The $35 million Lou Correa would get for Orange County would COST us $1 billion

Update: Of course, Lou “North” Correa sold out and voted in favor of the tax — and against taxpayers.

State Sen. Lou Correa is a smart fellow. But he must have taken that New New Math back in grade school instead of real math.

In return for selling his vote for the $14 billion tax increases in Gov. Arnold’s Budget Abomination, Lou extracted from his fellow Democrats, who run the Legislature, $35 million more in state spending for Orange County (for the first year; more in subsequent years — if state Democrats keep their word, which they might not).

But Orange County’s 3 million residents are 8% of California’s 37 million. 8% of the $14 billion tax increase is  $1.12 billion.

Next: $1.12 billion – $35 million = $1.085 billion. That’s how much Lou’s vote would cost Orange County.

That’s $362 for each Orange County resident, each year, in higher taxes. And it’s $1,448 for a family of four, each year.

As I write on Sunday afternoon, Feb. 15, it’s still not too late for Lou to vote against this Budget Abomination.

Harry Sidhu is running for O.C. Supervisor — in the wrong district

My sources tell me that Anaheim City Councilman Harry Sidhu is running for Orange County Supervisor in the Fourth District — even though he lives in the Third District. He is scouting a new residence in the Third.

Beginning a week ago, on Feb. 6, I made several calls to Sidhu to confirm his position, but he has not returned the calls. So I’m going with this story anyway.

His candidacy means Sidhu is moving out of the Third District, the location of his current residence, into the Fourth District.

It’s called carpetbagging, and Americans frown on it. A politician is supposed to come from among the people he represents.

We have residency requirements that are supposed to prevent rich people from other areas effectively buying a seat, something common in England, where there is no residency requirement for parliament. The most famous modern American carpetbagger is Hillary Clinton, who switched from Arkansas to New York to run for the Senate in 2000, but now is President Obama’s secretary of state.

The Fourth District currently is held by the excellent Chris Norby, who is term-limited out of office. The best candidate to replace him is Shawn Nelson, currently a Fullerton councilman and previously the city’s mayor.  Nelson has made a name for himself fighting a pension-spiking scheme for the city’s government workers.

At times like these — of economic Depression and insane tax increases pending at the state level — Orange County needs a real fighter like Nelson. As times get tougher, you just know Orange County’s government-shirker unions are going to imitate their state brethren and push tax increases instead of cuts in government waste.

How about 2010?

Sidhu should stay put in Anaheim, complete his current term as councilman and, if he still thinks Orange County needs him as a supervisor, run in his home Third District when it is vacated in 2010 by term-limited incumbent Bill Campbell.

After all, the Third District is the Indigestion District. Campbell once owned a number of Taco Bells, and Sidhu owns a number of Burger Kings.

Burger King’s most famous slogan is, “Have it your way.” In Orange county, “our way” is electing locals.

How to avoid Gov. Arnold’s new tax increases

It looks like the fix is in for massive tax increases in California, put together by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger-Shriver-Kennedy and legislative leaders. The tax increases are supposed to be “temporary” — that is, permanent.  Here’s what is in the works, although the details could change:

• Increasing the state’s sales tax by 1 cent on the dollar.

• Increasing gasoline taxes by 12 cents per gallon.

• Raising the state’s vehicle license fee from the current 0.65 percent of a vehicle’s value to 1.15 percent, with 1 percent going to the general fund and local law enforcement getting 0.15 percent.

• Increasing the personal income tax across the board, either by assessing a surcharge on tax liability or increasing the tax rate.

But you don’t have to pay the tax increases.

First, if you don’t live in Taxifornia, don’t come here. Take a vacation or get a job somewhere else.

If you live here, then you should make a determined effort to pay to the state fewer taxes this year than last year — legally, of course. It’s simple, really. Just find ways to not pay the taxes.

Some ideas…

How to cut spending

* Avoid the sales tax by buying less stuff. Just buy essentials. Food and medicines are tax-free. Postpone or forget everything else.

* Postpone buying a new car until the taxes drop.  You’ll have to pay for parts and repairs on your old flivver, but it still will be less than new car payments.

* Take a vacation in another state. If you planned on going to Yellowstone, instead go to the Grand Canyon. Make sure you fill up your gas tank with cheaper petrol just before you drive back across the Iron Curtain into Taxifornia.

* Fix your own house, car, etc. Prepare your own food. Fix and iron your own clothes.

* Barter with friends. For example, if you’re an accountant, you could prepare taxes for a car mechanic, in return for him fixing your car.

* It’s hard to avoid an income tax increase without accepting pay that’s lower than what you deserve. But you could move to a state with no state income taxes, such as Nevada or Texas, and avoid paying Taxifornia’s record high income taxes.

* Drive less. Instead of driving to a movie, stay home and read a book — or this blog. You’ll also save the high price of the movie — more than $40 for a family of four, plus all the junk food. Instead of driving to a shopping spree, don’t shop at all and save your money (see above).

Time to save, not spend

Of course, the message from the crooks in government is the opposite. They’re ordering us to Spend! Spend! Spend! And because we’re still not spending as much as they want us to, the government is perpetrating one wild spending “stimulus” after another, each worse than the last.

The real problem is that Americans — citizens, businesses, and governments — have spent way too much, paying for it with debt binges. That needs to end.

Citizens need to spend less. Governments needs to spend less and cut tax rates, not raise them. And debt should be reduced, not increased.

You can start by making sure your tax payments this year are less than last year.

Don’t let Gov. Arnold steal and waste any more of your hard-earned money than he already does.

Obama “stimulus” = Bush “stimulus”

Didn’t we have an election for “Change you can believe in”?

Obama’s first imperial press conference showed nothing is changing except the new prez is a smoother talker, not hard to do after 8 years of Bush’s tied tongue.

Obama sayeth:

What I won’t do is return to the failed theories of the last eight years that got us into this fix in the first place, because those theories have been tested and they have failed. And that’s part of what the election in November was all about. Okay?

Okay, okay, okay. We get it.

But what happened the last eight years? Bush blew $5 trillion on the Iraq War (not to mention all the dead Americans and Iraqis) and paid for it with inflation, deficits, and debt. To pacify upset voters, he went on the biggest domestic spending binge since LBJ.

What’s Obama doing? Continuing the Iraq War, escalating the Afghan War, conducting even more attacks on Pakistan, and spending even more wildly than Bush. And Obama isn’t ending the Bush inflation. (The decline in some prices in recent months is temporary, as people cut back spending and inventories piled up. Now inventories are clearing and prices are rising again — as you see at your gas pump — and soon will rise even faster.)

Bush also had two “stimulus” packages last year. Neither worked. Both made matters worse.

Bush tax increases = Obama tax increases

And as to taxes, Obama is just continuing Bush’s tax policies. Most of Bush’s tax cuts already were scheduled to expire in 2010. Call them the 2010 Bush tax increases. Obama is letting that happen.  So where’s the change?

Oh, and the impending tax increases are a big Sword of Damocles hanging over the U.S. economy right now. Persons and  businesses have no idea what tax levels will be imposed next year or in the following years.

Obama attacked Republicans for opposing his “stimulus.” Yet just a few months ago they supported both of Bush’s “stimulus” schemes. So it’s just partisanship — therefore irrelevant.

Cold turkey

Quoth Obama:

But at this particular moment, with the private sector so weakened by this recession, the federal government is the only entity left with the resources to jolt our economy back into life.

The analogy is to a patient on a gurney in the ER with heart failure, being shocked back to life with those electric paddles. That’s the wrong analogy.

Rather, the economy has been on the heroin of wildly increasing government in recent years under Bush and needs to go cold turkey, withdrawing from the opiates of high taxes and high spending. It will be painful. But the alternative is more addiction, economic depression, and even more painful withdrawal symptoms later.

John Lennon got it right:

Counties should secede from California tyranny

It’s time for the counties to secede from California. The large counties should do so by themselves, the counties with smaller populations should band together. Each county — or group of counties — would become a new American state.

Some news items show why this is needed now:

* Because the state government’s budget is $42 billion in the red, it’s withholding money from local governments. Now, Los Angeles County supervisors are considering withholding money from the state. They should do it.

Los Angeles doesn’t need the California government, which is a massive parasite. Los Angeles County has 10 million people, more than 40 states. That’s more than Georgia, North Carolina, New Jersey, or Virginia. So it should be a state.

For that matter, Orange County, where I live, has 3 million people, more than 20 states. That’s more than Mississippi, Arkansas, or Kansas. So it should be a state, too.

* California’s credit rating just dropped to the lowest of all 50 states.  That means higher interest rates paid on the state’s debt, which means an even higher deficit. Standard and Poor’s wrote of the drop:

At its current level, the rating generally recognizes our view of the lack of political progress around the budget negotiations that we believe is serving to exacerbate the state’s current and projected cash position.

Translation: The state’s broke.  In that case, why do we even need the state? Why can’t the counties — or groups of counties, in the case of the less populated areas — become free and independent states?

* The state still is refusing to pay tax refunds owed citizens. This is robbery, pure and simple. The citizens paid too much in taxes, and deserve to get their money back as refunds. But the state is keeping the money. Supposing you bought a new car for $25,000 but the dealer actually took $30,000 from your bank account — then refused to give you back your $5,000. He’d go to jail. Yet, the state gets away with this highway robbery.

* Proposition 8, which banned the joke of same-sex “marriage,”  continues to rattle around in the courts. But why should Orange County, which overwhelmingly passed Prop. 8, have to live in the same state as San Francisco, which overwhelmingly defeated it? Break up the state and let each county — now a state — have its own rules, however sensible or absurd.

* California’s population is 37 million, or 12 times the population of the whole country in 1776, when the 13 countries seceded brom the tyrannical British Empire. Well, it’s well past time for the counties to secede from the tyrannical California state empire.

A Declaration of Independence from California

So, let secession go forth. Each county — or group of small-population counties — could start a Declaration of Independence that begins something like this:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Counties; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present Governor of California is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these Counties. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.