As predicted, a week after he was sworn in to office, Dao Governor announced that, indeed, he did want to raise taxes -- but only if voters approved. Then Brown faced what somehow was an unexpected hurdle. The Democrat who, as a candidate, would not say he wanted to raise taxes could not scrape together four GOP votes to put his tax increase on the ballot.
Californians never will know what would have happened had Brown been honest when he ran for governor. It could be that Brown never could have mustered two GOP Assembly members and two GOP senators to put him over the two-thirds threshold needed to pass a tax hike. Or it could be that with a clear mandate and the threat that he might place an outrageous soak-the-rich measure before voters, Brown would have been in a strong position to negotiate a budget deal with needed spending reforms and a tax increase.
We do know that Brown's pledge to raise taxes only through the ballot undermined his ability to govern well. Rather than work with the right to get to the center, he found himself negotiating leftward in an attempt to tease two rival tax-increasing measures off the ballot. He only half-succeeded. Multimillionaire Molly Munger refused to pull Proposition 38, her tax measure to increase taxes on most working Californians.
In March, Brown announced that he had persuaded the California Federation of Teachers to pull its "millionaires tax" by agreeing to reconfigure his own tax plan. As a result, Brown's Prop 30 would raise the sales tax by 0.25 percent from 2013 through 2016 and income taxes on top earners, from 9.3 percent to 12.3 percent through 2018. (Californians who earn more than $1 million annually also pay 1 percent toward mental health services.)
- Topics:
- 2012 Election
- California
- Gov. Jerry Brown
Debra J. Saunders
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