The Great California Mess: It’s 80 Initiatives Deep
By Peter Schrag
A lot of Sacramento’s wise heads are warning that if more than one of the half dozen or so tax proposals now being circulated for next November’s California ballot actually get there, exasperated voters till throw up their hands and vote them all down.
The onus for clearing the field has been hung on Gov. Jerry Brown, whose own plan – a combination of increases in high-bracket income taxes and across the board sales taxes – is given the best chance of passing.
But what few have noticed, and may be even more important as a measure of the mess we’re in, is that those tax plans are part of a larger glut of some 75 would-be ballot measures that have been cleared for circulation or are waiting at the attorney general’s office for title and summary, so they too can join the crowd that’s already on the streets.
Shorter Mercury News: California Doesn’t Need Jobs
By Robert Cruickshank
California’s current unemployment rate is 11.3%. That’s still a far higher level than the state has seen in decades – and it has been sustained at around that level for at least two years.
California faces nothing less than a severe jobs crisis. That doesn’t mean any old job is a good job. But when you have an opportunity to create tens of thousands of jobs per year while building sustainable infrastructure that can save money and spur new growth for the rest of the century, you would be crazy to dismiss it. California didn’t dismiss those opportunities during the Great Depression, building dams and bridges that put people to work immediately and still help create economic value 75 years later.
Grover Norquist: Portrait of a One Percenter
By Steven Mikulan
Even when he loses, Grover Norquist wins. This is one of the unsettling conclusions to be drawn from Peter Dreier and Donald Cohen’s December 20 feature, “Grover Norquist’s Real Game: Shifting Power and Wealth to the 1 Percent,” posted on Truthout.org.
Their richly detailed portrait of the founder of Americans for Tax Reform shows Norquist as not simply a more highly evolved version of Howard Jarvis, the California anti-tax zealot who bequeathed us the nightmare known as Proposition 13. Indeed, as Dreier and Cohen state, Norquist is not really a conservative genuinely interested in smaller government or tax reform, but the hired arsonist of big business. Although highly secretive about who pays his rent, Norquist has flacked or lobbied for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Big Tobacco and the gambling industry, to name a few of his benefactors.