I don't follow. California is a industrious state with a diverse portfolio of large industries: from agriculture, resource extraction, entertainment, aerospace,

I don't follow. California is a industrious state with a diverse portfolio of large industries: from agriculture, resource extraction, entertainment, aerospace, defense, tech, real estate speculation, etc. Depending on how the market moves for those industries, the state can easily end up with a big surplus or big deficit in any given year. Surpluses and deficits have almost no inertia and aren't very meaningful on their own. There's naive political pressure to react to them immediately (everybody wants a slice of the surplus; everybody wants to use a deficit to undermine governing party candidate) but it's not responsible governance. If anything, I'd expect politically ambitious governors to take the bait and spend surpluses immediately on programs or tax cuts that win them attention, which sounds like the opposite of what you're saying.