For as long as many Californians can remember, it seems, the state government has been struggling with budget deficits. Year after year, lawmakers and governors adopt a budget that is supposedly balanced, only to discover – shocking – that the assumptions behind the spending plan were fanciful, or conditions changed, and the red ink overflowed.

Amazingly, this sad history might be coming to an end. Don't bet your house on it (if you have any equity left with which to bet). But it really does look like change is afoot.

An improving economy, voter-approved tax increases and, yes, spending restraint in Sacramento are combining to give revenues a chance to catch up to spending in the years ahead. Soon the debate in the Capitol might not be about what to cut, but about how to spend a surplus.

The decade-long string of deficits began with the burst of the dot-com bubble in 2001. All through the late 1990s, the technology boom fueled a red-hot California economy. Soaring incomes, investment returns and corporate profits produced more tax revenue than legislators knew what to do with.

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