Arnold has gone around the bend and is ignoring polls that say the no votes on sales tax increases means the public wants to eliminate in-house care for Alzheimer's patients, CalGrants for students, CalWorks, state parks, everything. He's going to go down with the right-wing ship, with the extreme right of the California Republican party that hates him anyway, and is taking as many of us as possible with him. The Gov goes around saying stupid helpless stuff like, "I know that that could mean potentially that now Alzheimer's patients will not get this in-home service that they deserve. . . . But you know something? Even though those are tough choices, what is the alternative?"
Actually the alternatives are legion, but most of them involve increasing equity in the tax system, and we have all been taught that fairness is bad for California business, so
are totally ignored as the entire state political system is thrown into a paroxym of defensive lobbying. Who can take the U.S. and especially California seriously given this total inability to solve the most basic financial problems?
Genius at work:
"Several of the latest cuts were eye-openers, but the largest was the wholesale elimination of the California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids Program, which provides grants to parents that people commonly refer to as "welfare."
"Matosantos said that by eliminating the CalWorks welfare program and the Healthy Families program for children's healthcare -- which would affect 930,000 children -- the state could save nearly $1.6 billion. But it would also lose $4.7 billion in federal funds."
The captain is crazy. The crew is awol. The ship is sinking.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
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Yup. But if the ship sinks, then what happens to all those families?
Fairness in tax would be to repeal Prop 13 as unconstitutional in practice, since it has created huge disparities in the tax assessments against adjacent properties, strictly on the basis of when property has been sold. One can rent out a property for a long time at market rates (that are linked to the current mortgage costs for home buyers in the area), or take out a home equity line of credit (in the days when that kind of thing happened) and not trigger a valuation event for tax purposes. Reform that, and the state would see a 4x increase in property taxes.
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