| Sacramento, California - California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and leading lawmakers agreed on measures to plug the state′s 26.3-billion-dollar budget deficit, narrowly avoiding a financial collapse. They settled late Monday on substantial cuts in education, welfare and health services but avoided an increase in taxes after months of acrimonious wrangling that left the largest US state without enough cash to pay its bills ′We accomplished a lot in this budget agreement,′ Schwarzenegger said, adding that the negotiations over the deal often resembled a ′suspense movie.′ ′In this budget, we are making government more efficient, and also we are cutting the waste, fraud and abuse in some of the programmes,′ the governor said. The agreement envisages a broad range of cuts to services to the elderly and poor and includes drastic restrictions on health care and education funding. More than 14 billion dollars in such cuts are envisaged with the rest of the deficit covered by accounting manoeuvres and wage cuts for state workers. The compromise still needs to be approved by the legislature Thursday. If the deal passes, California could stop issuing the borrower′s notes it has been giving to vendors for several weeks as the state coffers dried up. ′I am glad that we will close the deficit, and I am glad that IOUs will no longer be needed,′ said Karen Bass, the speaker of California′s State Assembly, its Legislature′s lower house. ′But make no mistake, this is a budget of shared sacrifice and shared pain. But we did not eliminate or completely shred the safety net in the state.′ | 
