Following the lead of the Obama administration and congressional Democrats, the state of California is hellbent on driving the nearly bankrupt state off a cliff and into the abyss … by mandating state-run health insurance with a ban on private insurance.
Keep in mind that California is already amidst a chronic and prolonged budget crisis brought on by runaway spending and exorbitant taxing. Perennially listed among the worst states in our Union to do business, California features 10%+ income taxes and the highest regulatory burden around. So imposing are the costs to business in California, despite its ports and natural resources, Nevada and its desert is #1 in the Country in new business development.
As Congressman Tom McClintock famously says, only government policy could convince people and business to relocate from lush California to the barren deserts of Nevada. The practical result of those anti-job polices is that California now has a revenue problem. Just 3 years ago revenues were in the $125 billion dollar range. Now they are in the $85+ billion dollar range. In other words, government has created a revenue problem by killing off jobs and, without those jobs, there are less taxpayers, less income tax and less sales tax.
Rather than make California job friendly again – and thereby increase government revenues through sales taxes and new income taxes from new jobs – California Democrats offer nothing but tax hikes and even more regulation. And now this.
California is bankrupt. It’s been the laboratory for every single liberal policy imaginable. Tax, tax, tax. Spend, spend, spend. Regulate, regulate, regulate. Mandate, mandate, mandate.
It’s the United States 10 years from now if we continue down the path chartered by Barack Hussein Obama and his progressive allies in Congress.
Watch the Second American Revolution started in Massachusetts spread to California by November.
While the committee hasn’t identified a new tax to raise the money needed for the Democrats’ latest California healthcare boondoggle, my guess is that they’ll propose a European style Value Added Tax. VATs are pernicious and hard to evade, plus their actual cost to consumers is better hidden that with a sales tax. The Field Health Policy Survey last summer reported that 53% of Democrats favored a VAT, while 74% of Republicans opposed it.
26% of California Republicans are idiots. I am surprised that more Democrats aren’t backing this.
This is exactly the same plan that is being considered by Bela Pelosi and the rest of the folks who put the “con” in Congress, with the open support of the White House. Rumor has it they are planning to ram all of this through before November while they still have the numbers. A lame duck Congress won’t, and the Democrats simply won’t have the numbers in 2011.
Gridlock is a good thing. It means nothing pernicious can get done.