EDITORIAL FROM TOMORROW’S PRINT EDITION OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The Decline of California They still think they can tax their way out of this one.

If you thought Washington’s stimulus debate was depressing, take a look at the long-running budget spectacle in California. The Golden State’s deficit has reached $42 billion, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is threatening to furlough 20,000 state workers (go ahead, make our day), and as we went to press yesterday Democrats who control the legislature had blocked lawmakers from leaving until they finally get a deal.

It’s sad to watch. The Golden State — which a decade ago was the booming technology capital of the world — has been done in by two decades of chronic overspending, overregulating and a hyperprogressive tax code that exaggerates the impact on state revenues of economic boom and bust. Total state expenditures have… Read More

The Lincoln Club of Orange County has sent a letter to the State GOP Legislative leaders and Senators Maldonado and Cox urging them to oppose the current budget deal.

See the link to the letter below.… Read More

This morning, around forty Republican legislators have to look back at the bleary mess that was their President’s Day Weekend (and somewhere in there was Valentine’s Day, too), wondering exactly what happened to them. With the seeming speed of the flip of a switch, Republican representatives to the “Big 5” signed off on a Big 5/Big Taxes budget “deal” that would make any professional sausage maker proud.

The problem with the plan is that at its center is a massive increase in taxes (sales tax, car tax, car fee, income tax) that totals over $14,000,000,000.00 (multiply that out a few years to really see that number grow – all of those zeros, by the way, make it BILLIONS). Completely conceded in this Big 5/Big Taxes plan is the notion that Republican lawmakers were elected to office with a pledge to protect Californians from higher taxes (let alone tax hikes of this record-making magnitude). There are two underlying assumptions to this plan that are flawed – the first of which is that there is simply no way to balance the state’s books without a tax increase. The second is that there is no way to get a plan that will resolve the issue that will… Read More

Benjamin Franklin spoke these words 222 years go at the Constitutional Convention, but he may as well have been commenting on the rhetoric coming from those trying to foist a $14 billion tax hike on Californians to pay the the recklessness of our rulers:

Hence, as all history informs us, there has been in every state and kingdom a constant kind of warfare between the governing and the governed; the one striving to obtain more for its support, and the other to pay less. And this has alone occasioned great convulsions, actual civil wars, ending either in dethroning of the princes or enslaving of the people. Generally, indeed, the ruling power carries its point, and we see the revenues of princes constantly increasing, and we see that they are never satisfied, but always in want of more. The more the people are discontented with the oppression of taxes, the greater need the prince has of money to distribute among his partizans, and pay the troops that are to suppress all resistance, and enable him to plunder at pleasure. There is scarce a king in a hundred who … Read More

This morning, around forty Republican legislators have to look back at the bleary mess that was their President’s Day Weekend (and somewhere in there was Valentine’s Day, too), wondering exactly what happened to them. With the seeming speed of the flip of a switch, Republican representatives to the “Big 5” signed off on a Big 5/Big Taxes budget “deal” that would make any professional sausage maker proud.

The problem with the plan is that at its center is a massive increase in taxes (sales tax, car tax, car fee, income tax) that totals over $14,000,000,000.00 (multiply that out a few years to really see that number grow – all of those zeros, by the way, make it BILLIONS). Completely conceded in this Big 5/Big Taxes plan is the notion that Republican lawmakers were elected to office with a pledge to protect Californians from higher taxes (let alone tax hikes of this record-making magnitude). There are two underlying assumptions to this plan that are flawed – the first of which is that there is simply no way to balance the state’s books without a tax increase. The second… Read More

[Cross-posted from OC Blog]

Capitol Alert just posted an article about Sen. Abel Maldonado naming the price of buying his vote for the largest tax increase in state history:

A blanket primary in which the top two vote-getters make the general election. Denial of per diem to legislators if they don’t pass a budget on time. A ban on legislative per diem and pay increases in budget deficit years. Removing unspecified pork from the budget package.

Gosh, can Maldonado’s litany be any more transparently self-serving?

Abel wants to run statewide in 2010, and knows that voting for a $14 billion tax hike makes him a dead-candidate-on-a-stick in a closed GOP primary. Apparently, he believes he’d fare better as a tax-hiker in a blanket primary — although I think he’d be just slightly-less dead meat even in that set-up.

Demands… Read More

As the "O" word in thetitle I used above becomes more and more prevalent in the media as the "BattleO’ The Cap’tol" drags thru the "Presidents Day" holidayfrom the Valentines Day one, the Republicans, laboring in the minority, getbranded once again with "stopping progress". I say they’re only being consistent in the belief system that they haveheld all aong.

Most Republicans have opposed very openly, oftenand in plain English, the expansion of government that has put us in the fiscal wreck we are in. It’s in our party plank, plain as day. More importantly it’s in the minds of Republicans that run for office.A frequentdifference found between the legislators of the respective parties is thatmost of the Republicans have been in business. They have actually lived in the world of those that are regulated to the brink by all the fine ideas that come from Sacramento and DC regulators via laws Democrat legislators pass, almost always with no, or a tiny handful of Republican votes.

Before a law like AB 32, Carbon Dioxide Greenhouse Gas regs pass, you heard from our… Read More

Associated Press reporter Steve Lawrence’s latest article on the budget mess is here.

In it is a quote from Senate President Darrell Steinberg, where he throws the proverbial gauntlet down against Republican legislators. "We’re going to come back at 11 o’clock tomorrow morning, and we’re going to stay and we’re going to work again and we are going to come back every day until we get this done," he said. "This will get done, and it will get done with the framework that has been presented to you as a result of 90 days of work by your elected leaders."

It’s time for our elected leaders, Senator Cogdill and Assemblyman Villines, to hold a press conference and say that because Republicans, as a team, are not supportive of this plan, it is time to end the "lock down" and return back to the… Read More