California Fuming, From Dime Bags to Billion Dollar Bags
California public employee unions have their collective underwear in a bunch over Governor Schwarzenegger’s proposed budget cuts to staunch the fiscal hemorrhaging and close a mammoth now $14.5 billion budget gap. For every seven dollars the state takes in it now spends over eight. The budget hole is three and one-half times the size of the $4 billion deficit that provoked then Governor Gray Davis’ recall resulting in the election of Schwarzenegger.
Conservatives are fuming that Schwarzenegger is talking about raising taxes and fees to bail out the state’s bureaucracy saying that will deepen and prolong the state’s coming recession. What is clear, as the officially projected deficit jumped half a billion dollars, is the usual hocus-pocus and slight-of-hand will no longer work.
Schwarzenegger made good on his promise to release as many as 50,000 prison inmates to save cash. Critics predict a wave of crimes will follow that will ultimately cost even more than any savings asking, “If these people aren’t a danger to society why were they imprisoned in the first place? Because some are a danger.”
Saturday’s SACRAMENTO BEE
Andy Furillo profiled a heroin dealer, a drunken driver, and a self described self-described former prescription drug and methamphetamine addict that could be freed under the Governor’s massive amnesty plan. Right now, the three of them are doing time at Folsom State Prison. But if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s early release plan becomes law, the three will be heading home to their neighborhoods in Stockton, Sacramento and Pollock Pines sooner rather than later. Many of these released convicts will not find jobs, and return to crime overtaxing local parole, probation, and police budgets.
Los Angeles is about to “sell” its freeways and make them toll roads changing commuters as much as $10 @ day to use the roads taxpayers were already heavily taxed to build and maintain.
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