<i> Snapshots of life in the Golden State.</i> : Ballot Item on Tax--a Case of ‘Read My Euphemism’
When is a sales tax not a sales tax? When it’s up for a vote. You wouldn’t know it by reading Proposition 172’s official title and summary on the November statewide ballot, but 172 would simply extend permanently a half-cent statewide sales tax surcharge that’s been in effect since 1991.
But instead of just saying so, the Legislature passed a special law allowing itself (instead of the attorney general) to write the ballot language--and nowhere does the Legislature’s language use the dreaded words sales tax. Instead it offers a “dedicated revenue source for public safety purposes.”
The Legislature may have been too clever for its own good: When a recent Field Poll asked people how they’d vote based on what they read on the ballot, 42% said “no,” 34% said “yes” and 24% were undecided. But when pollsters added sales tax to the ballot language--as in “it would make permanent a temporary half-cent sales tax increase enacted in 1991”--the “nos” rose only to 44%, but the “yeses” jumped to 42%, and the “undecideds” dropped to 14%. Didn’t anyone ever tell these guys honesty is the best policy?
The California Catch
Commercial fishers in California landed 294 million pounds of fish in 1992, valued at $131 million. Interestingly, most of the state’s sea urchin catch is exported to Japan as a sushi delicacy. Here are the top five types of fish caught ranked in two categories, by value and by weight.
FISH VALUE (in millions) 1. Sea urchin $29.3 2. Rockfish* $14.9 3. Dungeness crab $10.7 4. Pacific herring $8.0 5. Swordfish $7.6
FISH POUNDS (in millions) 1. Mackerel 43.0 2. Pacific sardine 38.4 3. Sea urchin 32.6 4. Rockfish* 31.6 5. 5. Squid 28.8
* All species
Source: state Department of Fish and Game Compiled by researcher TRACY THOMAS
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Sonnetvision: San Diego’s low-power Channel 63 signed off its shop-till-you-drop program late one night, and anyone who stayed tuned was treated to blank verse in the buff. Determined to be new and daring, station manager John Willkie presented “Stark Verse: Poetry Sans Culottes,” four unnamed naked guys reading their original poems, with titles like “No More Shopping Today . . . Torpor Tao of Inaction” and a composition called “Give the World an Enema,” which concluded, “I’d love to give the world an enema/to jump-start the revolution/to bring back the dinosaurs/which never had talk shows, MTV or the shopping channel.” No complaints about the four raw guys, but no encores either. Nudity, philosophizes Willkie, “removes the ability to be armored, to use the Reichian term.” For you home shoppers, that means no place to carry the Visa card.
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City lights: No one-horse town, Fresno. Too much horsepower for its cross-town freeway has prompted Caltrans to set up the same devices that have ruled L.A. and Bay Area drivers for years: freeway on-ramp traffic lights and diamond lanes. Signals will flash their red and green cues for an hour each morning on four entrances to Freeway 41 in the state’s sixth largest city. Car-pool diamond lanes will be in effect all the time, and livestock do not count as a car pool.
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You say goodby, I say hello: So what if the state Department of Finance is claiming that more people left California last year than in any of the 20 years before? The U-Haul move-yourself people say just the opposite. From April, 1989, through March, 1990, U-Haul figures that 15.3% more families left California than moved to the Golden State. The next year it was 7.6%, the year after that, 4.3%, and last year, only 1% more movers leaving than coming in. Among the most popular destinations for outbound Californians: Phoenix and Denver. The cities most California-bound people leave behind: Phoenix and Denver.
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The fox and henhouse award: The Legislature has approved a measure sponsored by Sen. Leroy Greene (D-Carmichael) transferring from the Legislature to the secretary of state the responsibility for running the legally required ethics training courses for lobbyists.
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Mr. Rink, we struck us a Crisco gusher!One man’s cholesterol could be another man’s octane. Three professors at Fresno State have earned a $120,000 grant to find out whether used vegetable oil can fire up diesel engines and cut pollution. Vegetable oil has already been shown to run a diesel engine without spewing smog-hued nitrogen oxide pollutants. Now the Fresno trio must figure out how to keep a carbon buildup from grotting up the works. No oil wildcatters need apply; the Fresno Bee says 10 million gallons of vegetable oil and fat gets dumped by California restaurants every year. It’s perfect for California’s health-conscious drivers: Keep your arteries and highway arteries flowing freely.
EXIT LINE
“Back at the front door, she turned to me. ‘I’ve never understood how a cheap dick like you can make ends meet in Southern California.’ I looked her in the eye. “Welfare, my lovely.”
College professor and Renaissance drama specialist Bruce Golden’s contribution to La Jolla’s annual festival honoring the hard-boiled detective fiction of Raymond Chandler.
