By George Runner
If
you fall for an opponent’s head fake in sports, you risk losing the
game. The stakes are much higher for taxpayers. If they fall for the
Governor’s head fake this November, the price tag could be as high as
$50 billion dollars by 2019.
Don’t
be fooled. The Governor and Legislature have for months been carefully
orchestrating a head fake of massive proportions designed to scare
Californians into voting for higher taxes.
At the center of this head fake are $6 billion dollars of “trigger cuts” contained in this year’s recently signed budget.
The
budget hopes voters will approve raising taxes by $8.5 billion a year.
The trigger cuts kick-in only if voters reject higher taxes this
November.
There’s
no good reason for the Legislature to postpone balancing the budget.
There’s also no reason, except political games, why 99% of the trigger
cuts target schools.
About
half of California’s state budget funds education. This year’s budget
grows school funding by 6.7 billion—14%. Including both general and
special funds, K-12 will get $68.4 billion and higher education will
receive $23.1 billion.
Governor
Brown insists nothing fishy is going on. When he unveiled his budget in
January, he claimed his numbers “emanate from the bowels of the Finance
Department bureaucracy.”
The
experts aren’t buying it. Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse Unruh
Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California, called
the Governor’s plan the “largest ransom note in California political
history.”
Allow
me to explain: the Governor and his allies want more of your
hard-earned money. But they also know most voters won’t agree to send
more dollars to Sacramento to fund growing welfare entitlement programs,
state worker pensions and the like—especially when the Legislature
refuses to reform these programs.
The
Governor and his allies linked their tax increase scheme to something
voters really care about—teachers and schools. According to the Public
Policy Institute of California, K-12 education is the budget area most
Californians would like to see spared from cuts—58% of likely voters and
64% of public school parents chose it over three other major areas of
state spending.
In
alliance with the Governor, the Attorney General has already titled the
Governor’s ballot measure “Temporary Taxes to Fund Education” to make
sure you understand school funding is at stake.
In
case that wasn’t enough to increase his chances of victory, the
Governor and his friends have even found a clever way to move their tax
hike to the top of the ballot. They think you’re more likely to vote yes
before you get worn out reading the dozen or so measures on November’s
ballot.
It
will still be an uphill battle. California voters have rejected eight
consecutive efforts to raise taxes at the ballot box. The most recent
vote in June was a measure aimed at raising cigarette taxes by a dollar a
pack. It failed.
If this pattern continues and voters reject the Governor’s tax hike plan, the full trigger cuts probably won’t happen.
Case
in point—last year’s budget contained $2.5 billion in trigger cuts.
These cuts were to be implemented if revenues fell short mid-year. When
revenues did fall short, the Governor only imposed $980 million of the
cuts, sparing K-12 classrooms from a $1.5 billion loss in funding.
There
are always other options. Republican lawmakers offered a budget plan
this year that protected education funding and did not raise taxes.
Since Republican votes are no longer needed to approve budgets, that
plan was ignored by the Democrat majority.
Don’t
get faked out by slick campaign commercials urging you to vote for
school funding. They’re but a final move in a carefully orchestrated
head fake designed to take more of your money to Sacramento.
