Terminating Our State

Well There have been lots of things that I have been planning to blog about but today's news has me bothered enough to sit down and pound this out right now.
Our Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is proposing massive cuts to the state budget due to a budget deficit faced by the state. He plans to terminate funds for medi-cal, education, parks, prisons, and other public services. (Remember the first thing he did after being elected was to repeal the car tax increase which cost the sate $4 billion a year.)

The numbers for the cuts are staggering!!
--$4.5 billion from schools
--1 billion from medi-cal
--the closure of 43 state parks
--the early release of 22,000 inmates
--and a 10% across the board cut for next year, effecting every state agency

This will mean:
-- thousands will lose their jobs (6000 prison staff and how many from the park service, --medicare, education?)
--public schools will lose something like $700 a year per student.
--tuition will go up for higher education
--poor, elderly, and disabled will lose their health care or have their coverage reduced
--families will become homeless

Now these cuts will obviously be effecting the students and lower income people in the state. This in a state where low income and middle class wage earners are already feeling the squeeze of a high cost of living.

The car tax. Gov Grey Davis raised the car registration fee from .65% to 2% in order to generate funds for the state. Arnold repealed this the first thing in office, sending everyone a check to pay back those of us who had already paid our fees for that year. I received a check for $1 with a nice letter from Arnold. This raised our budget shortfall from $10 billion to $14 billion. Now he goes and slashes the budget to make up for this.
One argument was that if people had the money back from this tax they would spend it and that would help the economy. Now do you think a dollar made much difference in my budget? What about those who have $100,000 dollar cars? Do you think their $1400 made a big difference? If it did then they probably should drive a more modest car. But what about these 10,000 plus people who will lose their jobs? Will that effect their budget? Will that effect our economy? How about having less people with health coverage? Will that effect our economy? What about the loss of tourism due to the closure of state parks? Will that effect our economy? What about having less access to higher education and less resources for k-12 education? Will that effect our economy?
Hell, I say tax the hell out of cars. Raise the car tax to 5%. The tax on hummers should be double! Or how about a tax on big screen TVs. Or a tax on cheap shit made in China. Or what about a tax on houses that cost more than $5 million dollars. Or will that make life hard for those who are in the market for such houses?
If we want to live in a first world country with good education, infrastructure, etc, then we need to pay for it. Come on Arnold, and I guess come on California. You elected this moron partly because he promise to return a couple hundred dollars of you vehicle registration fee. Now you see what we get.
peace