Free Republic

What to expect in 2012? Jon Coupal is preparing for "nuclear war." As the president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, Coupal will play a critical role in the effort to defeat any tax increases up for a vote next year.He'll also be on the offensive. His group has proposed a spending limit and is backing another measure to curb unions' political influence by banning paycheck deductions to build campaign war chests. Fighting revenue measures at the ballot box is not new turf for the 56-year-old leader of the group founded by Howard Jarvis, the driving force behind Proposition 13....

Even in the best of times, the three major bond proposals on the November ballot would merit a thumbs down. Propositions 1A, 3, and 10 would put taxpayers another $16 billion in debt to fund some dubious projects. Proposition 1A spends $10 billion as a down payment on a massive bullet train project. Promoters, which includes the company responsible for Boston's infamous "Big Dig" disaster, claim the project can be completed for about $50 billion. However, a just released study by transportations experts, which includes a former president of the High Speed Rail Association and a former member of the...

Voter rejection of special election Propositions 75, 76 and 77 is especially bad news for taxpayers. The big winners were government employee union bosses who will continue to exercise unbridled power over their members as well as the state budget process. The second biggest winner is the tax-and-spend majority in the Legislature whose reelection is now assured. Union leaders spent over $100 million to defeat measures that would have required them to get permission before taking union members' money for political purposes, that would have put mild limits on increases in state spending, and that would have created more competitive...

...Mr. Schwarzenegger's goals as governor include shaking up Sacramento, where an intransigent legislature beholden to special interests had turned the state into an economic basket case. Arnold does have something to show for his efforts to date, insofar as the fiscal bleeding seems to have stopped. California's credit rating is out of the gutter, and the economy has created a quarter-million new jobs in the past year. Still, important reforms remain unaddressed, and the passage of Proposition 75, also known as "paycheck protection," would go a long way toward ending California politics-as-usual. By forcing public-sector unions to get written permission...

The tax revenue windfall. For local government officials, it is the major topic of conversation. They are delighted that the hot real-estate market is providing billions of additional dollars to county coffers around the state. For Los Angeles, it represents a cool $1 billion in new revenue, a nearly 10 percent increase over last year. San Bernardino County anticipates its tax receipts to double to about $320 million. However, you'll have to pardon us if we don't join the celebration just yet. The last time we saw government officials so excited was in the late 1990s after Gray Davis took...