The Los Angeles Times has a javascript tool that lets you try your hand at balancing the California budget. It’s called: You balance the budget.

You can choose to implement a variety of tax increases and/or a selection of budget cuts. The budget cuts are divided into categories: Education, Human Services, Health, Law Enforcement, One-Time Fixes, State Workers, General Government, and Tax Increases. The tool gives you a general idea of what the impact of each of your choices is likely to be.

It’s an interesting exercise and worth a few minutes of playing around with. My first inclination was to implement all the relatively non-regressive and green tax increases. That got me better than half-way home, but it was pretty rough sledding after that. The trouble is that cuts of significant social consequence tend to garner only relatively meager savings.

Try your hand at it.

Update: Maybe a solution to the California crisis is at hand. I’m now seeing on Craig’s List an offer to buy an California state IOU at up to twice face value.

Update: California Controller John Chiang has said that the state with pay 3.75% interest on its IOUs (actually registered warrants). That’s a pretty decent interest rate these days. Maybe we’ll see a market develop for these things.