Opinion: In today’s pages: Fixing the California budget, biking along the Los Angeles River and debating abortion
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Here at the Opinion Manufacturing Division, we’ve got our minds on our money and our money on our minds. In particular, that would be our state tax dollars. On the Op-Ed page, Timothy A. Hodson, head of the Center for California Studies at Sacramento State University, urges lawmakers in Sacramento to take a more realistic approach to power sharing in a divided but still largely Democratic state:
Many Republicans declared the defeat of Proposition 1A as the triumph of ‘tea parties’ and the return of the anti-tax spirit of Proposition 13. Good spin; lousy analysis. It’s fantasy to think that voters in San Francisco, Santa Monica and other liberal and Democratic strongholds who overwhelming voted against 1A did so for the same reasons as Republicans.
The editorial board, meanwhile, says the state may need to close some parks temporarily, but that’s not as great a money-saving opportunity as it seems:
The state must patrol and minimally maintain the parks with or without visitors or it almost surely will incur worse expense, not just long term but in the immediate future. Closing parks doesn’t mean that people won’t use them. It means that law-abiding people won’t use them. Among those who will: meth lab operators, marijuana farmers, the homeless, taggers, poachers, rogue mountain bikers and off-roaders, as well as just plain campers who think the rules don’t apply to their personal visits.
Rounding out the editorial stack, the board calls for the Organization of American States to readmit Cuba, and editorial writer Dan Turner lambastes the multi-billion-dollar plans to restore the Los Angeles River. Back on the Op-Ed page, columnist Tim Rutten argues that the murder of a late-term abortion provider in Kansas illustrates the need for both sides in the abortion debate to ‘break with the rhetorical recklenssness of the past.’ And Michael Siegel, a professor and tobacco-policy specialist at the Boston University School of Public Health, blasts a proposal in Congress to give the Food and Drug Administration purview over tobacco products, saying it would create ‘the appearance of regulation without allowing actual regulation.’