of the budget deficits two years ago. When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wrote his first state budget, he floated an unusual idea to collect nearly a half-billion dollars: Let the state take 75 cents of every dollar that juries award in punitive damages. The Legislature eagerly bought into the idea for the cash-strapped state, and the budget was written on the assumption that the money would be there. It wasn't. In fact, it never has been. Two years later, that $450 million still hasn't materialized. Amazingly, not even a penny has flowed into the state Public Benefit Trust Fund, which was expressly set up to handle the punitive-damage money. This gap between the administration's promise and pocketbook reality is remarkable, even in the smoke-and-mirrors world of state budgeting that, in the end, is based on sophisticated expectations of revenue and expenses.