On April 6th, 2017 the California Legislature narrowly approved an additional fuel and car registration tax and fees to make up for a “budget shortfall”. I did not approve.
Poor California. Run by men and women who steal from the working people of the state to fund everything but quality of life in the Golden State. The bureaucracy in California, from the local planning commissions, to the Air Quality boards, the education administration and a thousand jobs, bureaus, and committees that take money out of our pockets. They fund “trains to nowhere” around the state. They put bicycle lanes in existing roads that diminish the utility for motorists. They approve Public transit projects that do not provide an adequate ridership.
There are few streets or highways in the state that are maintained in suitable condition. In Los Angeles, there are hundreds of miles of highway that are a patchwork of potholes, filled potholes, patches, barriers, cones and flashing signs. In San Diego, one of the more recent projects did nothing to alleviate a congestion problem of merging lanes but to move the congestion three miles to the west of the original problem. And the local planning board approved an additional neighborhood development to funnel another five or six hundred cars at any given time into the present congested highway merge point.
In every municipality there have been bond measures – robbing from Peter to pay Paul for school improvements, fire stations and so forth, but the roads still don’t have improved traffic control and signal lights, street lights do not get bulbs replaced. Abandoned and broken down cars in neighbor hoods are the last item law enforcement investigates due to few resources.
But we continually hear the drumbeat of how the state of California is so progressive. Democrats — and it is the Democrats, or at least the socialist fringe Democrats who push through legislation or policy and regulations. There have never been sufficient numbers anywhere in the other 75 percent of the state to express a different viewpoint. Democrats and their Union/ ethnic/ LGBT lobbyist masters are the ones to blame for all the ills in the state. Not bad living at an average of $95,000 a year to make others lives miserable. And the Republicans, Greens, Socialists, and Libertarians are no better at any significant improvement in the management of our state. The state would be run far better if high school students could run things. The last generally-equipped-with-common-sense and not (yet) beholden to social justice warriors for opinions and direction.
The California education system loves to implement new methods for teaching but year after year the children in the state come out functionally disadvantaged, indoctrinated in all things to do with gender equality and green technology, but unable to hold responsible working – high paying jobs – because they have to pursue social justice protests and activist politics.
Everyone expects there to be blame assigned and subsequent REMORSE on the part of the worst offenders. But the social warriors have no delusions about this. Despite the huge numbers of people who do not HAVE to acquire a working knowledge of the English language, nor a skill to sustain them, nor an understanding of budgets, health care, and other common sense skills that the residents of this state enjoyed up until the 1960s. we have huge numbers that follow vapid entertainment personalities who present themselves as paragons of virtues, experts in sexual persuasions, proper roles of religion in society (none) and absolutely have no regard for Government — that does not follow the continued moral and social decline so favored by the socialists.
In California, the reason that we have rain and the inability to store water for the state in times of drought, is not because of weather patterns existing for millions of years, but because the political policy wonks find money can be leveraged for public-valued works to pet projects. What hampers growth in the economy – businesses and people- are favored academics who have conclusions FIRST and who then find or create evidence to support their grant money.
When millions of people stream into the state without the education, ability or desire to improve the state community as a whole but look to the state to care for them, the state – we who fund from our labor – has a problem. When we cannot discuss it for fear of reprisals, from the very same critics who demand we change everything to suit them – that do not tolerate dissent.
It’s a crazy, crazy place to live, California.
Oh, dear state legislators and bureaucrats, Soon, I will not afford to drive, the roads are already impassable, the trains don’t come my way; I still am expected to pay my bills and taxes. Maybe you can send every state retiree a vacation package for swimming with sharks, hot-air ballooning, skydiving lessons, or other means to decrease the number of pensioners in the state. I need YOUR optimism for California – and maybe a solar-powered car to get around.
For further study:
http://www.taxhistory.org/thp/readings.nsf/ArtWeb/5DDB79194769C2BF852574D5003C28D5?OpenDocument
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/26/us/two-votes-show-public-is-wary-of-tax-increases.html
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-oew-greene3sep03-story.html
Truths, Half-truths, and Sea Stories 