California’s taxpayers look on in bewilderment as more and more tax increase proposals are created for next year’s ballot. A whole lot of organizations and people think they have the solution to California’s problems with an increase in taxes. And they all want to bring them to the ballot.
Over the weekend, the Sacramento Bee revealed the proposals from the Think Long Committee funded by billionaire Nicolas Berggruen. As noted in one of my previous posts, the centerpiece of this proposal is a tax on services. The proposal also carries plans to cut income and corporation tax rates, drop the sales tax on goods a half-cent and raise business taxes on out-of-state firms, among other proposals.
The sales tax cut goes against the plan being tested by the California Teachers Association, which would raise the sales tax along with income taxes on certain high-end taxpayers.
Then there are other tax plans in the works primarily aimed at funding education. As I reported last week, civil rights attorney and investor, Molly Munger, has a proposal to increase income taxes. A coalition of some business and education groups including the Bay Area Council, Children Now and the California School Administrators Association are reportedly behind a strategy that would include broad-based tax increases along with plans to make it easier to raise parcel property taxes on the local level.
Already filed with the Attorney General’s office is an initiative to create an oil severance tax to fund both K-12 and higher education.
It doesn’t take a degree in political science to realize that if all these tax measures appear on the ballot, they would be self-defeating, scaring the taxpayers to pull the NO lever and be done with it.
The Big Kahuna in bringing these disparate plans together is the governor. We know he, too, wants a tax plan on the ballot. Word is he still wants to entice business interests to play along by staying away from business-specific taxes and advocating for broad based taxes like the sales tax and an income tax increase on upper income earners. Unlike the education interests who would be satisfied with directing all new revenue to schools, Governor Brown wants money to fund his government realignment plans.
One definition for Kahuna is “priest, sorcerer, magician, wizard, minister.” The governor, a former seminary student, would have to be all these things to get the different tax plan opponents to pull together.
While all these tax measures, and perhaps others, will be filed for a title and summary that gives the governor and other interests until sometime in January to try and reach consensus on a tax strategy that won’t send the taxpayers running for the hills.