The Fact of My Ignorance

Screenshot from real life political computer game: "Take Back Illinois"

Well the Monday night deadline for CA politicians to agree on a budget came and went so Schwarzenegger was forced to send out 10,000 layoff notices to state employees.  The reason for the stall?  They were one vote short in the state senate.  California has a very unusual arrangement that requires a two-thirds majority in both houses of congress for a budget to be passed.  And after months and months of negotiations and concessions to republicans (the bill now consists of millions more in spending cuts than tax hikes) they were only able to entice 2 of the necessary 3 GOP senators to support the bill.

So when everyone woke up the next day and 10,000 more Californians were facing unemployment, did any of the senators who had voted against the bill, have second thoughts?  Did they acknowledge in anyway that thousands of CA families would now be suffering (and not to mention on the unemployment and/or welfare roles of the state) because of their posturing?  Nope.  In fact they gave a big raspberry to bi-partisanship and ousted the senate minority leader who helped negotiate the compromise bill.  The reason for these legislators’ ire?  The bill still contains tax hikes.  Literally, many of them will not vote for the legislation if it contains any tax hikes at all.

Unfortunately, CA is facing a 42 billion dollar deficit that absolutely cannot be fixed by spending cuts alone.  Governor Schwarzenegger recognizes this:

“If you think that you can do this budget without any increase in revenues then you have a big math problem because you can’t erase a $42 billion deficit without revenue increases,” Schwarzenegger said. “I hate taxes, but you when you are faced with that kind of reality, that’s what you have to do. We can only solve this problem with additional revenues and with spending cuts.”

We slashed 11 billion from the budget last year and the current budget has 15.2 billion in further spending reductions in the works.  I don’t think we can cut our way to solvency without unconscionably… Continue reading

One last stimulus post and then I promise I’ll take a break.  I have been utterly amazed at the creative reading skills of stimulus opponents over the last few weeks.  As they say a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth has finished putting its shoes on.  And the four outrageous claims discussed here have been passed around virtually unchallenged for a while now.

ACORN Nuttiness

The idea that there was money for ACORN in the stimulus was first invented by Fox news in the run up to the stimulus debate and its since been parroted by republican legislators including John Boehner and David Vitter.  In reality, of course, ACORN is not mentioned at all in the bill but what worries republicans is that 4.2 billion is set aside for local governments and (gasp) non-profit organizations to help them buy up foreclosed homes, fix them up, and sell them or rent them out.  So the logic goes 1.There is money in the bill for non-profits to buy up homes,   2. ACORN is a non-profit organization that does things vaguely housing related   3. The democrats are trying to sneak money to their buddies at ACORN!!!!!

Lest you think I’m exaggerating here is a quote from Louisiana Republican David Vitter on the subject: ”$4.2 billion dollars would be available to organizations like ACRON for so-called neighborhood revitalization. That’s just political payoff, quite frankly, not in spite of their voter registration fraud activity, really because of it, in my opinion, in terms of support from some of the liberals in Congress.”  … Wow.   That’s quite a conspiracy theory he’s put together there.  Never mind the fact that “ACORN Housing” is an entirely different organization than the ACORN that committed voter fraud, never mind that ACORN housing has never purchased a foreclosed home in its history and has no plans to do so, and never mind that… Continue reading