Crisis at the Pump
Our state is facing a major crisis.
Come April 1st anywhere from 6000 to 8000 gas stations could be forced to close if they do not meet a new California Air Resources Board (CARB) mandate that requires small station owners to install new enhanced vapor recovery (EVR) nozzles to capture 98% of the vapor emissions instead of the current 95%.
Should this happen it will be devastating to California’s urban and minority communities.
That’s why myself and a Bipartisan group of Legislators are calling on CARB and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to extend the deadline for compliance by one year to April 1, 2010.
A Vote For Prop 1A Is A Vote For Fiscal Responsibility
There has been a lot of discussion about Proposition 1A within Republican circles over the past couple of weeks. But in my view this debate has centered on the wrong issue: anger over tax increases. Proposition 1A isn’t about that.
This measure is about putting real handcuffs on the ability of the Legislature to lock our taxpayer dollars into way too much spending in the good years only to have to turn around and make major cuts or increase taxes in the tough times.
Rather than getting sucked into an emotional argument about taxes, as thoughtful people who share a common world view, Republicans should hold ourselves to a higher standard and have a substantive discussion of the merits of Proposition 1A.
May 19th Election: P.T. Barnum is Alive and Well in Sacramento
Previously the Governor told us,”Pass Prop. 58, and deficit spending will be a thing of the past”. Today the deficit, with Prop. 58, is $50 billion and growing. In 1979, we were told pass Prop. 4, the Gann amendment, and we will control deficit spending–it took Sacramento ten years to change it, to allow bigger and better deficits.
The current effort, Prop.1A, has a loophole, it allows the Governor, for any reason to declare an emergency, with no appeals, to get at the “rainy day fund”. In other words, the vote of the people and the legislature can be overturned by one person, the Governor. Do you want to have one person hold your paycheck and bank account hostage to special interests? That is what Prop.1A does.
In fact, the reason Prop. 1A is now losing is that the word has been received by the voters–Sacramento is lying to them. The ballot summary does not mention the $16 billion tax increase. It does not make clear that for no reason the Governor can overturn the rainy day fund.
Financial Anger Management and Class Warfare
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross (with those two, little horizontal dots over her the U in her middle name), in her 1969 book “On Death and Dying,” named the five stages of dying as: Denial; Anger; Bargaining; Depression, and Acceptance. Las Fall, while the economy drove off a cliff, we saw plenty of Denial as our investment portfolios melted like the proverbial cake left out in the rain (with apologies to Richard Harris’ ‘MacArthur Park’ song).
This Spring, Denial is moving into the Anger stage, big time. What is dying is our old economy; what may be being born, I hope, is our new 21st Century economy, offering sustainable, real growth instead the Masters of the Universe on Wall St. pumping up what looked like growth by taking wild, risky, largely unregulated bets that have now all failed so spectacularly. Can Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance be far behind?