Tea party tomorrow to demand an end to over-the-top job killing eco-regulations
Thousands of taxpayers, farmers and small business owners will converge on California’s Capitol in Sacramento tomorrow for a Tea Party rally which is being sponsored by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.
At the top of the event’s agenda are California’s job-killing global warming law, AB 32 and the devastation of Central Valley farmlands in an effort to protect a 2-inch long minnow. Economists estimate AB 32 will cost our state over 1 million jobs, will cost the average family nearly $4000 annually and will cost the average small business almost $50,000. Many Central Valley farmers have seen their fields turned into a dustbowl by an order shutting down water pumps, and unemployment in some rural communities now exceeds 40%.
From the huge April 15th Tax Day Tea Party, to our overwhelming defeat of Proposition 1A, taxpayers are in revolt. Much like when Proposition 13 was passed, taxpayers are fed up with a government that has made California a state that leads the nation in high taxes and high unemployment. Unbelievably, some state officials are now even pushing for higher gas taxes and higher property taxes on businesses.
Water Politics Invade State Fair
Political work at the California State Fair in Sacramento is typically a low-key, people-friendly affair. Office holders and would-be office holders typically make a pilgrimage out into the heat of Cal Expo, where they shake a few hands, kiss some babies, eat a corndog and sing the praises of California agriculture.
Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, for example, will be out there this evening, visiting the Republican Party booth in one of the halls and hoping desperately that some desperate newspaper or TV station, stuck in the August doldrums, will send out a reporter or a camera crew to ask him about his campaign for governor.
It’s generally considered bad form to do any serious politicking, especially since most of the fairgoers wouldn’t pay any attention anyway.
Fantasy Football and the Constitutional Convention
One of my oldest friends spends each fall obsessively playing fantasy football. (It would be more accurate to say he spends each fall “cheating” at fantasy football, but that is a different story).
Here’s how nuts he is: To prepare for our league’s draft next weekend, he has run more than 30 “mock drafts” on web sites that offers fantasy addicts this service.
At his urging, I recently signed up for one of these mock drafts, and immediately found myself thinking about the debates over whether California needs a constitutional convention and how to conduct such a convention.
On the web site I used, there were a half-dozen mock drafts starting every five minutes. I signed up for a draft similar to my own league, with 12 teams. Eleven other people (I have no idea who they were—you could sign up anywhere in the world simply by registering with the web site) also signed up. And then we took turns drafting, remotely over the Internet. There was a time limit of one minute for each pick.
Small Business Raises Red Flags at Tax Commission
An old adage is that business wants certainty. That reality was certainly on display at the workshop set up by the Commission on the 21st Century yesterday in San Francisco. Witnesses and commissioners tried to determine the effects of the newly hatched Business Nets Receipts Tax (BNRT) cooked up by the commission as a major cog in their plan to re-do California’s tax system.
Fear is not a word promoters of a tax plan want associated with that plan. But, concern of what affect the BNRT would have on small business permeated the testimony. The BNRT is a form of a value-added tax, which is a general tax applied at each point of the exchange of goods and services from the primary production to final consumption.
To be fair, the commission has not set forth its final plan, yet, and that led to the uncertainty that many business people feel. Experts and laymen alike are trying to calculate the impact of the brand new tax program.
Good news on the real estate front
While nobody is yet predicting the end of the California housing crisis, there are increasing signs that prices have stabilized and transactions have increased, which could signal the end of the three-year-long collapse of this vital economic sector.
California home prices rose in the second quarter for the first time in three years while logging a second-straight monthly increase in June, according to the S&P Case-Shiller home-price indexes.