Working to Wreck California this November

Governor Jerry Brown has reached a "compromise" with the Californian Federation of Teachers (CFT) on competing tax increase measures for November's ballot. The teachers' union wasn't happy that the Governor wasn't proposing to drive enough millionaires out of the state. To make sure there weren't competing measures on the ballot, the gov reached out to the teachers, like one family of thugs to another, dividing up the spoils. From the Sacramento Bee:

The Democratic governor and CFT announced last week that they had reached an agreement to work together to try to qualify a measure that combines parts of their rival tax proposals. CFT had been working with the Courage Campaign to qualify a special tax increase on millionaires.

The "Courage Campaign?" How much courage does it take to propose a tax on a small minority of the population. Of course, this is all supposed to be "temporary", until the crisis passes.

The measure is similar in structure to the constitutional amendment initially proposed by Brown, which relied on a temporary half-percent hike in the sales tax and temporary income tax increases for Californians earning more than $250,000. The new version features a quarter-percent hike in the sales tax and steeper increases for higher earners. The sales tax increase would last four years and the income tax increases would last seven years.

What hogwash, we know that these tax increases will be permanent and rising until the state goes broke from failing to offer meaningful pension reform. Nothing is so permanent as a temporary tax increase. It took 108 years to repeal the long distance telephone tax originally intended to fund the Spanish-American war. Most shockingly, that tax was also billed as a "tax on the rich."