1. If you make it nearly impossible to raise taxes without asking people to vote on the individual tax increases you're going to have revenue problems. That's just stupid.
2. This: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/11/states-federal-taxes-spending-charts-maps
Specific to California, for every dollar in federal tax revenue California contributes it only receives 87 cents in federal spending in return (as of 2010). Where does the rest go? Well, Mississippi for example gets almost $2.50 in federal spending for every dollar it contributes.
So basically, the pathetic gasping economies of a bunch of mostly red states are propped up by siphoning off revenue from the massive economy of California. What does this translate to in total dollars?
California contributed $314 Billion in tax revenue in 2007... (last numbers I could find on short notice, can hunt up more recent ones if necessary)
About $40 billion of that was siphoned off to prop up other states economies.
Give that money back to California and it erases the state budget deficit and puts California in surplus if that cash wasn't being siphoned off every year. Of course it also does little things like bankrupting Mississippi, and Alabama, and Alaska, and New Mexico, and West Virginia...
So the next time some right wing moron cracks some smartass comment about those liberal Californians not knowing how to run an economy, verbally smack them upside the head with this and ask if the red states would care to give California all it's damn money back and watch them shut up fast.