Posted on 05/23/2011 6:19:15 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
In 1967, five years after California became the most populous state, novelist Wallace Stegner said that California - energetic, innovative, hedonistic - was America, "only more so." Today, this state's budget crisis is like the nation's, only more so. Bob Dutton is an island of calm in the eye of the storm - which should agitate Gov. Jerry Brown.
Dutton came to California from Nebraska at age 19 in 1969 and now is the leader of Republicans in the state Senate. He contentedly says that his caucus is "almost like a Chamber of Commerce board of directors." Its members are mostly from small businesses, as he is. Because they are term-limited, they cannot make a career here, so they might as well follow their small - well, smaller - government inclinations.
They have it in their power to compel the governor to confront the public employees unions that have gained so much power over the state's budget. All they need to do, Dutton notes, "is just say no to more taxes." This is so because Brown needs two Republicans in each house of the Legislature to raise taxes (actually, to reinstate for five years some taxes and fees that will have lapsed by July 1), or to authorize a November referendum that could reinstate them.
Brown's plan for balancing the budget is to close about half of the deficit with reductions and fund shifts already approved and the rest by tax increases. Republican resistance to the taxes is explained by facts provided by Troy Senik, writing in the Manhattan Institute's City Journal:
"Californians already labor under sales-tax rates usually reserved for states without income taxes (at 8.25 percent, the nation's highest) and sharply progressive income-tax rates usually reserved for states without sales taxes (the state's top rate is 10.55 percent, and it doesn't allow you to deduct your federal taxes, as some states with income taxes do)."
Those tax levels are surely related to these demographic facts: Between 2000 and 2010, Los Angeles gained fewer people than in any decade since the 1890s, and Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area have the slowest growth rates since the end of Spanish rule. For the first time since 1920, the Census did not award California even one additional congressional seat.
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I was in LA about a year ago, had not been there in years, the place is a waste land, looks more like Mexico than the old LA.
All true, but in the Nov ‘10 mid-terms, the GOP made no gains and some speculate that it may be possible for the dems to gain a super majority in ‘12, which would allow them the ability to raise taxes at will.
That is probably inevitable - California is being overrun by the freeloaders.
Was there last week. (actually from the airport north to Ventura) It's truly an ugly hellhole. Every building looks like it came from a mexican slum. The streets were dirty and in need of repair, and the general feel of the place was run down and dirty. I saw nothing of beauty whatsoever
I was so glad to get out of there and get back to the real world.
While "conservatives" (many of whom voted for the GOP moderates that made this mess) turn tail and run.
RE: I was in LA about a year ago, had not been there in years, the place is a waste land, looks more like Mexico than the old LA.
Where in LA? There are great and bad places just like most cities. Los Angeles is a HUGE metropolis.
Gimmegimmegimmegimmegimmemaketheotherstatesbailusoutgimmegimmegimmegimmegimme.
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