Calbuzz Is Right About Me
As the wisest and most powerful actors in California’s
journalistic and political words, Calbuzz did me a great favor by putting me in
my place today.
In
fact, what they said is an honor. It is especially gratifying to get such a
knuckle-rap from bloggers who – in these times of great challenge – focus their
reporting on important public service topics, such as Jerry Brown’s eyebrows.
One
strong bit of evidence that the Calbuzzers are right about my not having done
enough reporting is that I have never been able to confirm the factual claims
that Calbuzz makes in their attack on me. My meager reporting for example
failed to turn up the fact that:
-the Whitman campaign bowed to
Calbuzz in deciding to become accessible to the press corps.
Angelides Versus Arnold, 2006 Revisited
With San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom running for lieutenant governor, the race is getting way more attention than it probably deserves. It’s also opened the way for a hazy bit of Democratic historical revisionism.
In a story that’s spread all over the liberal blogosphere, Paul Hogarth of Beyond Chron asks whether Newsom could become “the Angelides of 2010.”
Hogarth argues that state Democratic Treasurer Phil Angelides lost to Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger four years ago because a grueling primary with Steve Westly and his campaign consultant Garry South “left (Angelides) so bloodied that he went on to lose the general election by a landslide.”
Without the nasty attacks South orchestrated against Angelides, California might now have a Democratic governor, Hogarth suggested.
Stop Hidden Taxes
One of the concerns of the business community and taxpayers is that the legislature is calling taxes “fees” to get around the constitutional two-thirds vote requirement to pass a tax.
This deceptive practice has caused an initiative to be launched in an effort to put a check on this procedure, which is adding to the economic burden of California businesses and citizens. The California Taxpayers Association and the California Chamber of Commerce head up the Stop Hidden Taxes Coalition. The Small Business Action Committee is a member.
The coalition expects to qualify the initiative for the November ballot. For more information on the initiative and the effort to stop hidden taxes, visit www.nomorehiddentaxes.com.
Cal Tax recently highlighted four such “fees.”
Distraction – it’s a time-honored strategy
Kids do it when they’re in trouble. Husbands do it when they want to watch a game instead of doing chores. Dogs do it when they bring you a toy after they’ve had an “accident.” Even army generals do it when they want to disguise their retreat or find a devious way to win. And, according to Machiavelli, so do politicians.
That’s what is happening with the California Forward budget reform proposals introduced by Democrat legislative leaders – they are a distraction to facilitate deception.
Maybe we should call the proposal a diversion – a game or smokescreen – instead of reform. The real goal of this effort is to allow Democrats to raise taxes with a majority vote and eliminate the power Republicans have to stop their overspending.
The proposed “reforms” are riddled with loopholes that will render them useless, but the major hole in budget policy – the reduced vote count to raise taxes – will allow Democrats to carry on with their drunken spending barrier free–despite what voters have said they want in every poll taken since Proposition 13 was passed in 1978.
No on an Oil Severance Tax
The Santa Barbara County Taxpayers Association is opposed to AB 1604 by Assemblymember Pedro Nava (D-Santa Barbara) not just because it creates a whole new tax that will cause a larger drag on our economy, which is already struggling to recover.
We also oppose the deliberately misleading tactics being used to promote the oil severance tax. Assemblyman Nava and his supporters like to say that California is the only oil-producing state without a severance tax. This is true on its face, but is misleading.
California taxes oil producers in ways other states do not. For example, we have the highest corporate income tax in the country. Texas, Nevada and others have none. California charges a sales tax on the purchase of the expensive manufacturing equipment used in oil production. Most states do not.
California is already taxing oil producers at a high rate. The addition of the AB 1604 severance tax would give California yet another area where it has the highest taxes of all.
Fun with Accounting
Recent revelations concerning the
fall of Lehman Bros. and other financial shenanigans have revealed the fun side
of accounting – fun, that is, as long as you don’t get too hung up about
honesty and the ethics of ripping off other people’s money ("OPM"). The staggeringly huge Lehman
bankruptcy, the biggest in the history of American business failures, recently
produced a 2,200 page report and related documents released by Anton Valukas,
the court-appointed examiner charged by Bankruptcy Judge James M. Peck, to
figure out just what happened.
Judge Peck said Valukas’ report read "like a best-seller." Here’s the short version.
So let’s say you have decided to
take advantage of today’s historic lows in home loan rates and refinance your
home – before interest rates start going up, perhaps later in the year. You owe a lot of money on your credit
cards (having not learned that paying for those lavish dinners and weekend
getaways with plastic and then paying the minimum on your monthly bill is just
a dumb trap). You also have those
student loans to the tune of umpety-ump thousand dollars and a nagging
obligation to support wife #1, even though you are on to the greener pastures
of wife #2, who spends your money like it is water. It is obvious that if you listed all these debts, nobody in
their right mind would re-fi your house.
What to do? What to do?