California is a less prosperous place than it was a year ago. People are making less money. Our homes are worth less. And we’re all spending less shopping.

That means Californians are paying less in income taxes, less in property taxes and less in sales taxes. Naturally, state and local governments have less money.

In February, we voted to do what no Legislature has ever done. We cut $15 billion in spending.

I hated voting for the largest cut in California history. But we’re going to break that record with the cuts we’ll make in the next few weeks.

It’s easy to talk about “cutting,” but it’s hard to live with what you are really doing — taking jobs away from a lot of people. But we can no longer afford all the things we want government to do.

What I learned before

government

As a young woman, I worked to rehabilitate seriously injured and burned people in the hospital.

Many of them would cry when they saw me coming into their hospital room. It hurt my feelings, but I smiled. I told them I understood.

But they knew I had to get them out of bed and on their feet. It hurt them. Real and unbearable pain. Grown men cried.

The only way I could get through my day was to keep a simple thought in mind — I was making them stronger. I was helping them leave that hospital without crutches. On their own two feet.

What I am going to do

Let’s not beat around the bush. I am going to be voting for layoffs for thousands of people. Good people. People with families, mortgages and car payments. That job is ugly. But it’s no different than what every business has had to do now that its customers don’t have money to spend. Neither do the taxpayers.

Voters are telling us the same thing that I told my physical therapy patients. We have to go through the pain.

No more crutches of bookkeeping and borrowing. No wheelchairs of higher taxes. We have to get stronger. And that’s going to hurt.

Getting stronger means making decisions to return California to prosperity.

I am working full time to speed up the construction of high-speed rail. You’ve voted for the ballot proposition I wrote to build it. We have to get it moving, because it puts people to work right now, and we have the money to do it.

I am working to slow the rate of home foreclosures, to get rid of the go-slow government regulation that has become economic strangulation.

I don’t have all the answers. But I do have all the confidence that if we do the hard work and endure the pain, we’ll walk and then run to a brighter day.

• Cathleen Galgiani was elected to the state Assembly in 2006 and represents the 17th District, which reaches from Stockton to Los Banos and Tracy to Merced.