State Senate President Darrell Steinberg has a great idea, if you are into higher taxes. He wants to shift the responsibility for a lot of the state’s social welfare program spending to local government. With that little gem, he also wants to lower the threshold for local tax increases from a two-thirds vote to a majority vote. You can read a lot more about it in this story just filed by Katy Grimes over at the Pacific Research Institute Cal Watchdog site.
In my book, that is a shell game designed to avoid "right sizing" government spending in California to be in line with the current tax system.
While it is not an easy task to dismantle significant component parts of California’s modern welfare state, it’s really the only viable option. Increasing taxes, whether at the state or local level, would be a travesty. There are two reasons why we are where we are… Because liberal politicians have ballooned the size of state government to epic proportions, and because we are in a recession, which means that people make less money, they pay less in taxes.
The only path to long-term fiscal sanity for California calls for shrinking state government spending back to a reasonable level, and reducing the regulatory burdens that are making the recession here in the "Golden" state more challenging than many other places in the country.