"The shell game (also known as Thimblerig, Three shells and a pea, the old army game) is portrayed as a gambling game, but in reality, when a wager for money is made, it is a confidence trick used to perpetrate fraud" (an excerpt from Wikipedia's description).
The state government in California is about as full of it as the L.A. City government, with a whole different cast of characters. Don’t worry if you don’t know them, they really don’t care about that just as long as they (a.) continue to be re-elected, (b.) are able to collect more money from people and businesses in California so that they can cover their bad money management decisions, and, (c.) continue to get paid all the benefits that they can from their elected post.
The other thing about the politicians at all levels you can note again is that they like to handle money in large sums, the larger the better. It looks to me to be an ego thing or some sort of an establishment of a pecking order among politicians- a kind of game: “Who can squeeze the most money out of what you already have” It also makes for increasing the opportunities to waste more money and victimize taxpayers at a higher rate.
Yesterday’s plan was another adventure by the Democratic majority into victimization of taxpayers along the way to the reaching a budget. The L.A. TIMES accurately labels their story , “California Democrats devise plan to hike taxes,” http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-budget18-2008dec18,0,1785472.story The story gives the details and background, as well as views on the moves involved in achieving the plan, and what you can expect to happen now.
And here's a reminder of the size of the pot of money they affect. When they speak of a "billion dollars" that means "a million one-thousand dollar bills."
Or you could look at it like this: Put a THOUSAND millionaires into an arena and that would equal the wealth of ONE billionaire.
The plan that Governor Arnold already said he will veto, was to increase taxes, most of which they called “Fees,” which was done by majority vote by lawmakers instead of two-thirds vote that the State Constitution requires in matters of taxation. The proposed changes were as follows: INCREASE State Sales tax by 3/4%, ADD a “fee” to the 2009 State Income Tax bill for everyone, INCREASE gasoline tax by 13 cents each gallon.
The problem with getting more money was that the taxing power is limited. So what do they do to get around that limitation? Simple. “Let’s call the increased charges ‘FEES’ and you only need to have a simple majority, not a two-thirds vote.” The word they should have used was “disingenuous” because you can call an elephant a cow all day long, but you still won’t be getting any steaks or hamburgers to barbecue from that mislabeling.
Fees, in general, mean some service is done and there is a related price for it, like a "copy fee" for documents or "entrance fee" for city or county beach parking lots. You get the idea. The point here is that you are paying for a service and there is a set price to cover the value of it, so it's an actual FEE.
Now taxes just happen to be unrelated to the benefit you receive and more related to how much money your governing politicians need to pay the bills they were supposed to be managing. The amount is set most commonly in terms of a percent of something, like your income, your gasoline purchase or other unit of measure. Usually, when there is an increased FEE charged, there has been some increase in the real cost of the service.
If you see a cost to you that is going up and the amount of that increase is set by a vote of politicians without any real relation to the COST of doing the service itself, and it's a percentage rate, then you can be fairy certain it is really a TAX.
Well, the Governor’s veto, as the story includes, is not due to the legal terms “shell game” of the legislature, but by the fact that Arnold did not get all he wanted into the bill, including an ability to lay off more state workers which bothers employees unions quite a bit.
Read the story for more of their manueverings. And that’s just at the State level. More misdeeds are happening at the city level- but they are on their break until January when they come back and make the mess worse as they so typically do.
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