Three months afterMore....California seemingly averted a state budget meltdown, voters are being asked to ratify billions of dollars in higher taxes that were part of the deal.So far, voters don't seem to be buying it, a mood that portends trouble for other deficit-addled states whose political leaders are proposing tax hikes as a way out.
"The voters who are really tuned in are really turned off," said Mark Baldassare, president of the Public Policy Institute of California, a think tank. "They see the state's budget situation as a big problem, but so far, they don't like the solution."
Among the half-dozen ballot initiatives facing voters in a special election Tuesday are tax hikes and borrowing measures that are the centerpiece of Republican Gov.
Arnold Schwarzenegger 's budget plan.Two polls, one conducted by the Field Poll in late April and another by the Public Policy Institute of California in early May, found Schwarzenegger's proposals trailing badly. Those proposals include a $16 billion extension in sales, auto, income and other tax increases for two additional years while placing a cap on future state spending.
Friday, May 15, 2009
They must be selfish
If one were to use the standards of the liberal who accused people who won't vote for tax increases as being "selfish" then there are apparently one hell of a lot of selfish liberals in the state of California.....
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2 comments:
No government, city, state or federal, should be allowed to go into debt for any longer than one budget cycle. The fact that CA is in this much trouble is a direct result of lazy politicians forcing the private sector to bear the brunt of their power grab.
If a government is over budget, they need to start cutting. End of story. The politicians say, "but the people need our valuable services." Uh huh. How much longer will CA be able to provide their services?
Even those who think a tax increase is the answer, you can only raise them so much before raising taxes reduces total revenues due to snuffing out the private sector. And CA has hit that point. The only way out is budget cuts. CA can either do it in a controlled way via the legislature or they can simply let it be done by the bouncing paychecks they have to start issuing. Looks like the latter will be the direction.
If any business was run fiscally as poorly as CA, they would be out of business in six months. The only difference is that, by virtue of it being a govenrment, CA can borrow and spend with seeming impunity. I stress the term "seeming".
That is because even governments have to obey the lays of mathematics and physics. Those laws dictate that you cannot compound debt to infinity, and you cannot reallocate more resources than what physically exists.
Laws can be passed and courts can enforce laws to tell the people to make electricity without pollution, for 5% of the people to feed the other 95%, and so on. But at the end of the day those laws are a physical impossibility and will be broken as simply as 2+2=5 can be proven wrong..
This is Kim Jong Il territory. Totally delusional. CA is about 2 steps away from delaring that Gov S. has shot 12 holes-in-one in a round of golf.
Like the tea parties and like the "selfish" comment on Gordons letter to the editor, this has been mislabeled as a tax issue. This is not about taxes.
This is about government trying to take on more than it can handle. This is about politicians being too lazy to prioritize what can and should be paid for inside a balanced budget.
But perhaps more than anything it's about responsible people like us who "care about the children". That's right it's about the children, but not the fake way the the left claims to care about theoretical children. This is about real people who really do care about real children. Notice the first thing that's getting cut if CA doesn't pass a tax increase? Education. Yes, the children. So today's children are bearing the brunt of the last decade of California government overreach. And who is going to pay today's debt tomorrow? Today's children. And who is going to *not* get the so-called "valuable" government services as a result of these cuts? Theoretically it's the people who need them the most--the children. Note that the majority of the CA budget does not go to "the children", but interestingly the majority of cuts that will occur without a tax increase will be cut from the budget of children related programs.
It's not the "selfish taxpayer" who is at fault here. It is politicians who refuse to respect the constraints of sound fiscal policy and prioritize for the long term.
It has taken much longer for CA to run into these constraints than a normal business would have. But a business would have made the adjustments much longer ago. Government has let the bad decisions compound for decades, and when this one falls it's going to fall very hard and hurt many many people. When the dust settles we will see how many people are standing and how many still think it's a good idea to put government in charge of large swaths of their lives.
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