Free Republic

Prop 30: Your Wallet or Your Kids. NO Either approve $36 billion in higher sales and income taxes or else Gov. Brown threatens to shoot the schools. Don't worry, the income taxes are only on the "very wealthy," but it turns out the "very wealthy" include many small businesses filing under sub-chapter S, meaning lower wages, higher prices and fewer jobs. California already has one of the highest overall tax burdens in the country and yet has just approved a budget to spend $8 billion dollars more than it's taking in. Moral of the story: it's the spending stupid. Prop...

November 2012 Statewide Ballot Measures Proposition 30 Initiative Constitutional Amendment 1578. (12-0009) - Final Random Sample Update - 06/20/12 Temporary Taxes to Fund Education. Guaranteed Local Public Safety Funding. Initiative Constitutional Amendment. Qualified: 06/20/12 Proponent: Thomas A. Willis c/o Karen Getman (510) 346-6200 Increases personal income tax on annual earnings over $250,000 for seven years. Increases sales and use tax by ¼ cent for four years. Allocates temporary tax revenues 89 percent to K-12 schools and 11 percent to community colleges. Bars use of funds for administrative costs, but provides local school governing boards discretion to decide, in open meetings...

California Watch, a new investigative reporting service, told us the other day that California politicians and campaign contributors "have routinely funneled money through county-level political party committees … avoiding strict limits on campaign giving and hiding the source of millions in donations." California Watch didn't tell us, however, that laundering campaign money to disguise its source is exactly what state legislators intended when they wrote Proposition 34 a decade ago. Its "strict limits" were designed to give the appearance of reform while encouraging money-laundering and so-called "independent expenditures" so that candidates wouldn't be accountable to voters for their sources of...

California politicians seeking and occupying seats in the Legislature and statewide office have raised more than $1 billion since 2000, despite a voter-imposed cap on campaign contributions, according to a critical new report by the state's campaign watchdog agency. "The $1,006,638,463 directly raised by officeholders and candidates works out to $344,503 per day or $14,354 per hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year," said Ross Johnson, chairman of the Fair Political Practices Commission, .. The FPPC's new report, entitled "The Billion Dollar Money Train," criticizes the vast sums of special interest money that has...

The three known candidates for governor are all out trolling for millions of dollars in campaign funds, but no big, six-figure checks will be flowing into their accounts. Not unless the checks are written by the candidates themselves. For the first time in a California gubernatorial election, there are limits on how much individual donors can contribute to a campaign. Under Proposition 34, which took effect for statewide offices after the 2002 election, individual contributions to a candidate for governor are capped at $22,300. Garry South, a longtime Democratic campaign strategist now advising state Controller Steve Westly's gubernatorial campaign, said...