George Rebane

Praise the Lord, tomorrow’s California election will not draw many to the polls.  And those who will vote, will likely defeat the hokey smorgasbord that desperate Sacramento politicians have cooked up for us.  This morning’s WSJ op-ed summarizes it nicely –

California politicians have operated for years as if the purpose of government is not to provide reliable public services at low cost, but to feed public employee unions. Sacramento also needs to rethink its highly progressive antigrowth tax code, where the tax rates are the highest outside of New York City. The Golden State now ranks worst or second worst on most ratings of state business climate. This drives away entrepreneurs and high-income taxpayers, which in turn leads to lower revenues.

It concludes by suggesting a state flat tax, but observes that the difficulty in achieving it by saying that “(t)his kind of reform will only come from Golden State voters who aren’t yet on the public dole or the public payrolls. Howard Jarvis led such a charge 30 years ago. It needs to happen again for California to break out of its tax and spend death spiral.”  An uphill battle indeed.

Meanwhile left-wing groups – e.g. Center for Budget and Policy Priorities – are continuing their assault on the ‘rich’.  Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore (‘Soak the Rich, Lose the Rich’, 18may09 WSJ, Chad Crowe graphic) cite an Ohio University study finding

that from 1998 to 2007, more than 1,100 people every day including Sundays and holidays moved from the nine highest income-tax states such as California, New Jersey, New York and Ohio and relocated mostly to the nine tax-haven states with no income tax, including Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire and Texas. We also found that over these same years the no-income tax states created 89% more jobs and had 32% faster personal income growth than their high-tax counterparts.

The piece goes on to cite additional data on the effects of states attempting to redistribute income through taxation.  The picture is not pretty, yet such class warfare arrows seem to be the only ones remaining in the socialist quiver.

Finally, Texas Governor Rick Perry recognizes that the states are not only competing with each other, saying, “Our state is competing with Germany, France, Japan and China for business. We’d better have a pro-growth tax system or those American jobs will be out-sourced.”

The Laffer/Moore piece concludes with –

Texas created more new jobs in 2008 than all other 49 states combined. And Texas is the only state other than Georgia and North Dakota that is cutting taxes this year.

[19may09 update] In his regular Tuesday column, Jeff Ackerman of The Union has, perhaps, a more useful view of the election and our response to it.