Our friends over at the lively website, Calbuzz, lamented the fact that with the exit of Gavin Newsom from the gubernatorial race there is no candidate that stands for authentic change. The particulars of the change they highlighted from the Newsom campaign were supporting a constitutional convention, changing the budget process, and taking a hammer and wrench to Proposition 13.
Perhaps the reason for Newsom’s early exit from the campaign is because those are not the kind of changes the voters want.
Citizens are angry and disgusted because government doesn’t work. However, voters are smart enough to know that not all medicine will revive the patient and some remedies could make the patient sicker. Taxing business property would not jumpstart the economy. It would cost jobs. Lowering the two-thirds vote to raise taxes leads to increased tax rates, but will it result in the expected revenue? The tax increase of February is already coming up short by billions of dollars. California’s economy doesn’t need another punch in the gut.
Calling a constitutional convention is no guarantee of a cure for what ails California because nobody knows what the result would be. The rules to select delegates are so convoluted anyone reading the measure will certainly have doubts about possible outcomes.
There are other remedies to fix government problems but folks who think California has a revenue problem rarely, if ever, raise them.
How about pension reform so taxpayers are assured that any new tax revenue actually goes to pay for service and not to pad a pension that exceeds any pension the taxpayer may have (if they even have one.) How about a spending limit to bring discipline to a state bureaucracy that frequently goes out of control, exemplified most recently by purchasing a fleet of automobiles and leaving them unused for months.
Those are the kinds of changes people might find reasonable in these difficult economic times. While some of these reforms have been circulating for a while these agents of change are dismissed because they challenge powerful interests.
While it’s easy to dismiss candidates who speak basic truths as unhip and not with it, the fact is those candidates are still in the game. Hip and cool is sitting on the sidelines because he didn’t have an audience.