Going Down With The Ship

15 June 2009 | By Sonja in Economy, Politics, Sonja

All eyes will be on Sacramento today, as California’s less than stellar state legislature faces a deadline to resolve its $24 billion wall of debt. Governor Schwarzenegger has denied, in writing, the option of trying to squeeze high-interest emergency loans out of Wall Street. That’s a good one. Wall Street bailing out California. One wonders how long we can keep flying the state flag, when the ship it is on is rapidly sinking.

What is left unspoken is that California residents will BE the bail-out. There will be cutbacks, and more cutbacks, but ultimately you and I are going to feel the state opening our wallets again. We are already feeling the pinch in our public schools. Summer School has been canceled in many school districts. Bridge programs for incoming middle-schoolers, canceled. Teaching staffs at every public school in the state are barely holding on. Most schools have released teachers low on the union totem poll. As a result, the average class- size for the 2009-2010 school year will be 35 in fourth and fifth grade, 45 in middles schools, and high schools, even more than that.

What kind of experience is a student or a teacher going to have in such over-crowded classrooms?

Trimming our schools to the bone won’t save our state. Without actually showing their faces, lawmakers quietly tried to add on critical tax increases to our Spring ballots. That was a miserable failure. This month, you can bet politicians won’t be so subtle about it. Palms will be firmly facing the sun. Our registration taxes will increase. Our state taxes will increase. Wireless phone taxes, utility taxes, property tax add- ons. They’ll find a way.

So, while quarterly tax payers dig down again this week, paying 10% to the State of California and around 35% of their earnings to Washington, it’s understandably disenchanting to see our hard-earned tax dollars barely make a dent. More and more my tax check is like a tablespoon of Tang, dissolving in a lukewarm glass of water, disappearing rapidly without leaving as much as a pale, orange ring around the glass.

Solutions you ask? State Controller Michael Chiang has apparently two options. Begin delaying owed payments to vendors, local governments and EVEN withholding tax refunds, (whew…just tore mine open) or begin to issue IOUs. IOUs!!!!! I wonder what that move will do to the State’s credit rating.

Imagine what might happen to you if you decided to send the Toyota Motor Company an IOU this month. Or instead of swiping your debit card at Albertson’s, you just pulled out a business card and wrote, “IOU” on the back of it and gratefully handed it to the check-out clerk. Another interesting possibility might be to try and see how many Chicken McNuggets you could squeeze out of McDonald’s in exchange for an old receipt, slightly sticky, pulled from the glove box, neatly addressed, “IOU” ….too.

I can never quite understand what happens when our newly-elected and over-staying Assembly representatives arrive in Sacramento and hop up the steps and into their State Capitol chambers. Is the air thinner in there? Is there something in the coffee blend? Do they really believe that we elect them, and pay them, and cover all of their expense-paid trips, so that they can dig us deeper and deeper into crippling debt?

Make it simple.

We need, water, power, law enforcement and schools. Trash pick-up is next, but we could pool our resources as neighborhoods and take turns driving to the dump if we had too. Road maintenance would be next.

After that, perhaps it should be all about self-reliance, as it was in Early America when taxation without representation meant that England was sticking it to you. Now it’s our own elected neighbors who stick it to us and we PAY them to do it! uncle_sam_iou_857j