California Gov. Jerry Brown Predicts ‘Inevitable Recession’ — Again

California Governor Jerry Brown warned on Monday — again — about the “inevitable recession” he has predicted for years.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Gov. Jerry Brown took time out from blaming big wildfires on climate change at the state emergency center to warn that California would be lucky if a recession did not happen within the next two years.

Brown took a dig at President Donald Trump’s trade war with China and the European Union when he said, “At some point, the tariffs and the natural cycle will kick in.”

Brown credited San Francisco’s St. Ignatius High School for his acumen at predicting the business cycle: “[T]he good priest Father Clark went to the blackboard and he drew a line up, and he drew a line down — up and down, up and down.”

Brown added although he first he learned that lesson in 1955, “that zigzag up and down is still with us” and “it’s going to happen.”

But the governor has been warning about a big business turndown since he pushed through a ballot initiative in 2013 for the largest tax increases in state history, after the state had fallen to the 9th largest economy in the world, according to the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy.

Brown told the California legislature in April 2014 that it needed to create a rainy day fund to prepare for the “inevitable recession.” Brown warned his Democrat allies: “There’s a tendency to spend on the high and lock in programs that become completely unaffordable,” according to the New York Times.

At a December 2016 speech to 3,000 attendees at the American Geophysical Union conference at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, Brown compared President-elect Donald Trump’s election to the type of wake-up a pack-a-day cigarette smoker experiences when he or she has a heart attack.

Brown warned the a group that that life was at risk from a combined “climate, nuclear or financial” meltdown, according to the Chronicle.

The New York Times reported in January that as Jerry Brown submitted his 16th and final budget with an estimated $6.21 billion surplus, after California’s economy had recovered to become the equivalent of the 5th largest on the planet, Brown warned: “What’s out there is darkness, uncertainty, decline and recession.”

Breitbart News reported that Governor Brown’s May revised 2018-2019 budget projected a record $135 billion in spending, a $13.5 billion rainy day fund, and a continued economic expansion.

But his budget proposal warned that “a moderate recession will drop state revenues by over $20 billion annually for several years.” In that environment, Brown’s $13.5 billion “Rainy Day Fund,” which took six years to build, would be gone in about 8 months.