Pundits predict new challenges to the two-thirds majority rule for California tax bills, based on current dissatisfaction with state legislative difficulties on budget issues. Allowing a simple majority to raise taxes will likely result in raised taxes, but voting results yesterday show that Californians don’t want higher taxes.
More taxes aren’t the issue. What California needs is more taxpayers relative to government workers and users of government services. There are not enough taxpayers in California to support the level of services, wages, benefits, and programs our state government has decided to provide.
Fox & Hounds opinion has a similar viewpoint, focused on business development:
Activists who want to lower the two-thirds vote and raise taxes will argue that a low turnout election really doesn’t represent the will of California’s people. Expect to see tax raising initiatives aimed for the general election in 2010 along with a measure to lower the two-thirds vote.
Voters rejected a move five years ago to reduce the two-thirds standard and their attitude on the issue seems more set in stone today. I doubt it will soften much in another year.
So, if raising fees, seeking tax increases via the ballot, and attacking the two-thirds vote requirement must not happen next, what should happen next?
Besides implementing restructuring that has been addressed by the California Performance Review and other studies over the years, the legislature should do everything it can to spur economic activity and create jobs. That’s how we can get out of this mess. Encourage the entrepreneur to lead the way.
University and State reveals that the majority of California voters want spending cuts instead of higher taxes, and insist on the two-thirds majority vote requirement preventing simple majorities from raising taxes. The problem, according to this blog post, is that the majority also opposes “cutbacks in ten of twelve major categories of state spending, including the three largest – the public schools, health care and higher education.” In other words, ordinary Californians don’t know exactly how to cut the budget, or they expect (as they well should) their elected representatives to make the tough budget choices.
Matthew Yglesias includes the two-thirds requirement in his list of California’s political and financial problems. His mention of population as a source of “dysfunction”, however, reveals the real problem: high demand for services that can’t be met with reasonable tax rates.
The crux of the matter, as best I can tell from the East Coast, is that California has a set of political institutions that don’t work. The 2/3 rule in the state legislation doesn’t make sense, the profligate use of the initiative process doesn’t work, the combination of the two is disastrous. There seem to me to be other sources of institutional dysfunction in California (LA County is almost twice as big as the country’s second-largest, and five of the fifteen top population counties form a contiguous belt in southern California) but those are the big obvious ones.
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