By Dan Walters, Sept. 13, 2014, Sacbee.com

As Jerry Brown seeks his fourth term as governor this year, he’s crowing about balancing the state budget after years of deficits that piled up a “wall of debt.”

Certainly Brown deserves some of the credit.

He moderated the spending ambitions of his fellow Democrats and, more importantly, persuaded voters to enact temporary sales and income tax hikes, the latter only on the highest-income taxpayers.

Those boosts, when coupled with the state’s emergence from the worst recession since the Great Depression, sharply increased the state’s general fund revenue over the last few years, from about $86 billion when Brown was running in 2010 to over $106 billion during the current fiscal year.

But the tax increase accounts for perhaps a third of the revenue gain.

The rest stems from the improving economy and particularly the substantial increases in incomes of the state’s highest-income taxpayers – the chief targets of the 2012 tax increase.

While criticizing the widening gap between “one-percenters” and the rest of us is popular, the fiscal reality is that California’s budget probably would still be drowning in red ink were it not for taxes on income gains by those atop the economic food chain.

State income tax data for 2012, the latest available and the first year of the temporary income tax increase, illustrate that fact.