U.S. Extends Tax Cuts, California Extends Tax Hikes

California decided to go the suicidal route when it returned Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown and Barbara "Dumb-as-a-Box-of-Rocks" Boxer to power, and when it voted to make it easier for the legislature to sneak tax hikes into budget bills.  It was foolish and we're all going to pay for it.

Moonbeam is proposing a budget balancing "solution" that will simply keep most of the problem spending in place and strangle the very people with the best chance to grow the economy:

Gov.-elect Jerry Brown is laying the groundwork for a budget plan that would couple deep cuts to state services, including university systems and welfare programs, with a request that voters extend temporary tax hikes on vehicles, income and sales that are set to expire next year.

The blueprint Brown will unveil when he takes office early next month also is expected to take aim at several tax breaks and subsidies that have been fiercely guarded by the business lobby in Sacramento, according to people involved in budget discussions with the incoming administration.

Among the breaks are multibillion-dollar incentives for redevelopment projects and hundreds of millions of dollars of "enterprise zone" credits meant to encourage investment in blighted neighborhoods. Also targeted is a recent change to state business tax formulas that has saved corporate California roughly $1 billion.

The combination of austere spending and extended tax hikes is designed to confront both parties and their allied interest groups with painful choices that Brown says are necessary to truly resolve the state's massive budget problems. He intends to take swift action, using the political capital of a new governor to confront a deficit that could easily subsume his governorship.

In a symbolic gesture to garner the trust of a skeptical public, Brown has already pledged to cut his own office budget by 25%.

So, while Congress is doing the right thing and extending the Bush tax cuts, Brown is asking voters to extend various tax hikes which were hiked in previous years to "fix" the problems that are still going on. They clearly didn't work then, and won't work now.

You have to understand that in California there's no such thing as a "temporary tax hike".  They're marketed to the voters as temporary to make them more palatable, but the Democrats who propose them are counting on voters becoming complacent after paying the temporary tax for a couple of years.  After they become used to the extra taxes they're less likely to object to an extension of those taxes.

Just say no to Moonbeam and his tax hikes.