Will Newsom end oil drilling in California?

Retard Alert

• The retarded Leftist Democrat base wants to abolish high paying oil industry jobs and at the same time eliminate the tax income to the state that those jobs produce.

(Tribune)  -  California’s legacy of oil drilling should be just that, many environmentalists argue – relegated to the history books.

They are urging Gov. Gavin Newsom to ban new oil and gas drilling in California and completely phase out fossil fuel extraction in one of the nation’s top petroleum-producing – and gasoline-consuming – states.

At the least, they want the state to impose buffer zones prohibiting new oil and gas wells near schools, hospitals and residential neighborhoods and also require monitoring for potentially hazardous emissions from abandoned or plugged wells, proposals already being considered by state lawmakers.

“It sure would make us happy if he made a big splash about this. It’s month four. People are being very patient. By month six, patience may wear thin,” said Sierra Club California Director Kathryn Phillips.

Phillips said her organization and other groups that support curtailing oil production in California have met informally with Newsom administration officials. While Newsom has not made any promises, expectations remain high, she said.

Newsom, who served on the State Lands Commission for eight years, says he’s well versed in the issues surrounding on-shore and off-shore oil drilling in California and said he would announce his administration’s detailed strategy on energy policy in the next few weeks.

The governor was coy about core aspects of that policy, and declined to say if it would ban the controversial practice of hydraulic fracking, a process that uses drilling and large volumes of high-pressure water to extract gas and oil deposits.

“I’m taking a very pragmatic look at it, in scoping this,” Newsom told the Los Angeles Times last week. “It’s also an inclusive scoping because it includes people in the industry, that have jobs; communities that are impacted from an environmental justice prism but also from an economic justice prism. It’s a challenging issue. There’s a reason Gov. Brown used a lot of dexterity on this issue.”

The Democratic governor emphasized that he would not be “exercising passivity.” But Newsom also said that, despite his strong support for putting California on a path to a 100 percent renewable energy supply, it would be unrealistic to think that California can just stop its dependence on oil and gas.

“One cannot just turn off the switch. One cannot just immediately abut against a century of practice and policy,” Newsom said.

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California may be reaching the point of ‘taxuration’

By JON COUPAL

The phenomenon of “taxuration” occurs when taxpayers are so saturated with new tax-hike proposals that they start to rebel.  According to a new poll, taxuration may have finally arrived in California, if hasn’t been here already.

Last week, the Public Policy Institute of California released the findings of a survey showing that a majority of likely voters in the state aren’t very happy with the tax burdens they are forced to pay. Most Californians say the state’s tax system is unfair, which is a reversal from the same question asked in March 2017. More importantly, a solid majority of likely voters in California think they pay more taxes to state and local governments than they should.

While perception is often not correlated with reality, it appears that Californians have a fairly realistic understanding of the tax burden in the state relative to other states.  According to the report, “The public’s perceptions are somewhat in line with fiscal facts: California’s state and local tax collections per capita in 2015 were 10th-highest in the nation,” citing the left leaning Tax Policy Center.  Note that another think tank, the Tax Foundation, ranks California even higher in tax burden.

It shouldn’t be surprising to anyone paying attention that citizens are reaching the breaking point on tax hikes. Every day seems to bring a new big tax-hike proposal emanating from the state Capitol.  Just one example that popped up this week was a proposal to bring back California’s estate tax, which was repealed by voters in 1982. Other tax-hike proposals in the mix include higher income tax rates, a water tax, a soda tax, sales tax on services and a so-called “carbon intensity” tax.  (Don’t ask.)

Moreover, when the California Legislature doesn’t want to do the dirty work of raising taxes directly, it is adept at enacting statutes authorizing local governments to raise taxes. The legislature has engaged in this practice for decades since the passage of Proposition 13, starting with the infamous Mello-Roos taxes on new developments.  The most recent – and dangerous – example of this is Assembly Constitutional Amendment No. 1 – which would lower the vote needed to pass a range of bonds and special taxes, including parcel taxes, from two-thirds down to just 55 percent. If approved by voters (constitutional amendments must be approved by a simple majority of the statewide electorate) ACA 1 will leave the door open to billions in new local taxes and bond debt.

And let’s not forget the tax hikes put on the ballot by progressives who never met a tax they didn’t like.  Chief among these is the notorious “split roll” proposal, which has already qualified for the 2020 ballot. It would strip Proposition 13’s protection against higher property taxes from owners of business properties.

The tax-and-spend lobby will argue that Californians actually like higher taxes as evidenced by the failure to repeal the big increases in the gas and car tax passed in 2017.  But the failure of Proposition 6 last November was the result of a deceptive ballot label courtesy of our Attorney General, who doesn’t hesitate to put his thumb on the scales of justice to benefit his political backers.

The reality is that Californians have likely had enough.  Even PPIC president Mark Baldassare interpreted the poll results as troubled water for the tax raisers, noting, “The trends say to me that the governor and Legislature should proceed with caution when it comes to raising revenues or restructuring taxes in light of the perceived tax burden.”

That may be the understatement of the year.

Jon Coupal is president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association

OCRegister.com