Schwarzenegger Move No Surprise
Those of you who were surprised when Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger floated the idea of a temporary sales tax increase as part of a budget solution, raise your hands.
As I thought, not many. It was hard not to see this proposal coming. The governor suggested a temporary sales tax solution as a back-up to his lottery lease plan months ago. As I wrote at the time, he dipped into former Governor George Deukmejian’s playbook in which Duke proposed a temporary sales tax be triggered by a certain time if the hole in the state budget hadn’t closed.
In budget negotiations, the governor apparently floated a package of a firm spending limit and structural budget reform along with the temporary sales tax, which he moved from back-up status to be part of the end game. In Arnold Schwarzenegger’s post-partisan world, he is the only one who would make this call.
And he may be the only one with an official say in the matter who likes this plan.
The Product Police, Part Two
When I was a boy, my folks owned a farm in Upper Lake in Lake County where we raised walnuts. It was managed by an aunt and uncle and I used to love going to visit. Every fall, we would go as a family to help with the harvest. The one thing I used to hate about it was drinking the water at my Aunt Betty’s house. It tasted horrible and there were always stains in the bathtub and the sink that looked like rust.
I remember asking my mother why the water tasted so bad and why there were those stains. It was the first time I ever heard the term hard water.
Hard water is water with a high mineral content. The United States Geological Survey states that 89.3% of homes in America of have some degree of hard water and some of the hardest water in the country is right here in California, including the counties of Los Angeles, Riverside, Ventura, and San Diego.
Schwarzenegger move not a pay cut, and Chiang’s computers add but don’t subtract
The state employees are marching. The editorial boards are wringing their collective hands. The Controller is standing firm. But guess what — Governor Schwarzenegger’s executive order on state spending issued last Thursday does not cut anybody’s pay.
Typical of the reporting is a story in yesterday’s Sacramento Bee which says, inaccurately, that the Governor instituted “a temporary pay cut.”
If anyone took the time to actually read the executive order, one would discover that it merely orders the Director of the Departments of Finance and Personnel Administration to
“work with the State Controller to develop and implement the necessary mechanisms, including but not limited to pay letters and computer programs, to comply with the California Supreme Court’s White v. Davis opinion to pay federal minimum wage to those nonexempt FLSA employees who did not work any overtime.”