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Greetings from California, the land of fallen revenue and record budget deficits! Over the summer the Governator and our Legislature approved a number of measures to help refill the emptied coffers, and the bills brokered in the halls of Sacramento are beginning to come to life in our everyday lives.
But it’s the increase headlined in today’s L.A. Times that has me spitting tacks. As of November 1, 2009, the State of California will begin withholding an additional 10% from workers’ paychecks, even though the tax rate has remained the same.
I’ll repeat: the amount of tax we owe is unchanged, but the State will be keeping an additional 10% of our money just because they can.
An interest free loan courtesy California citizens who are kind of busy at the moment figuring out how to stay in their homes, stay in their jobs, and stay healthy & the hell away from fiscal ruin courtesy the co-pay/no-pay/coverage-denying medical insurance monopolies.
Oh, we’ll get the money back in a refund. Eventually. And it may be in the form of an IOU, like last year. But at least with an IOU they’re legally required to pay you interest on your money that you don’t owe but they get to take just because they can. Indefinitely.
The Mobsters of the world bow down to our Viggenator & His Sackamenna Crew.
Constitutional. Convention. Now.
(the article linked above quotes some tax people saying you may be able to get around the new withholding rate by changing your number of personal withholding allowances)
12 Comments
I must have missed this, my mother brought it to my attention last week. Well its the legacy of The Governator, how is Meg Whitman going to win when she has to defend her party’s nonsense and tax increases when they always cry about wanting tax cuts?
California was once a wonderland.
A wonderland that depended on a growing economy.
What is the surprise now that its economy contracts?
The deal to the citizens was always the economy.
What is the deal now?
JFA ; maybe this will be the edge needed to get marijuana legalized and taxed.
CA workers SHOULD declare more dependents, given “Savvy taxpayers can get around the state’s maneuver by increasing the number of personal withholding allowances they claim on their employer tax forms, said Brenda Voet, a spokeswoman for the state’s Franchise Tax Board.
“People can get out of this,” she said, noting that most people would have to change their allowances through their employers. California’s budget leaders are banking on the hope that most won’t.” so that the ‘budget leaders’ know how fu’d they are.
Cannabis will only bring in a few billion dollars per year. The state’s structural deficit is tens of billions.
The reason why we have such a structural deficit is because Californians have been living in denial for the past 35 years, expecting to get government services and whining like entitled stuck pigs at the first hint that we might have to pay for it.
The tax rates that built California into the Golden State were very high, but when they spent that money, they got returns.
Since Prop 13, term limits and Prop 218, all of California’s infrastructure systems have plummeted along with the quality of government.
The last thing progressives should be doing is impersonating Grover Norquist and witholding revenue from the government as if they were trying to drown it in a bath tub.
If the Governor and Legislature need to raise taxes, let them do it in the full light of day. The gaming of the State income Tax Withholding sets a disturbing precedent.
Seems illegal to me. Shouldn’t they all have to go to jail? By what legal authority do they believe(!) they can just hike the rate?
You know that the system is gamed by Props 13 and 218 so that is impossible.
There are a lot of disturbing precedents here. One of them is people who want government to provide all manner of services but wince at paying for it.
I’d also asked my assemblymember, Tom Ammiano, the sponsor of the cannabis legalization measure, to make it retroactive, to empty out the prisons of cannabis prisoners and to expunge the records of cannabis felons. We can’t afford the luxury of this Reagan era panic anymore. We’ll see how far that goes.
Understand your point but everytime someone wants to change Prop13, ‘something’ comes up. And this is so true “If the Governor and Legislature need to raise taxes, let them do it in the full light of day.” ; like the unwillingness to tax oil extraction and being the only State that doesn’t do such.
As towards ganja, several billion is better than nothing and yes, let them out of prison(but you already know how much howling has been done about releasing those in prisons to meet the health standards that haven’t been met.).
How ironic that the state Republicans refer to as the “People’s Republic of California” would be LESS Socialist on that issue than the Free Market State of Alaska (or Texas for that matter).
The question is as much ‘where do we go from here,’ as ‘where can we get to from here.’
I gave Lori Saldana and her staff information about CA starting it’s own bank like N.Dakota has; also wrote to Lockyer about it and Dan Walter at SacBee(who tried to blow me off by stating the CA has several banks now, while refusing to recognize what a real bank means);
So to answer your question, I’ll again refer to Ellen Brown and her WebofDebt site.
I live in California and I notice that I pay income taxes, sales taxes (very high) property taxes, fees and watch people by the dozens scratch away at their lottery tickets. ( I remember when the Lottery was supposed to solve all our education funding problems.) As a private medical contractor who has worked for and within the California state system I can tell you without equivocation that it is horrifically wasteful and shamefully corrupt. Sorry to break the Mantra, but I really don’t believe cash flow is the problem. Cash Suck is the problem. Not just in people wanting programs for everything under the sun as Marcos implies in #6. But also in the form of good old corruption. I know that sounds kind of Repub, but I’ve just seen too much. Everyone can “screech” about prop 13 all they want, but I believe there is no amount of money that could be rained upon the Calif legislature that they could’nt waste down the rathole.