The City Council approved by a 6 to 2 a measure to place a sales tax increase on the November ballot. Between this, the Tea Party and immigration this off year election is shaping up as high entertainment. Did I forget Sarah Palin? Oops.
Of course the Brown-Whitman race for governor will make the most headlines and that race of opposites will be high politics. In the end, the winner will be just as hamstrung as the current boss. California politics is mired in a structural coffin and without a Constitutional Convention the future smells like a perpetual stalemate.
Stay tuned after Labor Day.
It is hard for me to escape this issue of California state workers having to take pay cuts. My wife is a State worker bee and we have seen much in the way of deteriorating pay and forced furloughs. I recognize that these government workers are but pawns in the large budgetary chess battle now going on in Sacramento. As I mentioned yesterday, someone has to pay the bill for public services;there is little hope for additonal revenues give the sorry state of the job market.
Still, the furloughs are not a bad idea on certain levels. First, taxpayers have less access to public services and there is an implied you-get-what-you-pay-for message for tax cheapskates. Second, workers have extra time for that part-time job at Target!
San Diego voters are going to possibly be looking at two ballot measures coming this fall that will actually raise taxes. The proposed half-cent sales tax increase and the $98 per house(and $60 per apartment unit) is quite a shift of direction from the spirit of Proposition 13, enacted in 1978. We decided then not to pay for government services. Instead we rolled the dice and hoped that economic expansions would provide enough tax revenue to keep the municipal ship afloat.
This variant on the trickle-down theory worked well enough for several years, at least it appeared so. But the real truth was we just engaged in a giantic shell game. Governments just deferred maintaining the services and the infrastructure that had made California an economic gorilla in the post-war period.
Now the bill is coming due. The over-generous public pension system does not help matters. Like the Greeks, public servants are going to have to learn to work past the age of 55.
Either that or raise taxes. This should be a very interesting election.
I was watching the Sunday morning show on CBS and was taken aback by the network’s scanty coverage of the death of Daniel Schorr. Like his rough take-no-prisoners style or not, this guy was a giant in electronic journalism. Their brief three minute bio-pic was an insult in my view.
I remember him most vividly during the Watergate affair but listened to him on NPR very recently. I hope when I am 93 I can sound as lucid and convincing as he did when I last heard that unmistakable voice. You know that voice, always with tinged with incredulity; somehow he communicated to us with his prose and timbre this point, “can you believe what they are trying to sell us?”
