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California Gas Tax Repeal is on November Ballot

California Gas Tax Repeal is on November Ballot

While Sacramento clings to a $16 Billion surplus, CA GOP plans to campaign on returning money to the taxpayer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4pXtFOU6eY

We have been following the saga of California, and the citizen revolt against the gas tax passed by Sacramento Democrats.
The petition gatherers succeeded, and the measure to repeal it will be on the November ballot.

Secretary of State Alex Padilla said Monday that initiative supporters collected enough valid signatures to qualify for the ballot. The move was widely expected after organizers turned in far more signatures than required.

The gas tax initiative is a central part of the Republican strategy to hold onto contested legislative and congressional seats in the face of Democrats motivated by opposition to President Donald Trump.

The GOP hopes opposition to the gas tax will make inroads with moderate voters and encourage conservatives to cast a ballot.

Republican gubernatorial candidate John Cox is making the gas tax repeal a central plank in his platform.

Cox is the chairman of a campaign to repeal the gas tax increase — a cause that Republicans will hammer at every turn in their hopes to make inroads in the heavily Democratic state.

“Gavin Newsom and the Democrats decided to do the easy thing in their view, and that is just keep sticking their hands in the pockets of Californians,” Cox told reporters at a news conference in front of the state Capitol in Sacramento.

He spoke ahead of a legislative hearing on a ballot measure that would repeal last year’s SB1, which raised taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel and created a new surcharge on vehicle registrations.

Yes, you read that right. Thanks to President Donald Trump, California’s economy is booming and the state has collected a massive surplus.

But the money is inviting a different kind of political problem for majority Democrats. It could be used to fuel the campaign that would repeal the 12-cents-a-gallon gas tax that they and Brown championed last year to lock in $52 billion in road repair funding for the next decade.

That record surplus gives gas tax opponents a simple message for their social media posts and radio ads.

The current governor intends to use road repair as an excuse to retain the surplus.

“What he is fighting for is his legacy, and so I think he would have every reason in the world to put a lot of emphasis on keeping the gas tax in place,” said Darry Sragow, a longtime Democratic strategist and publisher of California Target Book, which tracks political contests in the state.

The governor, who last reported $14.8 million in his campaign account available to fight repeal, has already begun offering his defense of the higher tax at press conferences throughout the state where he has announced the start of projects that they have made possible.

It is little wonder, then, that California is No. 3 for psychopathy! Sacramento is enough to drive anyone crazy.

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Comments

This flawed and dangerous measure … jeopardizes the safety of millions of Californians by stopping local communities from fixing their crumbling roads and bridges.

So … what is it about California roads which require a special tax to keep them repaired? All 57 states have roads, and the others manage to keep theirs repaired … well, more or less … without grabbing more money than usual.

    Living in Oregon and occasionally driving to California, I’ve noted that you can tell within a few feet where the border is, even without the signs.

    The sudden increase in “road noise” if you’re going south (or decrease if you’re headed north) is enough to tell you when you’ve crossed the state line.

    Now, Oregon does a pretty fair job of maintaining her roads and bridges, and it’s not cheap or easy. But road repair has to be specifically written into the budget, or else the money collected from the gas taxes can (read: will) be used for whatever pet projects our Governor Brown (I wish I was joking about that…) has in mind.

    Either way, the importance and necessity of well-maintained public roads has been recognized since the Roman empire. If Sacramento can’t manage to plan for it when writing their budget, that’s their issue, and no increase in taxes will fix it.

      4th armored div in reply to Archer. | June 28, 2018 at 2:00 pm

      this is a union cash cow which keeps giving more milk from the Woke fools.

      time to wake up and smell reality.

      harleycowboy in reply to Archer. | June 29, 2018 at 8:11 am

      “If Sacramento can’t manage to plan for it when writing their budget, that’s their issue, and no increase in taxes will fix it.”
      You can’t fix stupid.

    ConradCA in reply to tom_swift. | June 28, 2018 at 2:02 pm

    The Progressive Fascists who rule Ca stole the gas tax fund in order to fund their slow train to now where. They raised gas taxes on the promise to fund transportation without mentioning the fact that they are wasting gas taxes on their train boondoggle.

how much of that tax increase actually made it to the repair of the roads????

What?

You mean, people DON’T want to get slammed with more taxes for the “privilege” of going about their business?

The “sin tax” on commuting to/from work is not palatable to the people who actually work?

This is my shocked face.

We call this the Prius effect: Cars now use less gas, so taxes on gasoline must be raised. I would actually consider buying an electric car only because it would keep .gov from getting a penny in gas tax. But then that money is used to build bike lanes, which is a fancy way of saying that with a paint sprayer they are actually reducing the amount of roadway available for cars by that same amount. No bike lanes have ever been built, but a lot of car lanes have been re-purposed. So now we have fewer cars on the road because more people are biking, but congestion is still the same since fewer cars are having to fit on even less roadway. They are literally creating congestion as a means to justify more trains from nowhere to nowhere. The menses members in the streets dept decide that all of the time efficient routes need to be eliminated so they put speed bumps on these paths (we are now called bumptown instead of stumptown), or made them one-directional in different locations so they can’t be used over any effective distance. Fortunately, a bunch of side streets have been designated as bikeways so we car owners now use these as our efficient way to get around, and around the speed bumps. Or, where SE52nd is one directional for a few blocks, for example, cars now go to either 51st or 53rd for those few blocks, requiring multiple turns and traffic blockages, and endangering the kids who live on the much narrower side streets. 51st, a very narrow residential street, just got a whole slew of speed bumps, while djacent and very wide 52nd has none because it is now bikes only for those 3 blocks. It is like WW-II with the streets dept. For each measure, we develop a countermeasure, which they counter, and then we re-counter. It is constant social engineering with these people. But as a buddy put it, if it weren’t for Priuses decreasing gasoline demand and keeping the price down, he wouldn’t be able to afford to use either of his Suburbans.

“While Sacramento clings to a $16 Billion surplus, CA GOP plans to campaign on returning money to the taxpayer.”

Kali doesn’t have a budget surplus and never did.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-04-13/how-jerry-brown-hoodwinks-reporters

“How Jerry Brown Hoodwinks Reporters

State governments have a surefire strategy for hoodwinking the public and the news media, and nowhere does it work more perfectly than in California.

State governments have a surefire strategy for hoodwinking the public and the news media, and nowhere does it work more perfectly than in California. Journalists can’t stop lauding Governor Jerry Brown for a fiscal crisis into a “surplus,” even though that surplus was achieved by ignoring more than $6 billion in costs.

…Businesses aren’t permitted to use cash-based budgeting. Instead, they must accrue expenses whether paid or not. During Brown’s current term in office, his budgets will ignore more than $12 billion in retiree health-care costs… ”

And Brown is ow in his fourth term, given his two terms as governor in the ’70s. In reality the state is nowhere near a balanced budget. And, sit down, I know this will be hard to believe. But get a grip. The Democrat is simply lying about it. It’s simply “creative accounting.” If you know enough about the liabilities the state is racking up in terms of state employee salaries, pensions, retiree health care, debt service, and Medicaid the state is in reality still in the red. Except if you ignore all that, just like Brown and his Villistas are determined to do, you can claim the non-existent surplus.