Still Jerry Jarvis
Yesterday, I reported on San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s town hall meeting in Santa Monica and what I perceived as his tax and spend rhetoric. I was struck by the contrast with another Democratic gubernatorial candidate who has been around the block a few times – Jerry Brown.
In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle’s Carla Marinucci a week ago,
Attorney General Brown took a different tack. According to Marinucci’s report, Brown said if he were elected governor, “I would not be advocating new taxes, I’ll tell you that.” Already, California is “one of the highest tax states around,” he said. “So we’ve got to be competitive. We can’t drive all the jobs out and tax the few people who stay.”
Jerry Brown has lived through a tax revolt before when he was governor in 1978 and he senses when the natives are restless. Leading the opposition to Proposition 13, Brown learned the wrath of taxpayers first hand. After the initiative passed overwhelmingly, he declared himself a “born-again tax cutter” and did his best to implement the measure. In fact, his efforts on that front lead Proposition 13 co-author Howard Jarvis to vote for Brown for re-election.
A Permanent Fix For the Budget Crisis
Friday’s revelation that California has developed an eight billion dollar deficit only three weeks after the legislature supposedly produced a balanced budget ought to be a wake-up call for every citizen of the Golden State. Our fiscal problems can’t be fixed at the margins. Our elected representatives are trying to treat a cancer patient by occasionally trimming his fingernails.
There is a solution, however, and the state’s current economic crisis may provide a once in a lifetime opportunity to enact it. We need to entirely eliminate the spending mandates that virtually ensure that California will never be able to put together a coherent budget.
If this seems like strong medicine, consider the following: the California Budget Project’s conservative estimate is that about 66 percent of the state budget is completely out of the hands of legislators and the governor. In his masterful book “The Future of Freedom”, Fareed Zakaria puts the figure as high as 85 percent.
Odds & Ends – March 19. 2009
Some Odds&Ends from the past week:
- John Fund speculates on possible candidates for the congressional seat that will presumably be vacated by Obama appointee Ellen Tauscher, republished at FlashReport.
- CEO’s have ranked California as the worst state to do business in and the worst state for job growth in 2009, as reported on Jan Norman’s blog at the OCRegister.
- Politico is reporting that President George W. Bush has inked a book deal.
- Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi took a stand against the enforcement of immigration laws, calling such actions ‘un-american’ (FoxNews.com)