Yet another attempt to raise California’s taxes is rearing its head, this time from a group calling itself Think Long California. It’s already getting the usual uncritical reception from a fawning media.
(UPDATE II: The LA Times for a change doesn’t fall into this category. It published a fair article on the tax hike proposal, complete with appropriate headline)
Tax hike given its proper description
The Huffington Post bluntly spells out the net effect of this (UPDATE: I added this image below from a HuffPost article on the effort for Alger’s benefit, because he expressed doubt in the comments that this is really a tax increase):
Steven Greenhut at the limited-government site CalWatchDog puts this effort into perspective:
“California has produced a cottage industry of phony reformers who claim they want to fix the state, but they never want to touch the real problems — public sector unions, overspending, inadequate representation, too much regulation, etc. They always have names such as California Forward or whatnot.
“The latest is called Think Long — a group of well-known “reformers” including Willie Brown, Condoleezza Rice, Eli Broad, Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Please, pick yourself up off the floor after laughing so hard you coughed up your spleen. Didn’t many of these folks have their chance and blow it?
“Brown, Davis and Schwarzenegger did more to create our problem than to fix it. Their solution is — drum roll please — a massive tax restructuring that leads to much higher taxes. Hold the presses. Don’t think too long and hard on this nonsense.”
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(DISCLAIMER: Opinions I express here are not necessarily those of my employer, the North County Times.)