Fox and Hounds Daily’s Black Bart Award for 2010
The question we dealt with in deciding the Fox and Hounds Daily Second Annual Black Bart Award winner as Californian of the Year was: Is the obvious choice always the best choice? A strong argument was made that an unexpected player who changed the course of California politics might be an appropriate choice. In this category, Nicky Diaz Santillan had strong support. Meg Whitman’s former housekeeper certainly upset the Whitman strategy and changed the course of the gubernatorial campaign.
However, even if Diaz Santillan had never shed one tear in front of a camera or found her name in one newspaper, the odds are Whitman would have lost the governor’s race, anyway.
Governor-elect Jerry Brown was mentioned by all three of our writers as a nominee for Californian of the Year. He is the winner of the Second Annual Black Bart Award.
Democrats Prepping State For Tax Hikes
Cross-posted at CalWatchdog.
California’s Democratic leaders would have you believe that our state’s budget has been cut to the bone. They contend that the state’s never-ending budget deficit—currently estimated at more than $28 billion over 18 months—is the inevitable result of an unusually bad economy, and that more revenue is needed to avoid devastating service cuts. This is a false choice—there remains fat to cut in California’s budget, if politicians are willing to overcome union objections to doing so.
Governor-elect Jerry Brown (D) held a budget briefing earlier this month and fiscal conservatives took heart that the new governor was dealing forthrightly with dismal budget realities.
However, there’s no mistaking that Brown and his Democratic colleagues featured at the briefing (Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, Assembly Speaker John Perez, Controller John Chiang and Treasurer Bill Lockyer) view higher taxes as the prime solution to California’s problem. Perez, a former union organizer, said as much at the meeting. Steinberg, a close union ally, repeatedly voiced his concern about the effect of budget cuts on the state’s public employees.
The briefing was designed to show that California can no longer afford the sort of one-time budget-balancing gimmicks tried in the past. That much is true. There are no more revenues to shuffle around redevelopment agencies, no more federal revenues that will backfill gaping holes in the budget, no more opportunities to accelerate the collection of personal income and corporate taxes. In fact, Brown’s presentation noted that 75 percent to 85 percent of the predicted savings from short-term budget solutions over the last three years did not materialize.