As featured in Santa Maria Times, Feb. 1, 2009
It’s hardly news that California is in the midst of a serious budget crisis. What is different now is that we are fast approaching the point where the gridlock over how to resolve the situation is going to hit almost every Californian where they live.
Very soon, the state will literally run out of cash and be forced to pay its creditors with IOUs. If you expect to receive a state tax refund this year, this means you.
I know that for many of my constituents, already dealing with the pressures of higher prices and job insecurity, that refund could really help out about now. An IOU from the state just seems like insult upon injury.
We need a bipartisan budget solution, sooner rather than later, but we have to be careful not to adopt a cure that’s worse than the disease. Sales taxes, gas taxes, car taxes — the slew of tax increase ideas being tossed around in Sacramento these days would be just that. One proposal would even tax your tax returns.
Raising taxes during a poor economy is economic suicide, and California is in a full-blown recession.
Undaunted, tax proponents cooked up a convoluted scheme they claim would allow a simple majority of the Legislature to pass a budget containing $10 billion in tax increases, which means $1,000 for every California family in new taxes.
Their action directly violates the Constitution I just took an oath to support and defend. Needless to say, I joined a lawsuit filed by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association challenging its legality.
Nonetheless, taxpayers still need vigilant protection. As long as the idea remains a possibility in the minds of tax-minded lawmakers, the threat to Proposition 13 and to taxpayers’ wallets is alive and well.
To settle the issue once and for all, the suit has been refiled in Superior Court, which is good for taxpayers in the long term, and for budget negotiations in the short term. This exercise in creative writing has been a phenomenal waste of time, a game of keep-away that just put off real negotiations between both parties.
The California Constitution requires a two-thirds supermajority vote of the Legislature for new taxes or increases of existing taxes. It’s a fact of life that no amount of hoping, scheming and reinterpretation can undo.
It’s what California’s taxpayers demanded in 1978 when they passed Proposition 13, a demand reconfirmed again and again at the ballot box. In 2004, voters even defeated Proposition 56 to lower the two-thirds threshold by nearly a two-thirds margin themselves, 65.7 percent, as opposed to 34.3 percent in favor.
Make of that what you will.
Raising taxes will only choke our sputtering economy, cost jobs to many working California families, delay its recovery, and drive down the amount of actual revenues the state, and local governments collect. Even if you call them fees. Or levies. The blow won’t feel any softer to the Californian told to fork it over.
Now that everyone is back at the bargaining table, it’s time to adopt budget solutions that focus on economic stimulus and job creation. I am firmly committed to protecting California’s already overtaxed citizens from paying even more than they already are for bloated and inefficient government.
State Sen. Tony Strickland represents District 19, which includes portions of Santa Barbara, Ventura and Los Angeles counties.
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