California Propositions 1A-1F

As I write this, it is the afternoon before special Election Day. Californians will vote tomorrow on six proposals relating to the current budget mess.

Proposition 1A will make permanent the tax increases (income, sales, and car registration) the Legislature gave us recently. 1B will, if 1A passes, "pay back" education spending for any past "cuts". 1C-1E, best I can tell, allows "borrowing" from mandated spending to be used, temporarily, in the General Fund. 1F will prohibit any pay increases for Legislaters during a year in which there is an inbalanced budget.

1F may be a good thing, but it certainly won't help much. 1C-E are essentially meaningless. They give the Legislature a temporary pass to spend less than the normally mandated amount on certain popular spending categories, "Children's Services" and "Mental Health", in order to spend more on other things. I think I will vote Yes on 1F and No in 1C-E.

Prop 1B is based on a fraud. When the education bureaucracy got less funding than they wanted, their political wing called it a "cut" (or "billions of dollars of cutbacks"). Prop 1B would turn that into a debt, requiring the taxpayers to "pay back" the difference between what this particular set of tax consumers wanted and what they got. Imagine your son asked you for $1,000, you gave him $100, and he therefore believed you owed him $900.

Prop 1A, and the advertising to promote it, are two of the worst things in current electoral politics. California has the highest income tax, sales tax, and car registration tax in the country (I haven't confirmed this myself, but the anti-1A advertisements say it, and I haven't heard it being disputed). Property taxes in California are not the highest, which undoubtedly stirs the competitive fire of many of our leaders ("We're California. We should be best at everything!").

The proponents of Prop 1A, as far as I can tell they are all tax consumers, describe it as "budget reform", a solution to a "broken process", a "spending limit", everything but a tax increase, which is the only thing it really is. The advertising distances itself from the Legislature, as if our elected officials have nothing to do with spending the extra money that will come in if 1A passes. Most hilariously, and with the help of the Governor, they are threatening to close firehouses and let out prisoners if 1A is not passed. In the entire budget, the largest state budget in the country, larger than almost all nations on Earth, they can't find anything to cut except fire protection and prisons.

We should certainly replace our elected officials, either because they would do such things, or because they would falsely threaten to. But in the meantime, don't give them more money.