With recent polls showing that support has fallen below 50 percent for Proposition 30 — Gov. Jerry Brown’s temporary tax hike initiative that would help fund education across California — Jewish organizers working on behalf of the measure are working hard to convince Californians to approve the measure.
We Californians love to use direct democracy to perform amateur surgery on our state government. As heirs to a century-old tradition of progressive reform, we believe that if we tinker with the rules, we will get much better outcomes.
If there was ever a time for Jewish parents to fight for Los Angeles public schools, this is it.
It\’s spring in Sacramento, and that means the Capitol steps are jammed again with protesters against government cuts — the first protesters to show up in mid-March were thousands of community college students demanding that California taxpayers continue paying the nation\’s steepest college subsidies per student.
A 55 percent vote still requires a larger majority to pass our budget than 47 other states and the federal government. Arkansas and Rhode Island are the only other states that currently require a two-thirds vote to pass a budget.
If you study the state budgets over the last few years as I have, you would see that we have had a deficit at the end of each year that keeps getting larger each and every year. Even when revenues were perceived to be at a peak, we were outspending those revenues. The state budget began each year in the hole that just got deeper as the months went by.
Can California\’s new Republican governor make inroads among traditionally Democratic Jews?
The immigration issue burst into state politics in 1994 when unpopular Republican Gov. Pete Wilson used Proposition 187, a measure to deny public services to undocumented residents, to save his reelection.
\”We now tax Californians 2.7 cents per capita for all public art support,\” Paul Minicucci said, noting that in Canada, which has 4 million fewer residents than California, the National Arts Council has a budget of $660 million. He said similar figures for European nations are \”simply off the charts.\”
Nearly 200 Jews descended on Sacramento this week to lobby California\’s most powerful politicians to protect major programs that serve the poorest and frailest Jews and other Californians from the budget ax.
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