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Guest
Contributor
Joe
Armendariz
Joe Armendariz is Executive Director of the Santa Barbara
Industrial Association and the Santa Barbara County Taxpayers
Association.
 The
House Always Wins!
Sacramento Democrats control the game...
[Joe Armendariz] 7/13/04
I disagree
with the premise of a recent Dan Walters column (Schwarzenegger's
Failure Makes New Taxes Inevitable).
It isn't Schwarzenegger's failure that makes new taxes inevitable;
it's Schwarzenegger's successes that make new taxes inevitable.
Indeed, his first major policy success: convincing
state taxpayers to borrow $15 billion to get out of debt,
is a de-facto increase in the state's future tax burden, in that, it allows
the Democrats, who remain in complete control of the Legislature, to avoid
any kind of fiscal accountability by ignoring the state's fiscal reality.
What is the fiscal reality? The same as it always was; too
much government spending, too much waste in the budget, too
much fraud in state programs and
too much abuse of taxpayers, business and industry. Sound familiar? It should,
because the more things change, in Sacramento, the more they stay the same.
Schwarzenegger, in an honest, albeit misguided, attempt to
fix California's fiscal problems, fell for the oldest trick
in the book; he made deals with
the same politicians that created the fiscal mess in the first place.
By dropping his request for meaningful cuts in the Democrats'
stable of sacred-cows and by dropping his idea to ask the voters
to force the legislature to limit
the annual rate of growth in state spending, the Democrats gave him "permission" to
ask those same voters for a $15 billion dollar line of credit (Prop-57), and
to amend the state constitution by requiring a balanced budget (Prop-58).
Regarding Prop-57 and 58, some of us, indeed, very few of us,
said it wouldn't work and we were right. With respect to
Prop-57, we reminded those who would
listen that you can't borrow your way out of debt. As for Prop-58, we suggested
that by requiring a balanced budget without a requirement that there also
be a spending cap, we are making a tax increase...um, well,
inevitable.
What has been the result? The $15 billion is already being
used to pay for more government cheese and the so-called
balanced budget act is proving to
be about as effective in controlling spending as an onramp meter is in preventing
traffic on an LA freeway.
Fast forward to today and wouldn't you now it? Those clever
Democrats, in giving Arnold all that he asked for, are once
again in an enviable position of calling
most, if not all, of the shots on the budget. They remain in the pocket of
the state's powerful public safety unions; the state's left-wing teachers
union and the state's greedy public-employee unions. This
iron-triangle of anti-taxpayer
organizations is rested, ready and prepared for battle against a chaotic,
frustrated and fractured Republican party.
The Republicans are like Charlie Brown. No matter how many
times they try to kick that football through the goal post,
the Democrats, like the crafty Lucy
herself, succeed in yanking it away at the last moment. And the result is
always the same, the legs go up, the head goes down and the
victim is lying there
flat on their back stunned, seeing stars and utterly defeated. It would be
funny if it weren't so tragic.
The fact of the matter is, Democrats are better at this game.
The Republicans are burdened by a conviction to tell voters
the truth and to try and play by
the rules. Somewhere along the line, the Democrats were liberated from this
moral tyranny. For them, after all, it isn't how you play the game that matters,
it's who wins. And just like in Vegas, where the house always wins, in California,
the Democrats are the house and the odds are that they will remain so for
many years to come. CRO
copyright
2004 Joe Armendariz
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