Tuesday, December 29, 2009

A Strange Form of Extortion


Governor Schwarzenegger is threatening the people of his state:
If Washington does not provide roughly $8 billion in new aid for the state, the governor threatens to severely cut back -- if not eliminate -- CalWORKS, the state's main welfare program; the In-Home Health Care Services program for the disabled and elderly poor, and two tax breaks for large corporations recently approved by the Legislature, the officials said.
I'll say it again:
If more federal aid is offered to the states, it should have clear strings attached: tax reforms likely to create and sustain a balanced budget starting in, let's say, 2011. The CBO can crunch the numbers.
Schwarzenegger could start by convincing his own party to cooperate with efforts to balance the budget, as well as working to overturn some of the insanity that has been made part of California's state constitution.

2 comments:

  1. I can't believe I'm saying this, but it really is not all the Governator's fault. The largely Democratic-controlled circus in Sacramento is also a big part of the insanity. As for his own party, the state GOP is highly polarized and hostile to him.

    ReplyDelete
  2. No, it's certainly not all his party's fault, but they're a big part of the reason nothing gets fixed. Thanks to a generation of short-sighted ballot initiatives, your state's constitution is also a huge impediment to implementation of, dare I say, common sense solutions. And if the Dems had their act together you wouldn't even have The Governator.

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.