It’s easy to brush off the usual panhandlers
that regularly try to tap me for a
quarter on my way to pick up the mail at
the local post office. Some have even gotten to the
point where they don’t even ask because they know
the answer. But government panhandling
is quite another thing. Like death,
it seems inevitable. But we do try to
postpone the pain of it for as long as
possible. This year is no different.
During the past 20 years, overall
taxes have risen 40 percent here in the
Golden State––some 20 percent due
to inflation and the actual value of the
dollar going down. One would expect
that what we would see as a result is a 20 percent
increase in government services––but no, what we
actually see is that we are paying more taxes, user
fees and higher tuitions at state colleges and getting
less. The Golden State has become the Golden Cow
that is being milked hard, and its teats aren’t going
to get any rest anytime soon.
Both the City and the State are in a “budget
crisis.” The Governator wants to slash programs
and add a penny to the state sales tax. Mayor Antonio
wants another half-cent sales tax for transportation
after raising L.A. City trash fees, ostensibly
to hire more cops. Only to then raise parking
meter rates some 300 percent! Our very own
Councilwoman Janice Hahn is leading the charge
for a “gang tax” that will be on the November
ballot, which doesn’t tax the gangs, but the
homeowners. All of this is just the tip of the problem
in a minefield of raising the cost of living in
the land of opportunity. The problem is our government
is running out of money and no one is
really quite sure why.
This is odd because most of this can be
directly and indirectly attributed to the tax reductions
given to the wealthiest corporations,
many of which are being paid the most outrageous
contract fees for pursuing our current
wars. All of the privatization of government
services, whether in the War On Terror, or
within our state penal system, costs have been
driven up beyond the natural cost of inflation.
Wars have always depleted the wealth of nations
who wage them, enervated their economies
and destroyed peaceful alternatives to
military production. We are living in a war
economy and now we have to pay for it. Right?
Well, yes and no, it all depends on who
you think “we” are. In my mind, taxes should
be levied only upon those that have some direct
connection to the problem to be solved.
The MTA tax for instance, should not be
placed as a general sales tax on every product
sold but should be placed on the importation
of oil into the state to offset the negative impacts petroleum fuels create by building a cleaner
transportation system.
The City Gang Tax should not be placed on
property ownership, but instead on gun, ammunition,
and weapons purchases. When gang members
are arrested and found not to have
paid the tax, which they never do because
their weapons are bought illegally,
the tax would be levied retroactively
and any property confiscated
would be used to satisfy the lien.
The state should tax illegal drug
transactions after confiscating 100
percent of all property and cash that
is proven to have been acquired
through illicit means. The revenues should then
be distributed to the counties with the biggest gang
problems. Likewise, medical marijuana dispensaries
should be taxed at a higher rate than the
sales tax for the direct benefit of public health clinics.
And while I’m on the topic of taxing drugs,
the profits of the largest pharmaceutical drug corporations
should be taxed to subsidize health care
for those who can’t afford it.
These connections between what is taxed and
what it pays for make a lot of sense to me. There is
a cause and effect, or a nexus, between the need
and the tax. This, of course, would mean that the
war in Iraq would be paid for by taxing Halliburton,
Blackwater, General Electric, and the Carlyle Group
at a significantly higher rate than, say, Henry’s
Markets, or even the family of the soldier who died
there last week. (Do you suppose there is a deduction
for having donated the life of a son or daughter
to the war on the IRS form?)
While conservatives like Schwarzenegger like
to pawn off deficit spending on the public with a
sales tax increase, liberal democrats like Mayor
Villaraigosa and Janice Hahn should be following
the more progressive example of presidential
contender Barack Obama — tax the windfall profits
of the multinational oil corporations who have
been gorging themselves at the public’s expense!
What really angers me about the Governator’s
recent moves is that he wants to play politics with
the wages of thousands of state employees rather
than cutting the salaries of his own administrative
staff or taking a pay cut himself. Even more so,
Arnold got this state into this fix from the very
beginning, gleefully riding the wave of misplaced
anger that drove Gray Davis out of office, promising
to fix the state budget deficit himself, without
offering any details, and then making matters
much worse once in office, with massive borrowing
and a patchwork of accounting tricks. Clearly
he has failed to deliver what he promised.
The cascading deficit crisis has only been further
complicated by the sub-prime mortgage meltdown
that in and of itself was an avoidable problem
created by the very same corporations who
don’t want to pay taxes in the first place. In the
final analysis, increased taxes should be placed
on those who cause the problems government must
solve—Senator Lowenthal’s container shipping
fee, just passed by the State Senate after clearing
the Assembly last month, is the perfect example
of this just resolution and should be considered as
the model upon which future taxes are conceived.
Like the gas tax which goes towards the state highway
fund, new taxes must have a nexus between
what is taxed and the problems solved, this is not
the case with either the Governator’s sales tax or
the current proposed property tax.
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