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California Gov. Jerry Brown (photo: Freedom To Marry/flickr)
This November voters in California will likely be deciding whether or not to raise taxes. Yesterday, California Democratic Governor Jerry Brown and fellow supporters turned in what should be more than enough signatures to get their tax measure qualified. From the San Francisco Chronicle:
Gov. Jerry Brown and backers of his tax initiative submitted petitions Thursday to county elections officials they said contain nearly twice the number of signatures needed to qualify for the November ballot, but the governor acknowledged the measure isn’t a cure-all and warned he will unveil “severe” new cuts to state spending next week.
[...]Brown says the money would go to K-12 schools, higher education and courts – but if voters reject the taxes, he and Democrats would make deep midyear cuts to those same programs.
If approved, the measure would increase taxes on the wealthy and slightly raise the state’s sales tax. The measure is expected to bring in several billion a year.
The Democrats were forced to go this route because in 1978 the voters passed Proposition 13 which required the vote of 2/3rd of the legislature to raise taxes. Even though Democrats hold large majorities in the state legislature chambers, their numbers fall just shy of 2/3rds. As a result this gives the tiny minority of Republicans an incredible amount of power over budget issues. The GOP has used this power to stick to pure anti-tax orthodoxy.
This initiative will be an very interesting test case to see if voters are prepared to fund the government services they want and expect. Otherwise the state is going to need to go through another series of big cuts.
12 Comments
Cuts are more likely than revenue increases.
Public Education is in the crosshairs of the locked and loaded R Party and the Main Stream Media it owns.
The right has always hated public education. They simply do not want to pay to educate “other peoples’ kids”.
They hate teachers and especially unions.
Here’s how they sell it to voters: The left wants to raise taxes on working people and job creators. Prayer and God will save you. Book Learnin is stupit.
This is an interesting one because when Brown first started talking about this, they found that without the sales tax increase, it passed easily. With the sales tax increase, however, it barely edged past 50%.
What our state really needs to do is remove commercial property from the Prop 13 umbrella. It’s one of the things that’s killing business from moving to this state.
The money is needed for prisons. They’re overcrowded –
May 23, 2011
(Reuters) – The Supreme Court on Monday ordered California to release tens of thousands of inmates or take other steps to ease overcrowding in its prisons to prevent “needless suffering and death.”
Justice Anthony Kennedy said for the court majority that the medical and mental health care provided by California’s prisons had fallen below the standard of decency required by the Constitution.
Kennedy cited suicidal inmates being held for prolonged periods in telephone booth-sized cages, backlogs of up to 700 prisoners waiting to see a doctor for care and as many as 54 inmates sharing a single toilet.
– and they’re expensive
California Progress report (excerpts)
By Tom Reifer, May 31, 2011 (excerpts)
California is home to the most expensive prison system in the world, costing roughly $50,000 annually per prisoner. California now spends more of the general fund on prisons – almost 11 percent – than on higher education, which only gets 7.5 percent. California’s prison expenditures, which have increased 1,000 percent in the last three decades, are a substantial part of the state’s massive budget deficit.
California’s mass incarceration boom, the nation’s largest, saw prisoners increase from 25,000 in 1980 to some 143,000 today. It was supported by the prison guards union, the most powerful lobby in the state, and set the pace for prison expansion in the nation as a whole.
Black residents of California are now more likely to go to prison than college, a trend expressed in hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur’s lyrics: “You can’t conceal the fact, the penitentiary’s packed and it’s filled with blacks.”
Yes, indeed.
Especially this: the prison guards union, the most powerful lobby in the state. . .
One could almost say that the CA Demo Party is the political wing of the prison guards union.
especially under Joseph Graham “Gray” Davis
2002–On the day it endorsed Gov. Gray Davis, California’s prison guards union donated $302,000 to his reelection campaign, raising its total contributions to Davis to $1,014,000 since he took office, according to a report filed Wednesday with the secretary of state.
The California Correctional Peace Officers Assn. is now the largest single donor to the Democrat’s reelection campaign. Davis signed legislation this year granting the union’s members a pay raise of as much as 37% spread over the next five years.
The union also did the heavy lifting for Three Strikes.
re: “to see if voters are prepared to fund the government services they want and expect”
I would not frame it that way.
California is running a deficit because of the economic depression. Revenues are down, demand for safety net services are up. This is not California’s fault.
Raising taxes will not fix California’s economy, especially a regressive sales tax. No progressive should support regressive taxation.
The solution is increased deficit spending at a Federal level to stimulate the economy, and bringing back Richard Nixon’s Revenue Sharing program to help state and local governments. The Federal government can run deficits indefinitely to fund these things, California cannot.
California is merely a SYMPTOM of failure at the Federal level. Instead of talking about whether we want to pay more regressive taxes to fund the government services we want, we should be talking about why the Federal government is not using its unique powers — powers that the states lack — to fix the economy and to assist state and local governments during the depression.
Gee, it’s such a shame, Prop 13 has done nothing but increase the wealth and prosperity of all Californians along with freeing them from the shackles of a useless state government.
NOT!
California had the best university and state college system in the world which was the foundation of Silicon Valley and California’s high tech industry. At one time the goal of the UC system was to provide a FREE education to those citizens of California that were qualified (similar to in Europe, and much of the rest of the developed world). Then along came a Governor named Reagan, and Prop 13, and now California enjoys the benefits of being a third world country in all but name only.
I love California, but when my wife and I were coming back to the States after spending several years living abroad, we came to two conclusions: It was too expensive to live there anymore and the whole infrastructure was falling apart due to lack of adequate funding. We ended up relocating to New Mexico. If we were to move anywhere else from here, it’d probably be Oregon at this point.
California used to have the country’s best public universities. No more. The best parks. Decaying, under constant threat of being closed. The best public open spaces. Being sold to private developers. Honestly, I’m expecting the high speed rail project to be canceled any day now.
CA has had more than 30 years under Prop 13. It’s been an unmitigated disaster. They need to get a new Prop on the ballot to rescind it and return viable budgetary powers to the CA legislature where they belong.
GlenJo, Becca, and others here are absolutely correct. It was Prop 13 that forced California into giving public employees lavish pensions where many retirees actually make more retired that they did while working. It was definitely Prop 13 that raised prison guard’s pay into the six figure range. No doubt about it.
Calif sounds like a real dystopia now.
I lived there for a couple of years in the early 70s and didn’t care much for any of it then. Seems to have gone down hill ever since. . .
Sour grapes for people that have salaries attached to real inflation?
Or just plain everybody should have shitty jobs because WalMart greeters are now Middle Class?
Or is it only the fabulously wealthy people on Wall St that crashed the world economy that really deserve tens of millions every year?
What’s wrong with hard working people earning good money?
Well, let’s try this on for size:
1. It’s not the rich who primarily benefit from Prop 13, it’s the middle class and retirees (like me) on fixed incomes.
2. Without Prop 13, when the richy-rich lady lawyer buys the house next door for 8 times what I paid for my house in 1978, my taxes go up to the same level as hers. (Too bad I also don’t have a $100K laying around to do a complete revo, as she did.) My prop taxes go from $1,500 a year to $12,000.
3. Without Prop 13, when the banksters run up a huge home mortgage bubble, all the people who don’t participate in the bubble, who continue to hold on to their old houses, still have to pay the elevated prop taxes during the bubble period. Then after the bubble they have to go through a somewhat arduous process of trying to get their value reassessed down, even though it never goes back to what it really was, pre-bubble.
4. As for the middle class public employees earning salaries that are indexed to real inflation: I wish. In the case of the prison guards (CA’s most blatant offenders), Gov. Brown signed a special bill shortly after taking office that exempts the guards — only the guards — from a pension reform provision limiting the number of weeks of accured vacation time or compensatory time off that could be added to a retiree’s final year salary in computing their pension amount. Now factor this in: the averaqe prison guard accrues eight such weeks in their first year alone. Over 30 years that’s 240 weeks, or almost five years of salary that is added to the guard’s base when computing his/her pension.
But let’s say that the number of weeks declines as the guard accrues seniority, and the accrued unused time ends up being just a year’s worth, 52 weeks. That means that a guard who retires with a final year’s salary of $90K will have their pension calculated on $180K. At 3% a year for 30 years, that’s 90%, or a pension of $162,000. At 3% for 20 years, that’s 60% of $180K, or $108,000. (Plus annual COLAs.)
On top of their pension, many CA state employees benefit from a contract provision by which the employer entity (through CalPers) also pays both the employer and the employee contribution to Social Security. Therefore these pensioners get their pension plus SS. They also get to retain their state health care until they reach Medicare age, at which time they don’t have to worry about buying a Medicare Advantage supplemental payment, because their state health care coverage will pick up whatever MM doesn’t.
There are two huge problems here:
Privat sector workers are getting screwed out of defined-benefit pension plans.
Public sector workers in CA are getting lavish pensions completely divorced from fairness and reality.