BUDGET DAY PLUS 37 -- How much is state government saving by laying off a few thousand workers? Get out your calculators.

As you'll recall, Governor Schwarzenegger's executive order triggered pink slips for 10,133 part-time and temporary state workers. It also reduced the pay for as many as 185,000 state positions down to the federal minimum wage of $6.55.

But the minimum wage issue is far from resolved, and has led to a battle of wills between Governor Schwarzenegger and Controller John Chiang over whether the reduction was necessary, and even do-able.

On that latter issue, computer whizzes from the Schwarzenegger administration will meet this afternoon with their tech counterparts in the controller's office. The question: can the state's payroll computer system be reprogrammed in a matter of days to issue smaller paychecks to some 185,000 state employees? Chiang says no; the governor's team has essentially said... oh yeah? Prove it.

But the part-timers have already been axed. And late yesterday, Schwarzenegger's finance team reported that the state will save roughly $19.7 million a month from those layoffs.

Now, some perspective... strictly using the numbers.

In June alone, the last month of official data, total state operations cost almost $1.6 billion. That works out to $53.3 million spent every day of June. That's a little more than $2.2 million an hour, or -- if you prefer -- $6.7 million spent for an eight hour workday.

So... if the part-timers and temps had been laid off for the whole month of June, their salaries would have paid for less than three hours of a regular day of state operations.

Or, if you think it's more fair to use the full 24 hours, the layoffs would have paid for almost nine hours of state ops.

Granted, the number is only a mathematical calculation... and supporters of the governor's decision will likely argue it's not the full picture. Even so, it does give some perspective to what it actually costs to run California's basic government services.

And a footnote... just who were all of these laid off workers? They worked at various state agencies and departments. But a surprisingly large number of them really give new meaning to the term part-time.

After a few phone calls, I found that more than one of every five laid off employee worked only one day a month as an exam proctor. These are the kinds of people who give tests for, say, a cosmetologist license.

They were paid less than $94 a day.