Chiang’s legislative pay freeze is a sideshow
As the most outspoken, if not prettiest, opponent of Proposition 25 on these pages, I take smug
satisfaction in how the measure has exploded in its champions’ faces.
Last November, Senate Leader Darryl Steinberg said, "(T)here is no reason
for a late budget again with the passage of Prop. 25… (it’s) a real game changer."
Yes, the Democrats on a virtually party line, simple majority vote passed and
sent to the Governor a budget, which he promptly vetoed. Boom!
Well, at least (they thought) by passing a budget on
June 15 they avoided the pay penalty included in the measure. Boom! Controller
John Chiang has stopped their salary and expenses because the on-time budget
wasn’t balanced budget.
Controller becomes deputy to new sheriff in town
When California Controller John Chiang decided on Tuesday that
legislators would not be paid, he did so by connecting two provisions in the
Constitution – one approved in 2004 (Proposition 58) that required budgets
to be balanced – and the other approved
last year (Proposition 25) that prohibited legislative pay if the budget
is not passed by June 15.
Many lawmakers have taken issue with the controller’s decision,
and some have threatened to sue to get their pay reinstated.
The dispute over what constitutes "fiscal balance" has been with
us for a long time, even before Prop 58. California’s state budgeting
process has always been based on an agreement between the legislature
and the governor about what fiscal balance means in a given year, with the Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) providing commentary.
That LAO commentary often deals with identifying
"threats" to fiscal health – sometimes through the courts – and the
ability of the administration to achieve savings in the adopted budget.
Who’s Really Sandbagging the Budget Deal?
On Monday, I recapped in short snippets how we got to this point in the budget debate. Today, more depth on the sad story of the state budget.
While legislative Republicans have been widely blamed for sandbagging the Governor’s January proposal to ask voters to extend taxes, there has been scant attention paid to the fact that the most significant opposition to the Governor’s plan has not been from Republicans or business, but rather from the public employee unions – particularly SEIU and CTA.
When the Governor initially suggested a June special election to extend the sales, income and VLF taxes enacted as part of the 2009 budget compromise (supported by many businesses), many in the business community – and even some legislative Republicans – indicated support for the extensions and vote, if they were part of a comprehensive, bi-partisan solution that included fiscal reforms. While labor publicly indicated vague support for the Governor’s plan, behind closed doors the public employee unions were, by most accounts, aggressively pushing back against the Governor’s special election.
17,000 Small Businesses Oppose E-Taxation
In
the mad scramble to deal with the state’s budget deficit our Legislature would
have you believe that taxing internet sales is the equivalent of the goose that
laid the golden egg – that it will produce revenue for the state without a cost
to anyone in California.
And
if you believe that, perhaps we can get the tooth fairy to take care of the
rest of the budget.
AB
28X – now headed to the Governor’s desk – would place new tax burdens on
Internet sales and is a direct threat to small business and Internet
entrepreneurship. The California Small Business Alliance is a member of the
Coalition to Protect Small Business Jobs, calling upon Governor Brown to veto
the e-taxation bill approved by the California Legislature.
If AB
28X is signed, similar bills across the country will follow, and this would be
an accounting nightmare for small business owners. Unlike larger retail chains
with large accounting staffs and in-house legal counsel, small businesses
simply do not have the resources to contend with calculating, collecting and
remitting taxes to thousands upon thousands of tax jurisdictions across the
country. It would be a competitive disadvantage for small retailers and would
force many of them to close their doors.
The Counterlife in California Employment
The Counterlife, published in 1986, is the fourth in
the series of Philip Roth’s novels that focus on the novelist Nathan Zuckerman.
The book includes a number of the familiar Roth themes: midlife doubts and
reconsiderations, marital fidelity and infidelity, Jewish identity in America
and Israel. It differs from other Zuckerman books (and most novels) in its use
of counter-narratives; sections of the book jump across time, across
characters, across chronologies, across facts, so that by the end of the book
there are no clear storylines.
We’ve reached that point of multiple, sometimes
contradictory, storylines in the matter of California’s job creation and
structure. The most recent California monthly employment numbers, released last
Friday, show an economy that continues to struggle to generate jobs. The state
unemployment rate fell from 11.8% to 11.7%, but as most commentators pointed
out, this was due to a drop in the civilian labor force, from 18,028,000 in
April to 17,993,000 in May. The state lost a net of 29,200 payroll jobs.