Arnold: I will pump your taxes up!

Instead of electing Arnold governor, Californians should have tapped Hans und Franz, the parody of him on Saturday Night Live in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They always shouted, “Ve vill pump..you up!”

Arnold now is preparing to pump up not us, but our taxes. The L.A. Times reports:

News that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s administration is exploring potential tax hikes on personal services, some prepared foods and other items to help close a budget gap was not warmly received by consumers and business owners Friday….

The ideas being studied by the administration are geared toward closing a budget gap that the governor says has now grown as large as $20 billion — while the economy goes south and tax receipts dwindle. The hunt for potential tax hikes is occurring even as the governor has continued to say publicly that he will resist them and his staff denied Friday that they were considering new taxes.

You know it’s coming. Arnold has spent 5 years balancing not a single budget, a dismal record achieved by no previous governor, because of his wild spending. And that was during prosperous times. Now that a recession is hitting, like predecessor Gov. Gray Davis — who was recalled and replaced by Arnold for raising taxes — Arnold is going to raise taxes.

You know what he’ll say:

Is only temporary increase in fees. Really a tax cut. Otherwise the poor will be hurt and will cause problems. Will make Kalifornia better, wealthier.

Or some such rot said in an Austrian accent that sounds like my grandfather’s. (By the way, my grandfather came here in 1907 when there was no income tax, federal or state. Can I have the same rate — pretty please, with apfel strudle on top?)

As always, the higher taxes will chase away businesses and make the budget deficit worse, bringing even larger spending cuts in the future.

Waste…Waste…Waste…Waste 

But let’s look at where the waste is that Arnold easily could cut:

• L.A. Unified School District blew $230 million for a new arts school building that is admitted to be a waste. The Times reports:
  • But the cost of the project has gone from $30 million in 2001 for the standard-issue high school to roughly $200 million more for the new-and-improved version seven years later. The tower rises from a 950-seat performing arts theater, and this part of the project alone is priced at $49 million.
• To curb greenhouses gases that supposedly cause global “warming” (but really don’t — the earth actually is cooling), Arnold hired 211 more bureaucrats to assault California businesses. Cost to taxpayer: $55.4 million a year.
• Arnold pushed through his darling Proposition 49 back in 2002, when he was thinking of running for governor. It funds midnight basketball and other schemes to keep kids occupied while their parents are busy working three jobs to pay all the taxes to Arnold. Total cost every year: $455 million.

The California budget, whose general fund now is more than $103 billion a year, is riddled with waste, inefficiency, and boondoggles. It easily could be cut $20 billion to make it balanced. No tax increases necessary.

Let’s recall Arnold, as I’ve been insisting now for more than a year and a half — since just before clueless voters re-elected the Austrian Oaf — and replace him with Hans und Franz. As they would say, when it comes to cutting waste, Arnold is just a “girlie man.”

Summer gas tax cut is another dumb gimmick

One of the worst bipartisan gimmicks ever is the proposal for a summer cut of the gas tax. You know how much I hate taxes.

Except the gas tax actually is a user fee: You pay it, they build and fix the roads. If you don’t drive, you don’t pay the tax.

A real reform would be to turn the entire Interstate Highway System over to the states, getting the feds out of it completely. Better yet, entirely privatize the system.

There’s nothing in the Constitution that authorizes the Interstate Highway System. Eisenhower built it to imitate the Autobahns he saw after he conquered Hitler’s Germany. The excuse for Ike’s Folly was that it was for “national defense.” Supposedly, the Russkis were going to attack the East Coast while the ChiComs were going to attack the West Coast, so the freeways would be used by the military to truck the troops to the invasion points. Except both commie powers didn’t have any capability to invade America, and still don’t now that they’re capitalist.

Ironically, the interstate system makes it easy for illegal immigrants to spread across the whole country.

The highways ripped up wide swaths of every big city in America, commonly the areas where blacks lived because they didn’t have as much clout as whites. The blacks were forced into “projects,” instant slums that profited well-connected landlords and developers, Republican and Democrat.

McCain proposed the gas-tax-cut idea and Hillary supports it. The first doesn’t know anything about economics and the second is a cynical opportunist. Only Obama is opposed.

Finally, as a constant reader of my blog, you know that the real reason gas prices are high is not because of the gas tax, but inflation. Nobody but Ron Paul is talking about that. So expect no real relief.

Free Wesley Snipes!

The evil federal government just sentenced actor Wesley Snipes to 3 years in prison for three misdemeanor charges of not filing his taxes. It was the maximum penalty.

Three misdemeanors.

How about accepting his apology and accepting his check for payment? Nope. Not enough.

What a vicious government we have. The feds alone waste more than $3 trillion a year on unconstitutional wars, unconstitutional welfare schemes, unconstitutional assaults on our liberties — unconstitutional everything. And even that isn’t enough to steal from us. So they’ve put America’s citizens — even its children, born and unborn — in hock $9 trillion.

To get that kind of money they need to terrorize citizens into coughing up their hard-earned dough.

The news story reported:

“There’s nothing unusual about prosecuting a celebrity,” Judge William Hodges said. “[Snipes] never mentioned the words tax or taxes in his apology.”

Our Masters want us to grovel before them.

And the government loves to prosecute celebrities because it publicizes their terror and gets the little people to more readily go along. Remember how the odious Rudi Guiliani framed, demonized, prosecuted, persecuted, and imprisoned Leona Helmsley and Michael Milken?

This is not a free country. Just ask Wesley Snipes.

Nevada, here they come

Taxes are so high in Taxifornia that Nevada has begun a new campaign to lure away tax-weary businesses.

For those who abandon the Tax State, on the negative side, the weather’s a lot worse, especially across a scorching summer. On the positive side, you can still smoke in bars.

Writes the L.A. Times:

In a series of advertisements in newspapers and business journals that portray California in cartoons, the Nevada Development Authority is trying to lure California enterprises across the state line.

“Doing your part to carry the un-Bear-able load?” asks one ad, which features a cartoon of a businessman lugging the bear from California’s state flag on his back. The bear has a fistful of cash in its mouth and, just to be clear, the words “California Taxes” on its left hind leg.

“We can see what is going on in California as far as businesses are concerned,” Somer Hollingsworth, president of the authority, which is seeking to attract companies to the Las Vegas area, said in an interview. “They’ve got workers’ comp issues, a $16.5-billion deficit, employee retirement funds that are out of whack.”

Now many in Sacramento “want to raise billions of dollars in taxes,” Hollingsworth said, “and the only people left to pay them are businesses.”

I’ll bet you five-to-one that this only will get worse after Gov. Arnold jacks up taxes later this year.

Taxifornia’s top state tax rate, 10.3%, already is the highest in the country, and is almost as high as the 11% in Russia. But on top of that, alas and alack, in California also is imposed the 35% U.S. federal tax, which soon will be raised to 38% or higher by President Obama.

Back when I was in the U.S. Army, in 1979 I got posted to a unit in West Germany. I attended the 1979 international auto show in Frankfurt. The Russians — then called the Soviets — offered a car actually called (I kid you not; it’s no longer April Fools’ Day) the “Kalifornia.” It was a socialist knockoff of the Ford Bronco.

Fast-forward to 2008, and it’s Russia with a 11% income tax that’s capitalist, and it’s the actual state of Kalifornia — with a combined top income tax rate of 45.3% (soon to be 48%-plus) — that’s socialist.

Nevada at least offers some respite, if you can pay your air conditioning bill.

Arnold: jack up “fees” on property insurance

Arnold already is proposing a massive tax increase: a new “fee” — really a tax — on property insurance to pay for government firefighting:

This week, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed tacking a fee onto all property insurance policies sold in the state and using the proceeds to fight blazes in areas served by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The 1.25% levy would raise $125 million a year in badly needed funds.

Some fire officials hailed the move as a first step toward recognizing the immense danger and cost of living on the edge of the wild lands, noting that the state needs to spend hundreds of millions more on fire protection, according to reports completed after the devastating 2003 fires.

But if you don’t live “on the edge of the wild lands,” why should you pay for the protection of such homes, which tend to be owned by very rich people? If they choose to live there, they should pay for their own fire protection.

Somebody should check to see if a lot of Arnold’s rich donors live in such areas, and so would benefit from the taxes paid by others.

Ain’t government a swell racket?

(Keep up with my blog. Sign up for my RSS feed. And click here to hire me for your writing projects.)

L.A. Times: tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax tax

The L.A. Times continues its obsession with raising taxes. On the same day, it ran two calls for higher taxes to reduce the state’s budget deficit (actually caused by excessive spending).

“Consumer Confidential” (but not Taxpayer Confidential) columnist David Lazarus insists:

Proposition 13 has overstayed its welcome.

It’s pretty simple, though. Either we spend less money or we raise revenue, or both.

All things considered, our friends in Sacramento aren’t going to suddenly discover the value of frugality — unless packed schoolrooms, broken bridges and crumbling levees are your idea of satisfactory quality of life.

So that means we need to get our hands on some extra cash. And like it or not, that means taxes. That’s a bad word, I know. But it’s how things work in the real world.

No, that’s not how things work in the real world. When you increase taxes too much, people leave the state or stop working. That happened in California in the early 1990s, when tax increases hammered the economy so much state revenues declined.

And a Times idiotorial intones:

Schwarzenegger himself referred to criticism over his decision to reinstitute deep cuts to the state’s vehicle license fee. He continues to insist that his decision was the right one. He continues to be wrong. Just as California must not, in the governor’s words, go through a “binge and purge” cycle with spending, it shouldn’t do it with taxes either.

The time to impose broad new taxes is not when the economy is struggling. Still, the governor and the Legislature would be wise to take a long look at some of the loopholes they have adopted to cater to the needs of wealthy interests.

Don’t they remember the immense suffering Californians endured when then-Gov. Gray Davis unilaterally imposed the car tax hike in 2003? Outrage was so high that he was recalled for it (as well as for other reasons). The tax increase also was unconstitutional.

And what “loopholes” are they talking about? Name one, please. Is it Prop. 13?

No wonder the Times’s circulation is declining. They’re detached from reality.

(Keep up with my blog. Sign up for my RSS feed. And click here to hire me for your writing projects.)

Tax cuts needed to ward off recession: Larry Summers is right

Larry Summers was the Treasury Secretary in the Clinton administration and remains a top Democratic Party economist. Now he says a tax cut of up to $75 billion is needed to ward off a recession:

Insufficient action to contain recessionary forces has much more serious consequences than excessive action to contain recessionary force.

He’s right. Great idea!

Unfortunately, Hillary, Obama, and the other Democratic candidates for president, as well as the Democratic leadership in Congress, want the opposite: massive tax increases. At the Dec. 13 Iowa Debate, they said:

Hillary:

I want to restore the tax rates that we had in the ’90s. That means raising taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals.

Obama:

Well, every proposal I’ve put forward during this campaign, we have paid for. And we have specified where that money is going to come from.

But let’s just look at our tax code, because it’s a great example of how we could provide some relief to ordinary citizens who are struggling to get by.

Right now, we’ve got a whole host of corporate loopholes and tax savings. There’s a building in the Cayman Islands that houses, supposedly, 12,000 U.S.-based corporations….

If we close some of those loopholes [meaning tax increases], that helps me to pay for an offset on the payroll tax that effects all Americans.

But tax increases would take money out of the economy and put it in the hands of grubby, wasteful government apparatchiki.

What’s needed is tax cuts for everbody to boost the economy — more, better, bigger, higher, faster tax cuts.

(Keep up with my blog. Sign up for my RSS feed. And click here to hire me for your writing projects.)

Just go ahead and increase cigarette taxes……………………..

Cigarette tax increases again are the rage. Arnold’s socialized medicine scheme would include cig tax increases up to $2 a pack.

At the national level, the Commonwealth Fund has come out with a “report” calling for cig tax increases to fund socialized medicine:

For example, the report calls for boosting the federal tobacco tax by $2 from the current 39 cents a pack. It also proposes a penny tax on 12-ounce, sugar-sweetened soft drinks to fund a campaign against obesity. And it proposes a 1% levy on insurance premiums to finance rapid computerization of records kept by doctors and hospitals.

All these people proposing cig tax increases are wealthy, like Arnold, or make big moolah at foundations. They don’t know what $2 a pack more means to the people who pay it.

I only smoke a couple stogies a week, so a tax increase wouldn’t affect me much. But I have friends who smoke cigarettes. These are not wealthy folks. They’re working stiffs. A couple are “single moms,” in the parlance of our time. They struggle. Meanwhile Arnold, the foundation fat-cats, and the politicians live it up, eating at four-star restaurants and guzzling expensive wine.

“Quit smoking” is the prescription for the high cost of cig taxes for my friends. Yeah, but how about if you like it? And how about if it calms your nevers in this high-tax, bureaucracy-choked, dismal Arnoldtopia?

Another nerve-wracking piece of legislation was passed last year, and signed by Gov. Arnold, right here in North Koreafornia. It bans smoking in cars with kids. “Second-hand” smoking is just another superstition, like believing that, if you put a hair in a bottle of water, it will become a worm. But the main point is that this is yet another seizure of parental authority by the omnipotent, oppressive, fascist government.

And there even are some health benefits to smoking. Benefits? What? Yes — relief for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Tourette’s Syndrome, even schizophrenia and cocaine addiction, according to “The Health Benefits of Tobacco,” a book by Dr. William Campbell Douglass, M.D. People, not government, should be in charge of their own health. And keep Arnold and other government functionaries away from our kids!

But I’m getting carried away. Back to the point…

When a decaded ago Canada increased cig taxes to around $7 a pack (U.S. currency) — where America is headed — a vast black market sprouted. The government didn’t get the taxes because the smugglers took over the market. The government had to cut taxes back so a pack cost around $4.50.

So, just go ahead ans increase cigarette taxes. Go ahead, Arnold.

Go ahead……..

(Keep up with my blog. Sign up for my RSS feed. And click here to hire me for your writing projects.)

Bill Bradley wrong on need for California tax increases

One of California’s most astute commentators is Bill Bradley. But today he advances the conventional wisdom that California is under-taxed. And that if only those nutty right-wing Republicans would support tax increases, everything would be hunky-dory.

I refuted that belief in my comments on the repeated calls by Dan Walters, usually another astute commentator, for higher taxes. Click there for a more extensive analysis of the specifics of the folly of tax increases.

Let me add here that Bradley simply assumes that the will to bring in higher taxes will do so. He writes (bold face in original):

The California Republican Party is in the grip of the state’s anti-government faction, even more than California’s Democrats are dominated by the state’s ultra-government faction.

But that’s all irrelevant.

What’s relevant is that California is the highest-taxed state in the nation. We suffer the highest top income tax rate, at 10.3%. And the sales tax, with local add-ons, also is the highest at about 8 centavos for every dollar.

We only get a break on property taxes because of Proposition 13. But that’s muted because housing here, despite the recent decline, is so high — median price about $600,000 in Orange County — that people struggle to make their mortgages.

So, where are we supposed to get more taxes? Bradley, like Walters, fingers the car tax cut of 2003:

Today that cut amounts to about $6 billion a year. Absent that, the state government doesn’t have much of a fiscal problem.

Except gas now costs more than double what it did in 2003! And the car tax increase by Gray Davis was unconstitutional. And he actually was recalled, as we all remember, in part because of outrage over the tax increase. And Arnold promised to cut the car tax. And — and — and — and State Sen. Tom McClintock was readying a repeal for the 2004 ballot, which would have passed. So, just forget about a car-tax increase gouging of drivers, will ya?

One more point. Countries around the world are adopting a flat income tax rate of 11% or so. That’s for the whole country. The latest to adopt the reform is Bulgaria, which just adopted a 10% flat tax. The Christian Science Monitor reports on the wave of flat-tax fever that’s sweeping Eastern Europe.

If California imposes a higher income tax, its rate will be above that 11% rate.

And we’re only the state, not a country, so on top of that is the 35% federal income tax top rate, for a combined top rate of $45.3% currently, and possibly even more in the future.

Bradley correctly notes that the state has become more left-wing, largely because of immigrants. So the new Californians want more government and higher taxes than do the old Californians. But whatever people wish for doesn’t cancel the fiscal realities.

(Keep up with my blog. Sign up for my RSS feed. And click here to hire me for your writing projects.)

Arnold will try to increase taxes next year

Arnold faces a $14 billion deficit. What will he do?

In his January budget, he’ll call for only massive spending cuts to balance the budget. This will be the beginning of a kabuki dance with the Democratic Legislature. They will denounce him for “hurting the poor,” etc.

This will last until the May revision, which will include major tax increases — at least $5 billion, I’d guesstimate. It also will include higher estimates for the deficit — say, $16 billion. He’ll say, “I tried and tried with the Legislature, but they wouldn’t agree to enough cuts. So we have to have ein bischen tax increases. Just a leeeeetle bit of taxes. And they will be temporary, only three years.”

The action then will be to get the handful of Republican legislators needed to get the 2/3 vote needed in both houses of the Legislature to pass a tax increase. That’s the big question. He’ll probably get them.

With term limits, about one third of assemblymen and one fourth of senators are term-limited. If they can’t get a job in the other house (maybe because they already had that gig before), and can’t bet some other elected office, Arnold could offer them a place in his administration. You thought all those offices were to “serve” us?

One probably will be Sen. Abel Maldonado, who sold out quickly on last year’s budget scam that, because it included massive spending increases, is a major cause of this year’s budget problems.

But the joke will be on everybody because tax increases will slam the economy, reduce the tax base, and make the deficit even worse next year. Eventually, the New York bond houses that hold the paper on the state’s debts will order massive spending cuts. And they will happen. Arnold will spend his last two miserable years in office, 2008-09, cutting and cutting and making everyone look on him with the fear Sarah O’Connor looked on the “bad” Terminator in the first “Terminator” movie.

Poor Arnold. After the next two years he’s going to long to go back to his native socialist Austria as the U.S. ambassador appointed by President Obama.

(Keep up with my blog. Sign up for my RSS feed. And click here to hire me for your writing projects.)