Gov. Jerry Brown today released "An Open Letter to the People of California" that reveals his single-minded pursuit of tax increases. Brown tells a one-sided history of the budget battle and paints Republicans as the key obstacle to a fiscal fix given their blockage of his plan to raise taxes. Brown said, he is "filing today an initiative with the Attorney General's office that would
generate nearly $7 billion in dedicated funding to protect education
and public safety. I am going directly to the voters because I don't
want to get bogged down in partisan gridlock as happened this year. The
stakes are too high." Brown refuses to try to actually reform the state government, i.e., to find ways to stretch taxpayer dollars. Even his pension reform plan was window-dressing -- a dead-on-arrival package that allows Brown to at least claim to have supported reform. In his view, the state government is cut to the bone and there's nothing to do but to increase California's tax rates, which already are among the highest in the nation.
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