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Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and your legislative leaders came to a tentative agreement this evening to (finally!) "balance California's $26 billion deficit by cutting broadly across state government, shifting costs into the future and capturing funds from cities and counties." According to Sacramento Bee,"[s]tate leaders believe their budget plan is credible enough to acquire billions of dollars in short-term loans that will end the states reliance on IOUs for only the second time since the Great Depression." (That is to say, California is still doomed! Maybe. Anyway.) The budget proposal, Sacto Bee goes on to explain, "includes spending cuts to programs ranging from schools to welfare-to-work to prisons. It takes money from local governments, including borrowing $2 billion that the state will repay starting in 2013 and taking gas taxes that normally go toward local road projects." By the numbers: 6 billion in cuts to education, 3 billion slashed to higher education, and 1.2 billion pruned from prisons. (Cuts to prison funding, however, will not mean that prisoners would get released early.) Some things that were spared? Cal Grants and most state parks. Please standby for fallout.
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Hopefully all San Francisco's legislators will vote no as you'd have to be dumber than Michela Alioto-Pier to vote yes (the laws of physics say that is technically impossible).
Gee, it's a good thing we all voted out Gray Davis due to fiscal irresponsibility and inability to act and put this second rate actor who can barely speak English in his place.
Yeah, that was me yelling at you "Recall Petition" asshole lemmings in the Inner Sunset back in the day.
Who's next, Jackie Chan?
Das TERMINATOR is a political hype machine.
Palin & Arnold in 2012!!!
YAY!!!
(effin retards)
Did you just move here? We've had budget problems no matter whether we're in a good economy or bad, whether the Gov is a Dem or Rep. The only common theme is the Democratically controlled legislature that over spends all the time, making promises to unions they cannot pay for. Blaming this on the recall is both childish and ignorant.
That went right over your head, didn't it?
This calls for the guillotine!
How about they let the nonviolent prisoners out?
We could let the potheads out of jail, and make it legal and clean their records and tax them. It's been said tons but it needs to be said again and again until the sane things happens.
We could let out the people who did stupid horrible things while drunk but are fine when sober, provided they're on a forced regimen of Antabuse and Naltrexone. People generally aren't drunks when a sip of alcohol results in screaming agony.
We could improve good behavior rewards to include shorter sentences for people who complete educational programs. Educated people tend to be better citizens.
We could encourage people to get jobs by ending the scarlet letter of "felon", and only let previous convictions be a factor in job applications if it's directly related to the employment they're applying for. (Repeat petty thieves/shoplifters shouldn't be working retail, vehicular manslaughter convicts shouldn't be delivery drivers, child molesters shouldn't be day care workers, etc.) I've seen too many ex-cons on the streets in my neighborhood who are super likely to reoffend because they can't get a job and bitter toward society since society clearly doesn't care about them.
We could lower our age of consent to something sane so we don't have to spend money to deal with "sex offenders" whose boyfriend/girlfriend happened to be 18 minus a day, instead of filing them in with the kidnap-little-kids crowd. (Seriously, we have way too many people like this costing us money in the system and having their ability to be taxable citizens curtailed. Places like Germany do not have this problem because they recognize that teenagers are not the same as little kids.)
We could stop pretending that prison is "correctional" and spend our money on treatment that fixes people instead, and save our expensive prisons for the people who are completely hopeless (under the assumption that they are going to be there for life).
And that's just prisons! There's so many other ways to save money:
We could roll back labor law slightly and limit unions from demanding pay far and beyond the median and let them focus on making sure there are good working conditions.
On that theme, would could do across the board pay cuts in government. Everyone from the top on down. Maybe 10% of all pay over $30,000 (so the people who can't afford a pay cut don't get hit as hard).
We could stop funding sprawl-enabling road projects that forces us to spend more money later on sustaining that sprawl. We have a highway network that is way too huge and needs to be pruned. The government does not owe you the favor of subsidizing your desire to have 15 lanes of freeway connecting you from your house in the boonies.
But most importantly -- we amend prop 13. Howard Jarvis singlehandedly crippled our state, and it's time we fixed it. Get rid of the stupid 2/3rd rule (MAYBE keep it a supermajority, but lowered to the 55% supermajority from prop 39, only apply it to everything, not just school bonds). We should keep the property tax limitations for homesteaders (rent control for old people) and small businesses, but not corporate landlords (if you get to jack up the rent when someone new moves in, then the state should be able to raise the tax on that unit too).
Even with prop 13 in place though, there's tons of ways we could ease our budget woes without simple broad-stroke cuts. We can do better than that.
FREE THE COSCO BUSAN 1!
"We are all John Cota"
(get ready for the t-shirts to hit the street any day now...the Mission hipsters will eat it up)
love that the piece of shit chronicle (and now you, SFist?) put "tentative" and "finally" in the same sentence. Which is it?
"Borrowing" $2B in local funds is more like "unconstitutionally stealing local redevelopment funds with some vague promise to repay that could always be amended by Sacramento in the future". All that does is shift the pain down the chain - from the useless state bureaucrats in Sacto (including the overpaid prison guards union) down to the local level - which is about the only level of government that seems to get anything useful done.
The spineless Democrats need to just say NO to this "deal" - call the insane Republicans bluff. Let the GOP pull a Gingrich and shut government down. That worked out SOOOOO well for Newt and the gang.
It's time, folks. A constitution designed to prevent the railroad trusts from controlling the state in the 1800s has become a suicide pact in the 2000s. Let's do this thing:
http://www.repaircalifornia.org/
will a constitutional convention allow us to toss the proposition process out the window?
please tell me so.
Silly me ... I thought we'd finally reached the year when the State's elected officials could not cop out and kick the can down the road again ... but we've got another "get out of town" or "good 'nuff" budget proposal. My favorite (cynicism) is pushing a payday from June 30, 2010 (last day of fiscal year) to July 1, 2010 (first day of 2010-2011 fiscal year) to save $1 billion in the 2009-2010 fiscal year. The borrowing from the Counties at this point in the great recession is maddening ... maybe it is time to drown the state government in the bath water and get back to San Francisco taxpayers taking care of San Francisco ... and those Counties that voted yes on Prop 8 taking care of their own damn problems with water and what not.
Oh ... and Democrats who keep pointing fingers at Arnold need to stop the spinning like Ann Coulter and take responsiblity for this shit mess they helped create back in the early 2000's when they ignored Governor Gray Davis's plea that they DO NOT treat the one-time $13 billion surge in income taxes thanks to dot-come folks cashing out their stock options before that bubble completely bursted .. and instead, the legislators quickly found a way to work the one-time surge of options money into California's operational budget ... dumb, dumb, dumb. Worst of all, the kids are getting screwed left and right by the selfishness of people who won't face realities .... oh well, they'll just have to rob people to survive I guess.