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There’s No Good Reason For Boosting the Car Tax

There’s No Good Reason For Boosting the Car Tax

California’s spending lobby has recently erupted into a veritable Mount Vesuvius of misinformation over the state’s car tax. It amounts essentially to this: unless the car tax is immediately tripled, police and fire protection will be decimated.

Come now.

In the five years since the car tax was reduced, local governments have not lost a penny of funding and they won’t in the future. It would take a vote of the Legislature to approve such a reduction and both houses have already unanimously rejected the idea outright.

What do public officials really mean when they say, “If we don’t raise taxes, police and fire protection will be devastated?” They mean that police and fire protection are their lowest priorities and the very first things they will cut in a pinch. I worry about such people in positions of authority.

Three weeks ago, the Senate Republican Caucus offered an alternative plan that would balance the budget within two years without raising taxes.

There is no excuse for tax increases at a time when state government is already spending a larger portion of your earnings than ever before , and delivering less. Even after California’s car tax was reduced to its current level, it is still the highest tax of the five largest states in the country.

There’s one more reason to be skeptical that raising the car tax will curb the state’s spending binge. It was recently revealed that Gov. Davis, knowing the dire financial condition of the state, has allowed his bureaucracies to spend $4.1 billion above and beyond the budget approved by the Legislature last September (which was itself too big to be sustained by California’s economy).

Over the last four years, even while the recession was suppressing tax receipts and the car tax was being trimmed, state revenues have still increased a healthy 25 percent while inflation and population combined have grown only 21 percent. This is not a revenue problem. The problem is that spending in the same period has ballooned 40 percent.

And that’s not the fault of taxpayers for not paying enough taxes.

McClintock, a Republican represents the 19th state Senate District.

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