California’s Captain Kirk Tax Code
In the Star Trek original series episode "A
Piece of the Action," Captain Kirk invents a complicated and confusing card
game, which he calls Fizbin. The rules are depressingly similar to
California’s sales tax code.
An excerpt from Wikipedia: "Each
player gets six cards, except for the player on the dealer’s right, who gets
seven. The second card is turned up, except on Tuesdays. Kirk deals one player
two jacks, which are a ‘half-fizbin.’ When the player says he needs another
jack, Kirk warns that a third jack is a "shralk" and is grounds for
disqualification. With two jacks, one wants a king and a deuce, except at
night, when one wants a queen and a four."
As the game proceeds, the rules keep changing.
Some examples of California’s fizbin tax
code:
Food products in California are exempt from
the sales tax, "unless otherwise specified."
Main Street Menace of the Week: Senate Bill 653 (Steinberg)
While the legislature is in session, the National Federation
of Independent Business/California will be profiling anti-small business bills
and the adverse effect they would have on California’s job creators. This is the second column of the 2011 series.
Taxes, taxes, we all scream for
taxes…oh wait, that isn’t right. That
may be the mantra under the Capitol Dome, but from the small business community
and majority of California voters, the resounding cry is "Enough is enough!"
It seems every time we turn
around, there are more taxes being proposed in Sacramento. But now, the tax-and-spend legislators have
gone one step further – they are proposing legislation that would expand the
taxing authority of all 58 counties in California. It isn’t enough that the California State
Legislature has the ability to increase taxes; now they want to give their
friends at the local level the power to do the same.
Weintraub ignores California’s silver bullet: jobs plan and manufacturing
Last week the well-regarded Daniel Weintraub wrote an accurate but complacency-inducing everything-will-be-ok Orange County Register article based on 2010 job data.
He emphasized that California’s job growth, sans the construction and government industries, trended with the rest of the country. Weintraub looked backward, saw some non-momentous trends either way and concluded that the job "numbers bode well for the state’s economic future."
California’s problems are so big, we can’t afford to wait and hope for a large recovery to come our way.
Presidential Job Approval in Light of Major Events Like Bin Laden’s Death
Given the great news about Osama Bin Laden, we at Public Opinion Strategies have updated our chart that looks at the historical bump Presidents receive from Major National Security Events. The table goes back to Pearl Harbor and President Franklin Roosevelt. This chart is VERY interesting.
On average, the President’s approval rating increases 13 points and a bump lasts an average of 22 weeks. That does not include the 105 week bump that President George W. Bush received after 9/11.
The “bump” on job approval shows the total increase in approval rating from prior to the event. The duration of the increase indicates the number of weeks until the President’s job approval rating returned to the prior level (so, for instance, the 35 point bump that George W. Bush got did not last the entire 105 weeks – the spike was the high, and it took 105 weeks to return to the pre-9/11 level.
Wasting and Wanting
You may have read an article recently about two Los Angeles motorcycle cops who were told to write 18 traffic tickets per shift. They objected. Quotas of that sort are illegal in California. As a result of their failure to fill their quotas, they claimed, they were given poor performance evaluations, threatened with reassignments and otherwise harassed by commanders.
So they sued the Los Angeles Police Department, and two weeks ago a jury awarded them $2 million.
Now, you may be tempted to assume that this is a random, one-off aberration. But you’d be wrong. It’s the latest in a string.
For example, an LAPD officer named Richard Romney had testified for another officer who was having a labor dispute with the department. Afterwards, Romney was fired. He sued. In November, an L.A. jury awarded him $4 million.