A state that once seemed limitless is now suffering.

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER


LOS ANGELES - California has historically been a pretty good bargain, with an enviable higher education system, subsidized energy and an abundance of services for those in need.

But three decades of staggering population growth combined with three high-impact recessions, budgeting by ballot box, federal mandates, an unusual tax structure and the rising cost of social services have finally produced disastrous results, and the ramifications are reaching across every aspect of life in this state.

The California dream is, for now, delayed, as demonstrated by the budget state lawmakers and the governor agreed upon late Monday. The state dealt with its fiscal issues by retreating deeply in its services, beginning this spring with a round of multibillion-dollar budget cuts and continuing with, in total, some $30 billion in cuts over two fiscal years to schools, colleges, health care, welfare, corrections, recreation and more.

“We are now the state that can’t,” said Stephen Levy, the director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy, a private research organization in Palo Alto. “It can’t agree on its water problem. It can’t balance its budget, it can’t decide what to do with prisoners, and it’s still fussing about its immigrants. And this is not the end of our economic problems. This is the beginning.”

The protracted national recession has delivered a big hit on the state’s greatest source of revenue, income taxes on rich people. Further, the state’s structural deficit has become exceedingly pronounced after years of accounting tricks and borrowing.

The result is that Californians will find state offices closed three days a month. The poor will go without health care in a state that practically invented the American health care safety net.

Classroom sizes are about to explode, and state universities are furloughing professors, cutting class offerings and reassessing whether the system can remain one of excellence.

The state’s population - over 38 million today from 23.6 million in 1980 - has also meant a growing need for costly services for the poor, especially when revenues are declining. While the state’s property taxes are below average, its personal income tax rate and levies on capital gains are among the highest; so unlike states that pass the tax burden around, California can become disastrously imbalanced.

“Volatility is a challenge for budgeting,” said Jed Kolko, the associate director of the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan research organization in San Francisco.

Now state agencies find themselves unable to provide the services residents have been used to receiving.

“Compared to the post-World War II era, an in-migrant to California now faces higher cost housing, lower quality K-12 schools, and more expensive higher education,” said Daniel J. B. Mitchell, a professor of public affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The fallout is already evident. Summer school was canceled in many districts. In Eureka, near the Oregon border, the Old Town Dental Center is about to close. Its patient base is mostly lower income, and the state’s program will no longer pay for anything beyond tooth extractions.

Nicole Eleck, the receptionist there, said, “Half our patients are saying, ‘If something bothers me, I will wait until it needs to get pulled.’”

What comes next is anybody’s guess, but it may be that California’s standing as paradise is meeting an organic end.

“In the end, we do not know for sure whether the California public really wants the California dream anymore,” said Bruce E. Cain, a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. “The population is too diverse to have a common vision of what it wants to provide to everyone. Some people want the old dream, some want the gated privatized version, and some would like to secede and get away from it all.”