California Liberals Commitment to Taxes and Government to be put to the test

Part of Prop 30 funds will be used to cover mistakes made by UC administration in their derivative trading on interest rate swaps, not for education.

Read the article in the SF Chronicle:

Web Link

All that talk and rhetoric above is so much fun to read!

The bitterness is thick!

Let's start with facts: what do you call 1 out of 9 Americans?

A Californian.

Why use the word liberal with Californian?

Californians are smart, wise, thoughtful... ie.. already LIBERAL, that makes a phrase like smart liberal Californian REDUNDANT!

The republican party has almost entirely marginalized itself out of existence, all by their own stupid policies. They can't even get 40% of the offices in CA!!

Name a republican elected to state or national office from the Bay Area.

Uh-huh.

So the fringe righties will post a bunch of anonymous rhetoric here and there... JUST IGNORE IT.

It's sour grapes. They will retreat back into their little Fox bubble alternate reality and think that folks will listen to their conspiracy theories.

Just ignore them. Politically, they have already gone away.

Republicans? Nothing to see here.

Pretty funny framing.

The rightiesare getting so petty and petulent. Going to be awhile before they show us the "commitment to their principles" and get out of prettyn blue California and move to one of the red welfare states.

Current California unemployment rate is about 2.4% above the national average. Making California even more business unfriendly, like the lefties want to do, is only going to make it worse.

Very sad for the lefties, that California cannot print its own money, like the Feds do.

Four years from now, the California unemployment rate will exceed 15%. Or else, the national inflation rate will exceed 7%. The combination will equal stagflation, aka Caternomics. Look at the bright side, though...Reagan replaced Carter!

Reagan?

Gary, do you mean the guy who cheated on his first wife, tripled the national debt, illegally traded weapons to IRAN, raised taxes 11 times, including the largest middle class tax cut in history when he doubled payroll taxes?

And ran like a baby when terrorists murdered hundreds of US Marines in Lebanon?

And had the most criminal administration in history, with over one hundred indictments?

That Reagan?

Regarding your predictions, we know how wrong you usually are on those, so save your breath.

Unless you want to tell us you predicted both Obama landslides.

The Reagan I am talking about won the cold war, and brought America back, and produced the supply-side economic victory...probably in inverse order.

Of course, it took Carter to produce Reagan's victory. Prologue is history (and vice versa).

Supply side is completely discredited, proven again by the Bush tax cuts - Bush doubled the debt, Reagan tripled it.

So if Gary is good with Ronnie Reagan Facts, like the Ronnie:
- who cheated on his first wife,
- tripled the national debt,
- illegally traded weapons to IRAN,
- raised taxes 11 times, including the largest middle class tax cut in history when he doubled payroll taxes
- amnestied millions of illegals
- ran like a baby when terrorists murdered hundreds of US Marines in Lebanon
- had the most criminal administration in history, with over one hundred indictments?

Hey, he was just an actor that signed the collective bargaining law for California unions.

Well, if that's all ya got Gary, then we're all good.

Nothing more to talk about Gary's mancrush Ronnie Reagan then.

Californians prefer smart liberals over the do nothing republicans by a 2/3reds majority.

Ignore the fringe noise, especially the history rewrite that makes the criminalgun runner reagan a hero.

Just revisionist noise.

Interesting that the thread has already been hijacked into a screed on Reagan - who last held office 20+ years ago.

I don't know whether the hyper-government we have in store will make things better or worse for California. My point here is that at last we will have a pretty clear idea of whether all the things the progressives have wanted to do will have the salutory effects that liberals have told us they will.

A lot of people - including many liberals (smart or otherwise) in California are going to be paying a lot of extra money in taxes to conduct this experiment in magnum-sized government. I just wonder whether they'll think it was worth it a couple of years from now.

That many of you on the left choose to bash a has-been Republican politician rather than talk about your preferred policies and their effects doesn't speak highly of your confidence in your principles.

As I said, it should be interesting.

Reagan won the cold war. Period. He did it by making America strong, and he set the stage for a major recovery from the stagflation of Carter.

The Obama/liberal left is about printing money, and hoping for the best. Will never happen...but it gives hope for the future. Will Scott Walker be the next Reagan?

Anna

You raise some excellent points to ponder. Unfortunately, as I have found in my thread, the readers of Palo Alto Online Town Square Forum are unable to debate, they just throw jibes.

I know of one local employer who is having problems because of the very things you mention. Is it going to be any surprise when small businesses are put out of business because taxes are eating up any income they make and they are unable to compete against the giants who manage to undercharge them all the time.

Many here want us to have more small, locally owned businesses, but particularly with the high rents in this locale coupled with the increasing taxes from the federal and state levels, these are not likely to make it.

"The Reagan I am talking about won the cold war..."

In that case you are talking about a Reagan that never existed. Kennedy won the Cold War when he made Khrushchev back down in October 1962. The USSR's ensuing death throes were long and irreversible.

Reagan and Nancy hobnobbed a lot with their friends Gorbachev and Raisa, but paling around with an already defeated enemy does not win wars. Like, how many times did Roosevelt or Churchill have Hitler and Eva over to dinner?

> Kennedy won the Cold War

How many chardonays have you been drinking this afternoon?

[Post removed by Palo Alto Online staff.]

Governor Brown may be the Governor that the times demand - a Liberal tightwad if you will. But then California's Governor's office is not that strong and the Propositions tie up too much of the budget and are mostly pushed by commercial interests these days. Redistricting reform was a good start.

But the US political Pay-To-Play system, a Founding Flaw, is as active in Sacramento as Washington. At the end of the day, the majority of our problems stem from that. It failed to buy the Governorship here or recently the Presidency or the US Senate. In both the Governor's election and the recent Presidential one, the Republican aspirant projected condescension towards and contempt for most voters. Fortunately, almost everyone is hard wired to detect condescension and contempt. In both cases the candidates had enough funding that they rubbed it in again and again.

Mr Romney was apparently into the Republican rhetoric where most of us are described as "parasites" or "takers". The billionaires funding the Republicans this year were trying to buy crony Capitalism and plutocracy as a system though that's a proven path historically to outright national failure. They also have foreign interests. But then they have offshore accounts and helipads. My business is not in that class.

The national Republicans are now sectionally based - they are not Conservative, they are Confederate or Know Nothing. Their rhetoric is oddly disconnected from reality. Most of the core Confederate culture area is on welfare. California and other Blue State funding makes us enablers for them to remain cultural and economic fossils even 145 years after the US Civil War. Many of them still it call the War of Northern Aggression. Reducing Washington to the Monument as they demand would leave most of the core South stone broke in a world where they can't earn a living.

Confederate politics often means raising distracted, conflicting groups while the real players clean the table. White and black low income voters in Mississippi, we read, voted as solid blocs for Romney and Obama even though both groups have identical interests. The Republicans also deserted Main Street, the real net new jobs US economy, for Wall Street years ago.

It may be well past time to turn the core Confederacy out as another country and let the IMF run Reconstruction as the US cannot. Web Link Where US federal taxes are raised and spent per state.

The old Whig Party elected a couple of US Presidents but was defunct before the Civil War. The Republicans of today need to disappear into history as well and be replaced by a real, American center/right party that excludes the principals and money of the present Republicans. That party has damaged our country more than anything internal after the Civil War itself. With them we are unlikely to stay one country over time. The states from Texas east to the Atlantic are more different from the US culturally than Mediterranean Greece is from the EU.

The Republicans here might recall that much of what they object to was bought in Sacramento by corporations. Many of them buy Capitalist profits but Socialized expenses and losses. That's not how it's supposed to work.