Well, the Republicans got their way. The state’s budget (read: services provided to the state’s people) has been cut and cut again. Services to the disabled are cut again. State workers suffer a huge pay cut through furloughs. The state’s universities and colleges are cut dramatically.
Corporations got a big tax cut.
All of this, of course, is for today. In a few weeks we will get another reduced estimate of revenue and the process starts again. And because so many things were just kicked into next year – including interest owed in borrowing – it will be even worse. Citizens will see a 10% increase in withholding, which will all come back, but which reduces their ability to pay mortgages, etc.
All so that oil companies won’t be asked to pay for the oil they take and sell back to us. All so people making $600,000 will not be asked to pay $38.42 more per week in taxes (which can then be deducted from federal taxes). All so businesses will not be asked to pay property taxes at current rates.
The LA Times on Sunday, Pat Brown’s California takes a beating in Sacramento,
The visionary governor swept into office in 1959, and by the time he
was swept out eight years later, he had created the 16-dam,
multiple-aqueduct state water project, devised the three-tier college
and university system, constructed nine major campuses and built more
than 1,000 miles of freeways to connect regions of his burgeoning
state. To this day, much of what gets us where we are going —
literally and figuratively — stems from what he did in his two terms.[. . .] In Brown’s California, there was a broad consensus that government was
a competent force for good. Now, among Californians of all political
ideologies, there is the opposite: a repudiation of government and,
even more, of any confidence in the governor and the Legislature to act
competently. On that matter, at least, California as a whole has
shifted to the right.[. . .] “The whole spectrum has shifted so far to the right that today’s
Democrats are yesterday’s Republicans. Yes, the state is more
Democratic, but it is by no means liberal.”
I’m not sure I agree that the people of the state are behind this at all. The Republicans depended on that infrastructure that was built up in the years of good government, before the conservatives tore government down. Now the public will start to see what it means to not have the government there for them.