Given California’s chronic problems, it is hard to imagine anyone sees our state as a model.
It is clear, though, the Obama administration does. To make matters worse, President Obama is using schemes from California’s playbook in his bid to impose our failures on the rest of the nation.
Like Sacramento, Washington is mired in gridlock. The budget never gets done. Politicians stumble crisis to crisis. Like Gov. Brown, President Obama lacks the ability to forge true bipartisan consensus to solve problems.
Of course, there is a difference between policies and tactics, between a goal and how you get there. It is no surprise President Obama and Gov. Brown have many shared policy goals, both being Democrats who support higher taxes, increased spending on high-speed rail, green energy subsidies and other questionable new government outlays.
It is alarming that in the pursuit of common goals, President Obama is embracing tactics we previously have seen in California politics. Rather than be warned by our dysfunction, the President sees it through rose-tinted glasses, choosing the worst lessons.
Attaching a Condition
Last year Gov. Brown signed a budget containing $6 billion in trigger cuts, to be implemented only if voters rejected higher taxes. Similarly, President Obama proposed $85 billion in automatic across-the-board domestic and military spending cuts, called sequestration, to be implemented if Congress did not approve an alternate deficit-reduction plan.
Gov. Brown successfully used the threat of looming cuts to win passage of Prop. 30, which raised California’s income and sales tax rates far above those of other states. Similarly, President Obama tried but failed to convince Congress to raise taxes in an unsuccessful bid to avert the sequester cuts, which took effect March 1.
Both the governor and President sounded like Chicken Little when they sought public support for higher taxes, each warning the sky would fall if further spending cuts became law. The only difference is that Gov. Brown was more persuasive than the President.
As columnist George Will wrote, moments like these force “liberals to clarify their conviction that whatever the government’s size is at any moment, it is the bare minimum necessary to forestall intolerable suffering.”
What Priorities?
The sad part of these political games is that the public’s priorities get tossed aside. Instead of being adequately funded, priorities like education, public safety, a strong military and veterans’ benefits specifically are targeted to scare voters.
Mr. Obama and Mr. Brown are using these tactics to pursue the same goal: Higher taxes. Those higher taxes chip away at our freedom.
Calculated annually by the Tax Foundation, Tax Freedom Day is the day Americans have earned enough money to pay their annual tax obligations at the federal, state and local levels. America’s Tax Freedom Day arrived April 18, five days later than last year.
This means this year Americans had to work five days longer than last to pay their taxes. Think about it: We gave up another workweek of our lives just like that. Californians had to wait nearly a week longer, until April 24, to taste tax freedom.
As you may know, Tax Freedom Day used to arrive much earlier in the year. According to the Tax Foundation, in 1900 Americans paid only 5.9 percent of their income in taxes and Tax Freedom Day was Jan. 22.
Since then, new taxes on income, sales, fuel, et cetera grew the size of government, pushing Tax Freedom Day deeper and deeper into the calendar year.
Like a frog being slowly boiled in water, we’re losing our freedom—the water may be a few degrees hotter in California, but the rest of the nation is not far behind.
We also know President Obama and Gov. Brown will say anything to convince us the government can’t possibly survive without even more of our money.
Don’t fall for their tactics. We must do better than this.
Mr. Runner, who represents nine million Californians as a taxpayer advocate and elected member of the state Board of Equalization, may be contacted at boe.ca.gov/Runner
