November Initiatives

A cursory glance at the initiatives on the California November ballot reveals that voters are being given all the rope they need for a $42 billion hanging. Initiatives happen when the people we elected fail to repair our roads, protect our water, rebuild our levees, secure our energy future, refurbish our schools, provide shelters to battered women or even find consensus on additional taxes to support health care to smokers, who didn’t heed a printed warning that TOBACCO CAN KILL YOU.

Granted, our elected officials are hamstrung with the bulge of budget entitlements, escalating union salaries, non-negotiable mandatory expenditures and extorted health and pension benefits, not to mention the oppressive Federal mandates that never get repaid. The latter being expenses to provide services to those that are illegal aliens, professional deadbeats or gamers of the system.

The irony of the ballot Initiative is that once you approve the bonds to pay for all these services, the Legislature will do damn well what it wants with the money, do to loopholes big enough to drive a truck through. For instance, fuel taxes were always intended to be used to improve, expand and repair our highways. Proposition 1A tells you how well that worked out.
I would submit that if you took away all the “smoke and mirrors“, rhetoric, political blustering, the “slight of hand” tricks and the ACLU and ADA lawsuits, a group of high school sophomores could craft a more responsible budget for California. A high school diploma, while desirable, would simply be superfluous to the current process.

Here’s an idea. Vote yes on 1A, then 1B would be moot. Deny developers permits to build where mother nature and gravity has the upper hand. Get communities involved with upgrading their own schools instead of squandering education dollars on architects, consultants and “prevailing wage“ construction costs.

Let the charitable community take care of abused women, let Smith and Wesson take care of the abusers. Get government, large or small, out of the redevelopment business they’re not very good at it and it’s just an end run around Prop 13, which we also voted for.

And last but not least, let adolescent boys have voluntary vasectomies so that young girls won’t need to have tax paid abortions or the alternative welfare support. See, that wasn’t so hard, was it?