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Comment by symesc | Hacker News Reader

My fun stat:

California has had a Republican Governor for over 80% of the last quarter century.

Gov. Arnold is more liberal socially and fiscally than most Midwestern democrats. California is so blue-state that its republicans wouldn't pass as republicans in most other states.

Uhm, this is patently false. California is gerrymandered to hell, there are safe Republican districts which elect some rather far-right representatives, to both national and state legislatures. It's actually very hard to be a moderate Republican in California. You're not right-wing enough to win the Republican districts, and still have the Republican stigma in the Democratic districts. It's only in full statewide elections that being a moderate Republican works, hence the governorship trending mostly that way.

It's actually the far-right Republicans who are part (but not all) of the problem with regards to the budget issues. They are mainly unwilling to compromise, any sort of tax increase is anathema, even the idea of bringing tax rates back to to late-1990s levels.

> They are mainly unwilling to compromise, any sort of tax increase is anathema, even the idea of bringing tax rates back to to late-1990s levels.

Tax revenues are now above those levels (after adjusting for inflation and population growth).

I mention revenues because you spend revenues, not rates.

Do you really want to argue that CA isn't spending enough money?

> Tax revenues are now above those levels (after adjusting for inflation and population growth).

Got a source for that?

> Do you really want to argue that CA isn't spending enough money?

No, where was I saying that? CA has a problem where it's spending money it doesn't have, not that it isn't spending enough. There's certainly plenty of spending cuts that could happen too, but the Republicans and Democrats can't seem to agree on much of that either.

Who's controlled the legislature?

California's minority-rule budget rules and ridiculous ballot initiative process have made crafting a reasonable budget impossible. Combine that with the slow fuse of the Prop 13 tax time bomb and you've got a disaster on your hands, and there's not much the legislature can do about it.

California needs a new constitution.

> ... and there's not much the legislature can do about it.

Spend less.

California has the second highest income tax rate, highest effective overall tax rates, highest sales tax rate, highest tax as a percent of gross income, highest corporate tax rate, highest incorporation fees, highest minimum corporate taxes, highest tax yield per citizen, and highest tax revenues in all of the United States. California gets more money per person in California than any other state, and more total money than any other state.

In plain English: California has gets more money per citizen and more money total than other state in the USA.

Prop 13 (property taxes can't be set above 1%, and aren't reassessed until a home is resold) has kept a lot of middle class and blue collar people in their homes. I'm in California, and my friend's parents are retired. Their modest house tripled or quadrupled in value over the last 15 years. If their property taxes had tripled or quadrupled, they wouldn't have been able to afford their house.

Taxes aren't too low here by any stretch of imagination. It doesn't matter how much money you have if you spend more than that amount of money. That's California's problem.

The people of California figured out how to cut their taxes and increase spending at the same time using ballot initiatives. The Legislature has extremely limited authority to close the budget gap because most of the spending is already set, and the Republican rump won't allow taxes to be raised.

California's taxes as a percentage of income are really not that bad. It's #10 as of 2006:

http://www.taxadmin.org/fta/rate/06stlrev.html

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/03/texas-is-not-the...

You gotta pay for services. If Californians want to have taxes like Arkansas's, they'll have to put up with services like Arkansas's.

Looks like we get to find out!

> California's minority-rule budget rules and ridiculous ballot initiative process have made crafting a reasonable budget impossible.

Oh really? On what planet would the majority Dems want to spend less?

On my planet Democrats believe in financing government programs responsibly, instead of borrowing money for them like California has done. If the Legislature didn't have to deal with the no-new-taxes Republican rump or the utterly ridiculous ballot initiative-funded programs they would have a lot more leeway to fix the budget without slashing services.

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