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Written by Sandra Marshall | 30 April 2009
Posted in iNFORMATION PRESS - Points of View

The May 2009 "Kick the Can down the Road"

Ballot-box legislating in California–as in this year’s special election – is a sorry way to run a state of 38 million people. The six measures on the May ballot, A through F, deal with fiscal matters – revenues and expenditures - that should have been resolved by normal parliamentary processes. But our craven legislature is a dysfunctional mess overseen by a governor noted mostly for “true lies.”  This gaggle of lobbyist led whohaws, incapable of doing the job assigned them in our representative democracy, is once again foisting upon the general population the nasty work of rescuing the State from financial disaster.

 

The job of a legislature, every year, is to do the hard work of right sizing revenues to fund a right sized government. The initiative and referendum processes were never intended to take over this basic legislative function. These tools of popular democracy were crafted in the early 1900s to empower the people to curb excess, right gross wrongs and set the constitutional rules of the game.

It is clear, after years of crisis management in Sacramento, that to right size taxes to finance a right sized government in a timely manner, we need to eliminate the two-thirds majority that our state constitution requires for passing tax laws and approving the annual State budget. That constitutional amendment should have been on the ballot this year. Instead, by asking us to approve these six hysterical slights of hand, the legislature and the governor want the people to get them off the hook. The party line is to blame the Republican troglodytes and the rabid, libertarian CA anti-tax lobby for our budgetary Armageddon. But truth is that our Democratic majorities in the State Senate and Assembly could have put constitutional reform on the ballot. Perhaps it is the Democratic legislators who do not want to be empowered to clean up this mess.

Due to the general economic downturn (recession, depression, crash?), if approved, these six ballot measures will not come close to providing the funds needed to bridge the huge gaps in the state budget for schools, mental health, and general government. California is on the cusp of insolvency, perhaps even bankruptcy, but even so I am leaning toward a NO vote on the whole package. This time by denying our elected officials another “hail Mary” pass, we just might force the constitutional reform we really need.

I’m damned tired of being told that I have to clean up after a bunch of politicians who are too clever by half.

Harlan Hobgood 
Avila Beach, CA

DRUG SOLUTION?

The statistics will make you sick:  7,000 killed (many beheaded) in Mexico last year by the drug lords.  Huge percentages are in our prisons right now because of drugs and drug related crimes.  These prisoners are sucking up billions of our taxes and resources.  Mothers lose their children, families are destroyed, young and old have their brains fried.

The money you spend on a joint of marijuana, a line of coke, crack or meth, ends up in the hands of a drug lord in a mansion somewhere.  He uses it to buy guns, bribe and corrupt officials and police, and do every disgusting thing he needs to do to keep control.

You think you’re having a good time, but you’re funding murder, extortion and prostitution with your fix.Let America be a leader to the world.  We can end the drug lords’ rein by simply stopping the use of these products -  one clean person at a time.  Stop a murder – stop using drugs.

Helen Saulsbury
Oceano, CA