As state chairman of Maine’s 2009 Taxpayer Bill of Rights campaign, this particular news has me giggling like a giddy schoolchild. From Ballotpedia:
SACRAMENTO, California: On May 19, California voters decisively rejected five out of six statewide ballot propositions. The only proposition approved by voters was Prop 1F, which prohibits pay raises for state legislators in years when they have failed to produce a budget.
The Sacramento Bee reprinted an e-mail from a reader that appeared to reflect the mood of the evening: “Schwarzenegger, Bass, Cogdill, Villines, Steinberg and the rest of those stinking, lying Sacramento bastards can go straight to hell. They’re going to be whacked hard upside their heads tomorrow.”
Gov. Schwarzenegger and the top two legislative leaders from the California Senate and California State Assembly will begin meetings on Wednesday, May 20, when the governor returns from Washington, DC to decide what their next moves are, as the state’s tax revenues continue to plummet and its budget gap continues to expand.
Five of the six measures involved tax increases to cover California’s catastrophic budget shortfall – provided to residents compliments of Sacramento’s catastrophic incompetence. The margins were decisive across the board. I just hope that Allahpundit is wrong in his assessment:
In fairness to the Times, though, Mark Steyn has long lamented this same tendency among European and, increasingly, American voters: They love their government goodies even though they manifestly can’t afford them, with the total paralysis here over social security reform the grimmest example. Californians don’t really have to make a hard choice between cutting spending and raising taxes since The One will surely force you and I to bail them out, but per that gruesome Heritage graph illustrating his own deficits over the next decade, the national reckoning’s coming. And given the likelihood that universal health care will pass sometime soon, creating a dependency among the public even more profound than social security, it’s not hard to guess how that choice will go when the time comes to make it.
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