Brother, They Asked For It
Governor Schwarzenegger. What a joke.
The land of liposuction and body sculpting chooses a candidate to solve its self-inflicted problems based on “Oooh! He’s a movie star!” I’m going to enjoy watching the state fall to pieces.
Californians must simply be too stupid to realize it was their own whining, NIMBY-based attitudes that got them into the mess they’re in. (When you don’t build power plants, you don’t have electricity.)
Since 1978, when voters voted to cut their own property taxes (by passing Proposition 13), more than 50 “direct democracy” initiatives have dictated — often in excruciating detail — how the Californian legislature had to spend its money.
For example, Prop 98 (1988) forced — er, required — the state to set aside 40 percent of its general fund strictly for education.
Then in 1990, the people (make that The People) passed Prop 117, the California Wildlife Protection Act, which required that $30 million each year be spent on protecting mountain lions and other ‘rare, endangered, and threated animals — and that 10 percent of the money from tobacco taxes go toward this Habitat Conservation Fund. The rest of the money had to come from the General Fund (unless there were other environmental funds available). Oh, and making changes to this law requires a 2/3 majority of legislative votes, not a simple majority — like many of these initiatives, voters added so-called “supermajority requirements” to make sure their will be done.
In 2002, Californians passed Prop 46 (the Housing and Emergency Shelter Trust Fund Act) that establishes a “trust fund” of $2.1 billion for housing programs. This will come from bond sales.
Do voters realize that bonds are the state’s way of borrowing money? That this money needs to be paid back? That the only way a state has of ‘earning’ money is through taxes?
At this point, something like 40 percent of the state’s spending is mandated by referendum. That means Californians have voted to buy things regardless of where the money is going to come from… and then whine when there isn’t money for other things.
Speaking of money, those dolts spent about $60 million on this silliness. If a textbook cost $25, that’s 2,400,000 textbooks that could have been bought with the same money. (And I bet the books cost much less that that for a large school district, so take that 2.4 million as a low-end number.)
It’s so appropriate for California to elect someone based on stardom rather than experience. A vacuous society uses vacuous logic to elect a vacuous governor who barely knows how to recite lines from a script.
Oh, and “recallarnold.com” has already been registered.
