Here’s an excerpt from my latest op-ed as published in the Fresno Bee:
It may seem like a distant memory, but merely two years ago, a different governor and Legislature tried taxing their way out of a similar budget mess. Since then California has lost more than half a million jobs and our state’s unemployment rate has grown by 20%.
We clearly don’t need an empirical study to tell us that tax hikes don’t create jobs.
Even so, Gov. Brown is proposing to extend these very same tax increases for five more years. If approved, Californians will pay $45 billion more in income taxes, sales taxes, and vehicle taxes.
On top of this, the governor is proposing to eliminate a number of tax incentives that currently encourage businesses to create and retain jobs in our state.
Under his proposals, private sector employers, including many small businesses, would pay more than $2 billion in retroactive taxes this year and increased taxes for years to come.
The governor calls his budget solution a "balanced approach" since it includes both tax increases and cuts. But in reality, his approach is anything but balanced.
A balanced approach would recognize that the private sector has been devastated by the economic downturn-more so in California than other states. In the past three years, more than one million private sector workers have lost their jobs.
During that same time period, guess how much state employment shrunk?
It didn’t.
According to the latest Employment Development Department numbers, state employment actually grew by 1,200 jobs. We now have 489,000 state workers-nearly half a million-whose wages and benefits are paid by a private sector that is a million workers smaller.
And now the governor is asking the private sector to step up and pay even more to protect those state workers’ paychecks.
Does that seem balanced to you?