How did California go from an enormous surplus to an enormous
deficit? It elected Gray Davis, who jacked up spending 32%,
bankrupted energy utilities through price caps and
power-plant-blocking environmentalism, and used the state
government as a personal piggy bank.
Democrat Kathleen Connell, the state’s controller, noted last
year that Davis’s gross incompetence and “panic” during the energy
crisis would saddle Californians with debts for years to come.
Now Davis is panicking again. In the face of a ballooning
$23.6-billion deficit, he is calling on Californians to pay for his
profligacy through higher auto and cigarette taxes. This, of
course, blatantly violates his I-don’t-envision-any-new-taxes
promise from earlier this year. But no matter: the goal in his mind
is not to offend the tax-guzzling beneficiaries of big government
— teachers, bureaucrats, minority activists — who form the base
of his party.
To curb the deficit without raising taxes would have required
deep cuts in public school education — the trench from which Davis
recruits many of his shock troops.
Davis’s proposed new budget, however, is hard cheese on the
poor. It would, among other things, reduce funding for juvenile
delinquent programs, cut Medi-Cal, and freeze cost-of-living
increases for welfare recipients.
But so what? figures Davis. The poor don’t even vote. A few
liberal lions, such as Senate Leader John Burton from San Francisco
(who wants to raise taxes on the rich, though they pay 70% of the
state’s revenues) may object, but their protests will fall away as
November approaches.
Teeing off the state’s public school educrats is another matter
altogether. Davis’ clumsy and crass request for a million dollars
from the California Teachers’ Association, even as he undercut the
group’s collective-bargaining legislation, still rankles. So now
Davis is deep in public-school pander mode.
“I had to find other ways to close this (budget) gap. I’m not
going to sacrifice the future of our children, particularly in
public education. Without some revenue increases, I would have had
to do that,” said Davis, relying on the fallacy that higher
spending equals higher student achievement.
If Davis wanted to protect the future of California’s children
and its public treasury, he would endorse vouchers to take stress
off the overcrowded public school system and expose children to
better education. But for Davis the commonweal is a secondary
concern to his re-election.
Given the swelling surplus with which he started, Davis should
be returning tax dollars, not asking for more of them. Members of
his party even have the gall to describe this self-serving solution
to his self-inflicted crisis as courageous. Apparently it counts as
courage for them to waste other people’s money, then demand even
more of it.
“In an election year, for him to make these very tough
recommendations on the cuts side but also the revenue side, (is) a
testament to his responsibility and strength,” said Assemblywoman
Jenny Oropeza to the Los Angeles Times.
Yes, it takes great courage to propose a tax increase not
effective until about two months after the election. Davis’s auto
tax hike would not kick in until January 1, 2003. Is it also a
profile in courage for Davis to stick a reviled state minority —
smokers, many of whom are lower middle-class — with some of the
bill for his mismanagement of the state?
“It’s fundamentally unfair to single out smokers to balance the
state budget,” Philip Morris spokesman Tom Ryan said to the Los
Angeles Times. “The taxes on cigarettes are already the
highest of any consumer product. It’s bad public policy. This is a
tax directed at roughly 20% of the population. A good tax, a fair
tax, is evenly spread out throughout the population.”
Not for Davis. The tax game for him is to find Californians who
will never vote for him to pay for the pet programs of the
Democrats who will.
Had Davis focused less on his growing campaign funds and more on
the growing deficit, Californians would face no shortfall at
all.
