By Tim Redmond
The state Legislature is scheduled to vote Friday on a budget deal that nobody likes.. I’m told that labor groups will urge Democratic legislators to oppose the deal; it’s not even clear that Republicans — whose leaders helped negotiate it — will vote for the proposal.
The GOP members still insist, for the most part, that they won’t accept new taxes, and this plan has $14.3 billion in new taxes, some of which are pretty good. It calls for a 12-cent increase in the gas tax, which is a great way to raise money and should be higher, and a slight increase in the car tax (ditto). I don’t like the 1-cent sales tax hike, and while I’m all for raising income taxes on the rich, a 2.5-percent across-the-board surtax isn’t even remotely fair (esp. since the higher earners, who tend to itemize deductions, will wind up deducting the higher tax from the federal income taxes, while the average person won’t get that benefit.) Still: at least some of the budget gap will be addressed with new revenues (which the mayor of San Francisco can’t seem to accept as a solution back home.)
The cuts are awful. The schools will get hammered . According to the Sacramento Bee
Welfare recipients and low-income disabled, blind and elderly individuals would not receive cost-of-living increases
which is awfully harsh.
And it goes downhill from there — among other things, the budget would eliminate state support for local transit systems, which is going to be a brutal hit for San Francisco.
So the more liberal Dems are going to get pressure to say no, and even the Republican leaders who worked on the deal won’t promise to vote for it. But as state Sen. Mark Leno told me:
“Given the nature of the $42 billion deficit, our budget resolution is by definition painful all around. And we have to move forward to get the state off life support.”