California voted “no” to more taxes. Hopefully Jerry Brown will not take us to court for voting, again, against the will of the state establishment. We can assume the LA Times will call us names for it.
Only an elite already at war with their own voters would be surprised to discover that raising taxes is rarely popular in California. The problem as Sacramento sees it? Voters also overwhelmingly oppose cutting most services when polled.
This poll data has become an excuse for lawmakers not to make those painful cuts. Tonight the LA Times is putting much of the blame for the budget mess on voters. I pointed out yesterday it may be true that voters want two contradictory things: bigger government and less spending.
Sadly, we have only been able to try bigger government. The elite believe they know which we really prefer so they keep trying different tricks to get us to embrace taxes. Why not try something new?
Here is an idea for Sacramento: make the cuts and call our bluff if you dare.
Instead of coming back again and again to the voters hoping to get tax increases only to fail, give the voters the government for which they have paid. Renegotiate contracts with government employee unions like a bankrupt business. Slash budgets.
See what the voters do. Perhaps a year of “austerity” will wake us up and we will vote for more taxes next election.
Why won’t the politicians take this simple step?
They are afraid for their jobs if voters discover they don’t like a smaller, leaner government and even more fear that voters will learn to live with “smaller” state government and remove “fear” of draconian cuts from future campaigns.
But this fear points to the fundamental problem in the system: our representatives are not earning their money by giving the voters a real choice. We vote for no tax increase, but tell pollsters we want about the same services.
Call our bluff Sacramento.
Find out which is more serious: what we tell pollsters or our actual votes.
Sacramento avoids this obvious decision, because left-of-center politicians are petrified that many voters may like the smaller government. They may not want so much “safety net.”
Left-of-center types have worked for and encouraged passage of voter initiatives in the past that designated spending for favored causes. The reasoning on the left was that with a great deal of budget money tied up in these special projects, the state would have to raise taxes to pay for “essentials.” Government would keep growing.
If that did not work, the same people who favored funding the “cause-of-the-week” could blame the people for their bind if they were not allowed to raise taxes to fund normal budget needs.
This trick would allow budgets to expand forever . . . or the voters would take the blame.
Perhaps, however, the voters are not to blame, because they want the “causes” funded and don’t want so much “normal” state government. Sacramento should find out by passing a balanced budget without raising taxes and seeing if the people of the state like it.
Call our bluff: give us the government for which we paid and not a penny more.