Governor Jerry Brown Calls for Higher Taxes and Deeper Cuts for California

All is not well in the Land of Fruits and Nuts.

Governor Brown announced that the California budget deficit has now reached 16 million dollars and that deeper cuts may be necessary.  He said:

"This means we will have to go much further, and make cuts far greater, than I asked for at the beginning of the year."

Of course, we can always raise taxes and that's exactly what Democrats prefer when the credit card has been maxed out -- just increase the max.  The article continues:

Brown has said there will be even deeper cuts, mostly to public education, if voters do not improve tax hikes in November. He is seeking a quarter-cent increase in the state sales tax for four years and a seven-year hike on incomes of $250,000 or more that will range from 1 to 3 percentage points. He says the measure would raise $9 billion in the upcoming budget year.

Read it all here.

I intend to vote against the tax increases, as I always do.  Instead of tax increases on an already outbound business population, who are moving in droves to more business-friendly states, we should simply curtail the state employee labor unions.  Reduce the size of their salaries, benefits and certainly their retirement, which greatly exceed that for similar work in private industry.

However, to do so would be to alienate a key Democrat constituency, which has no problem with draining the state coffers dry and taxing the public until they bleed.