> I find this argument suspicious.
My grandmother always said: don't compare apples and oranges unless you want to prove smoothness or redness. The idea of projecting Illinois' tax increase onto California completely ignores that California's income tax is already fairly regressive: you hit the top rate at $46k/single $93k/married. Increasing the top rate by 2% wouldn't be such a great idea.
> I am not an expert on state finances, but it looks to me that if ...
Well, you can be one!
The LA Times built a little tool to let you try your hand at making cuts and increasing taxes to see what the impact on the deficit would be.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/budget/
One downside is that it only gives you knobs to change the things that are on the table (so you can't make up your own tax rate brackets), but I found it pretty easy to increase taxes and close the gap without making any spending cuts.
/jordan