‘No Tax Increase’ Will Cost the State Plenty

Re “State Has No Way to Avoid Loans,” Jan. 26: Why do we keep hearing the fiction that borrowing is necessary to cover California’s budget gap? At any time, the governor and Legislature could raise the state’s taxes high enough to cover the shortfall without a dime of borrowing. Borrowing is only “necessary” if you pretend a perfectly good budgetary solution doesn’t exist.

Rob Schmidt

Culver City

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I thought Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said he was going to clean up or “pump up” the budget of California if elected. He said he’d find the waste. Charging each department the price of its water cooler paper cups isn’t going to solve the problem (Inside Politics, Jan. 26). Borrowing on the backs of our children, the ill and elderly isn’t going to do it either. Money is going to have to be raised across the board, and not only in “fees.”

Libby Breen

Altadena

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Re Indian casinos: The Governator remains firmly behind his “no tax increase” pledge. This means not a single-percent increase for multimillionaire CEOs. Not a tenth of a percent increase for massive (campaign contributor) corporations. But demanding almost three times that corporate tax rate from the most persecuted minority in the history of this country as their “fair share” somehow doesn’t qualify as a tax increase.

Something must have been lost in the translation from German, because it smells like a tax to me.

Lee Aydelotte

Huntington Beach

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I completely agree with the politicians and people such as Ed Coonce (letter, Jan. 25) who demand that the rich pay their fair share of taxes. Those of us who earn incomes in the top 5% pay more than 50% of the total income taxes, while people who earn incomes in the bottom 50% pay only about 4% of the total income taxes.

A fair tax system would lower taxes on those of us who have used our God-given talents and the opportunities we enjoy as U.S. citizens to earn more, rather than taking so much of what we have earned to fund a mountain of inefficient and ineffective bureaucracy.

F. Stephen Masek

Mission Viejo

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I am a middle-income high school administrator who recently purchased a home in an established neighborhood. Proposition 13 allows me the great good fortune to pay up to 10 times as much property tax as my neighbors. In fact, according to Warren Buffett’s publicized statement, my property tax is more than three times the tax he pays on his far more luxurious home in Laguna Beach.

Now Schwarzenegger wants me to vote to borrow a heap of money so that I can continue to subsidize state services for long-term residents of Beverly Hills and other wealthy neighborhoods. If not, he promises “Armageddon.”

I would suggest that the “waste” he promised to discover so far has been found in health services for the poor and disabled and in education. In fact, California’s poor are already experiencing Arnold’s Armageddon. Perhaps we need to have the Armageddon effects felt by the rich in order to summon the will to reform and modernize California’s tax system.

Nope, I am not voting for a $15-billion bond that does nothing but allow me to continue subsidizing the wealthy. As for Arnold’s Armageddon, in the immortal words of George W. Bush: “Bring it on!”

Kathy Crandall

Newhall