by Tom Alston
This is the evil person or thing that is always blamed for what happened in the past that put us into a condition we are currently struggling with. Hitler blamed the people in the insane asylums for infecting his country so he could start abusing them and conducting medical experiments on them without objection by the population. He viciously attacked the gypsy population so he could expand his reach for more guinea pigs for his medical experiments. Ultimately he blamed everything on the Jews. He blamed the bad economy, the inflation rate and “profiteering” on a larger group of people.
Who knows who would have been next if his regime had not crumbled, maybe the Catholics, maybe the Communists? The point is that the people of Germany constantly had their attention misdirected by the government. The government had mismanaged itself into crisis after crisis. As most government often do, they blamed someone other than themselves for creating the problem and their solution was more government control by the very people who had created the crisis.
A recent article from the Las Vegas Review Journal has this to say…
“As California teeters, Democrats are left to contemplate how this living laboratory of liberalism -- with its smothering taxes, intrusive regulatory apparatus, generous social services and well-fed, heavily unionized public sector -- could now find itself on the brink of collapse.”
Rather than conclude the obvious -- that decade after decade of high-tax, anti-business, anti-growth policymaking designed to sate an ever-expanding state is ultimately unsustainable -- a handful of liberals have found their culprit: Proposition 13, a measure limiting property taxes passed by voters in 1978.
Time magazine calls it the "root of California's misery." Leftist commentator Harold Meyerson argues that Prop 13 started the state down "the road to insolvency."
What a joke.
To believe this twaddle, you'd have to believe that California has been hamstrung in terms of raising tax revenues since 1978 thanks to the restraints imposed by Prop 13. That's nonsense. California remains one of the highest taxing states in the nation, with an income tax burden that can hit 10 percent. Even property tax collections have gone up consistently since 1980, increasing -- on average -- a healthy 7 percent per year in Los Angeles County alone.
According to the Tax Foundation in Washington, D.C., California residents suffered the 11th highest tax burden in the nation in 2008.
The group also put California's business climate at 48th in the nation and noted that its top individual income tax rate is the highest in all the land.
"Supporters of increased state spending have spent 31 years trying to make Proposition 13 the boogeyman," writes Joel Fox, former president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, in a Los Angeles Times commentary. "The measure has been held responsible for a freeway collapse during an earthquake and even for O.J. Simpson's not-guilty verdict in the 1995 criminal trial. But for a great majority of Californians, the boogeyman label doesn't stick."
That's because the label is flat-out wrong. And if California's spending class had actually heeded the message voters sent when they passed Proposition 13 more than 30 years ago, the buffoons in Sacramento wouldn't find themselves today scrambling to shore up this house of cards. “
Obviously the writer has a bias versus Democrats, but his words are true.
The real problem is that no one that has been elected is in-charge or responsible.
The Democrat majority that will ultimately have to shoulder the blame for the reckless spending is beholden to a behind the scene labor lobby who refuse to see the obvious.
Whoever is the governor will share the blame because he is the “head of the state government” and all this crap is happening on his watch.
The minority Republicans will be blamed because they always voted against every tax increase like a stubborn child.
What I am afraid is that no one will resolve the obvious problem other than the universe itself. Any entity that spends more than it receives is bankrupt, even though they can pretend to survive for quite a long time by borrowing, printing IOU’s and never paying the money back. This is called theft.
The physical universe will eventually crash this insane plan. The current economic crisis is going to crash the government of California. Sure the legislators can blame the International bankers for their obvious role in the crisis, but a well managed economy would have had a sane plan of reserves and checks and balances to minimize the destruction. Our Legislators have lived off projected revenues for too long. If it were a private business most of the managers would be in jail for managing a huge Ponzi scheme.
California currently supports over 30% of all welfare recipients in the United States, has over 60% of its annual budget tied to education as our students fall further behind every year, has income tax rates that are the highest in the nation for any state, and siphons off billions in tobacco taxes that sit in a bloated fund for a Hollywood personality to use to try and create more opportunities for himself to create more taxes to put him in charge of more funds. That is a run on sentence, but if I tried to list all the insane points without making you lose your breath trying to keep up, you would not get the physical impact I want you to get from my words.
When you get mad at the golden parachutes extended by failing corporations to people that ran their business into the ground, contemplate this;
Check out the current and retired politicians’ retirement programs that allow them to double or triple dip the retirement programs from the State of California. Look at the people that have been in the power to resolve this financial crisis for the last 30 years. How do you evaluate their performance?
Remember that the system used to hide the Enron company’s real condition was born from an accounting system that looks perilously like standard government accounting practices.
I was told a story that in the past California politicians balanced a budget by merely announcing they were going to hire more personnel for a tax agency without having to actually hire the people and producing the desired effect.
No matter what, the true scapegoat is you and me. When we look in the mirror we have to acknowledge that something can be done about it. Once we acknowledge that, we have a moral obligation to do something.
The news media have failed us. The elected politicians have failed us. And yet, we are responsible because we have allowed it.
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