Jerry Brown; A History of Failure to Act

When Jerry Brown was voted in as Governor, he inherited a $555,000,000 surplus from Governor Reagan at the end of Fiscal Year 1974-75. Brown allowed the surplus to balloon over three fiscal years until it reached $5,300,000,000 or a 954% increase. One of the main causes of the budget surplus was inflation and a housing bubble. The effect of inflation on property taxes also resulted in considerable hardship on home owners in the state at the time, but Brown refused to address the issue. This led to the Jarvis initiative and the passing Proposition 13 in 1978. At the same time, Brown pushed through another measure that was supposed to hold off, proposition 13 that called for the indexing of state income taxes for inflation; this saved California tax payers about $231 million, or $400 million over two years. Once Proposition 13 passed, Brown became a self-avowed, newborn tax cutter. However Brown did not see the necessity of maintaining the indexing, but he was overruled with Proposition 7, that made it permanent. Proposition 13 also placed the state in control of education. This directed a greater percentage of local property tax revenue to education and required more money from the state general fund to cover mandated expenses. As a result, Brown drained the state surplus and added 2 cents to the state gasoline tax. Many have tried to mitigate the gas tax increase as small, due to its price per gallon, but the result was well over $200 million a year.

While Jerry Brown been credited or demonized for raiding the state’s surplus, raising taxes and increasing spending when he was governor, this was all in reaction to Proposition 13 and the Carter recession that combined to drastically reduce tax revenues in California. But where does that leave Jerry Brown? If he has one major problem it is his hesitancy to act. During his first 4 years he spent way too much time posturing his austerity without taking the time to scope out the needs of the California voter. During this time, with a growing multi-billion dollar surplus he nothing at all with the money, no infrastructure building, no tax cuts, nothing. Afterwords, without being a newborn tax cutter, Brown could not have won the election. Jerry Brown is a political animal that has flown from the seat of his pants his entire career. If his political ads are a judge, I have little faith he has changed. When Jerry Brown was voted in as Governor, he inherited a $555,000,000 surplus from Governor Reagan at the end of Fiscal Year 1974-75. Brown allowed the surplus to balloon over three fiscal years until it reached $5,300,000,000 or a 954% increase. One of the main causes of the budget surplus was inflation and a housing bubble. Property taxes was one of the main causes of this runaway surplus that resulted in considerable hardship on home owners in the state at the time, but Brown refused to address the issue. This led to passing Proposition 13 in 1978. At the same time, Brown pushed through another measure that was supposed to hold off, proposition 13 that called for the indexing of state income taxes for inflation; this saved California tax payers about $231 million, or $400 million over two years. Once Proposition 13 passed, Brown became a self-avowed, newborn tax cutter. However Brown did not see the necessity of maintaining the indexing, but he was overruled with Proposition 7, that made it permanent. Proposition 13 also placed the state in control of education. This directed a greater percentage of local property tax revenue to education and required more money from the state general fund to cover mandated expenses. As a result, Brown drained the state surplus and added 2 cents to the state gasoline tax. Many have tried to mitigate the gas tax increase as small, due to its price per gallon, but the result was well over $200 million a year.

While Jerry Brown been credited or demonized for raiding the state’s surplus, raising taxes and increasing spending when he was governor, this was all in reaction to Proposition 13 and the Carter recession that combined to drastically reduce tax revenues in California. But where does that leave Jerry Brown? If he has one major problem it is his hesitancy to act. During his first 4 years he spent way too much time posturing his austerity without taking the time to scope out the needs of the California voter. Afterwords, without being a newborn tax cutter, Brown could not have won the election. Jerry Brown is a political animal that has flown from the seat of his pants his entire career. If his political ads are a judge, I have little faith he has changed. Brown says there should be no tax increases without a vote, sounds good, especially due to the fact that tax increase in California require a 2/3 popular vote. Lets hope his other ideas will be more robust than that.

AP Attacks Meg Whitman with Op-Ed "News" Article

Today, my local paper printed the second of two hit piece in 4 days on Republican candidates; the first (9/11) by the NYT “A G.O.P. Leader Tightly Bound to Lobbyists” and the second (9/14) by AP "Whitman exaggerates Brown’s spending". I wouldn’t mind the articles so much if they were printed on the opinions page, but placing theses editorials next to supposed real news is purposely misleading. What the AP article said was Meg Whitman used dumbed down accounting techniques to show the extent of Jerry Brown's tax and spending while he was Governor of California.

When Brown took over the Governorship from Ronald Regan in 1975, he inherited a $500 million surplus. Brown allowed this to balloon to nearly $5 billion in three years. This huge surplus was not result of anything done by Brown, but the result of taxes on California’s skyrocketing property values and inflation in the late 1970’s. Brown refused to re-distribute the surplus back to the voters, so a taxpayer’s revolt voted in Proposition 13, which drastically cut property taxes. Brown’s response, rather than reduce the size of the Government was to rely almost solely the the surplus, resulting in a $1 billion deficit by the time he left office. The AP article presented the fact that Brown held the growth of government to 10% a year after Proposition 13 as a positive, but if you do the math 10% a year will double the size of government spending every 9 years. Further the so-called budget cuts by Jerry Brown were not reductions in current spending, but reductions in the amount of future government increases. The AP article also compared Jerry Browns 120% increase in government spending to Ronald Reagan’s 105% increase. This is presented as if there was some consensus that Regan's spending increases were viewed a something positive by conservatives, where the opposite was true, as conservatives were highly critical of Regan’s increased spending as Governor. It is also not lost on the reader, that this AP article is not showing Brown in the light of a fiscal conservative, but rather placing him in the same category as a big spending Republican governor.

Brown did cut State income taxes by about $4 billion before Proposition 13, hoping to placate angry voters who saw the state budget surplus increasing while they could barely afford their property taxes. After Proposition 13, Brown raised gasoline and sales tax, which increased Californian’s tax burden by $2.5 billion and $4.5 -$5 billion respectively. While these taxes may have been necessary to offset Proposition 13, they most certainly were tax increase. Finally the article throws out a figure of $4.4 billion dollars being returned to local government during the 1978-1979 fiscal year. What it failed to say was as a result of Proposition 13, property tax revenues no longer went directly to local governments, but was paid through the state and then returned to local government, so it would follow that the amount of money returned to local government would substantially increase under Proposition 13.

So, to no ones surprise, the AP article is a partisan response to Meg Whitman’s political ads. One could almost justify these articles if they were more balanced, but there is also a total lack of opposing articles pointing out the obvious mis-information from the Jerry Brown attack ads. The most obvious is the ad that points out in a very accusatory manner that ebay’s overhead increased 2000% when Meg Whitman took control; the fact that she increased the number ebay employees from 40 to 15,000 may have had something to do with that increase. It’s as if Meg Whitman is being attack for creating jobs. So no, there is no reciprocity here, these AP and NYT’s articles should be clearly labeled as OP-Ed pieces. The fact that they are not, is indicative of the NYT being in near receivership and the Whitehouse’s stated desire to subsidize these partisan news media, as not to lose an outlet for their Progressive propaganda.