Posted by
Keith Arnold on Tuesday, February 17, 2009 10:09:30 PM
California is having a moment of crisis.
My California readers will be aware that virtually every year without fail, the Legislature fails to produce a budget for the state. And, of course, by "budget," the people in Sacramento mean something very different from what you and I mean by the word. You and I sit down over the dining room table with out husbands and wives and tally up how much we bring in, and looking at our total income, we ask painfully questions like:
- "How much money goes to things we can't control - the rent or mortgage payment, the electric bill, the medical insurance?"
- "How much can we set aside for things like retirement, a vacation, or home improvements?"
- "How much does that leave us?"
We start with what we have, and go from there to what we can afford. The California legislature, probably like most states, does this is reverse - they start with what they want to spend our money on, and then after totaling up the numbers, figure out how much they'll need to tax us in order to pay for it all.
Let's consider the total illogic of that for a minute. If your family started out by deciding you were going to spend $73,000 this year, even though you only make $58,000, then you would have to go to the boss and say, "Fred, my family has set our budget for this fiscal year; as a result, I'm raising my salary by $15,000 a year. Be sure to notify Accounting..." - well, let's be honest; you'd probably discover that your final paycheck was in the process of being printed about three minutes after Fred stopped laughing. At you, not with you.
And yet when the Legislature decides to raise income taxes because it wants to spend more of your money, we grumble, tighten our belts, and do nothing; after all, they're in charge, and we do what we're told by our masters.
Let me make this painfully clear: taxes are the allowance we give our elected members of our government to spend on doing the peoples' business. Unless and until we teach them that IT'S OUR MONEY, AND WE DECIDE HOW MUCH TO GIVE THEM, they will continue to spend like the profligates they are. If your son came to you and said "I spent all my allowance of crack cocaine, and it's gone; I need a twenty percent increase to pay my debt to my dealer and buy a new game for my Wii," you wouldn't do it, would you? Then why do we do it for our legislators? We need to make them understand; they're our servants, not our masters.
If memory serves, the California government is $42 BILLION in debt. The government got into this fix by spending itself into poverty. The proposed budget includes $14.5 BILLION dollars in tax increases - that's over $4,000 for every living, breathing Californian, if you stop and do the math, just for this coming year, or over $16,000 for an average family of four - between a quarter and a half of your income for an awful lot of families. Remember, too, that's on top of the $28,000 and change the Federal government just put onto the shoulders of each and every living, breathing American on this deceptively named "stimulus" bill.
They're also proposing $16 billion dollars in spending cuts, and borrowing another $10 billion in loans. Four and six... carry the one... hmmm... by my figuring, IF they're successful in collecting that extra $14.5 billion from you, and IF they don't spend money "off-budget," then they're still going to be billions in debt, and surviving by borrowing.
Why do you keep electing and re-electing these people?
Read it for yourself in the L.A. Times, if you can stomach it. There are a handful of legislators holding out against the tax increases, and you ought to thank every one of them. I'm going to make an offer: any of you reading this who thinks it's okay for the legislators to raise taxes to get a budget passed, you can go along with it just as soon as you write a check covering my share. You're fine with raising taxes? Cool. You pay mine, and everything's peachy.
Don't ever forget - you're dealing with a legislature that has already taken what you've given them and frittered it all away on shiny things, and then come to you saying you need to give them more because they can't control their spending. You're dealing with a Governator who got the job because his predecessor did what? Oh yeah, he raised taxes. That car tax thing. How did we ever forget Gray Davis and the car tax?
"But we're cutting spending now!" Great. Why didn't you do this five or ten years ago, before you got us into this mess?
"But we're going to have to eliminate jobs and cut services!" Yeah, that burgeoning 210,000-strong army of State employees, with their generous benefits packages and gigantic guaranteed pensions. Don't think for a second that cutting that by 50% wouldn't actually improve life for most Californians, and free those trimmed from government jobs to go do something productive for a change. While you're at it, this would be a good time to think about pulling the plug on welfare, ending all spending on illegal aliens, and doing away with a couple dozen do-nothing State agencies.
Here's a thought - all that oil off the coast? Think of that as a source of income, as well as a way of doing something toward this nation's energy independence. "But the environment! The seals! The ocean!" Trust me, Mother Gaia will be just fine, it will go a long way toward solving our problem, and Al Gore is a boob. And I'm super-cereal about that last part.
The notion that our elected legislators got us into this mess, and they think we have an obligation to get them out of it by coughing up more of our hard-earned money, is offensive. Because of our legislators' inability to not spend money like drunken sailors on liberty in port, and the anti-business climate of our regulatory state, California has gone from being the fifth largest economy in the world, to the ninth largest. I was concerned when France passed us; at the rate we're going, Zimbabwe will pass us by the time I retire.
If I can ever afford to, I mean.