By Steve Thompson, Chairman of the Butte County Republican Party
A lot of fuss has been made recently about state funding for education. Students at Chico State and other schools have protested fee increases to cover their tuition. CSUC President Paul Zingg wrote a heartfelt OpEd in the Chico News & Review. Actress Megan Fox has even made a funny commercial about education funding. In each case there are great arguments made as to why the state should fund higher education, but no ideas offered on how to pay for it.
Republicans and Democrats are often viewed as caught between two lines of argument on government spending. The democrats want tax increases to pay for government services, and the republicans want to cut government spending to bring the budget in line. Those dependant on government services of course do not want any cuts, and California taxpayers are literally tapped out and cannot afford a single penny more taken out of their personal budgets. Making it more difficult are the facts that cuts to vital services like police and fire can have drastic consequences, and raising tax rates any further would likely result in less revenue for state government (as seen with last year’s tax increase). What is our state to do?
Fortunately there are other answers. The first is to grow our way out of this hole. By that I mean, we need to revive our state’s economy by bringing back business and industry. Since 2001, California has lost about a million jobs, with half of those losses being manufacturing jobs. Losing manufacturing jobs hurts because they tend to pay more and create actual wealth (they take raw materials and create a sellable product). When workers make more money and have more disposable income, they spend it on goods and services which in turn creates more tax revenues.
A lot of businesses can no longer afford to do business in California. A combination of high taxes, fees, and regulations are driving them away. Even green jobs (solar manufacturing, internet) are moving to other states (and countries) where it’s cheaper to do business . Some of those green jobs leaving California for other states were even funded by stimulus money (our own tax dollars) to do it!
By lowering tax rates and easing off on strict regulations, we can encourage a friendlier business atmosphere and turn this negative trend around. That’s not rocket science, it’s just common sense. We’re not talking about letting people dump toxic sludge into our drinking water. We’re talking about letting private companies operate at a simple profit so they can pay their bills and their employees. There is a difference.
Second, we need to take action that would raise short term cash quickly for our state budget. This can be done by selling some of our state’s ample resources. Yes, this is the “drill baby drill” approach, and it works. Even President Obama, in a momentary show of common sense, has admitted that more domestic oil drilling would help our economy. The Chico News & Review (not known for their conservative views) agreed with the President on this! California has a multitude of resources such as offshore oil, minerals, and timber. We could jumpstart our economy and put thousands of people back to work by declaring a state emergency, cutting the bureaucratic red tape, and selling some of these resources to private industry.
I realize this solution scares some of the environmental community, but this is 2010 not 1910. We now have some of the cleanest technology for resource extraction in the world. If we’re not doing it here, it will be done somewhere else in the world with no guarantees of the environmental protections that we provide. We have oil, minerals, and lumber that could be sold right now to help pay for education in our state. Just one oil operation off the coast of Santa Barbara (proposed last year and shot down by legislative democrats) would have brought in over $1.4 billion to the state. How many college tuitions could have been paid for with that money? How many teachers layoffs could be prevented? I don’t see Sierra Club members offering to pay to keep our schools open, so why should we let them dictate our state’s economic future?
Taking action to grow our economy, and create more state revenue, is not a partisan idea. It is a bipartisan solution that should be pushed by anyone who wants our state to prosper, whether republican or democrat. The truth is that California has no choice and cannot put off real budget solutions any longer. They cannot raise taxes and they have run out of money to borrow. It is time to either sell our assets and put people back to work, or make drastic cuts to the state budget and say goodbye to a whole lot of entitlement spending. The good news is that California can recover, if Californians are willing to make it happen.
I want to thank you all for reading my first submission to Post Scripts and I welcome any comments or debate. This will be the first in a series of weekly Republican updates that I will be submitting, for which I want to again thank Jack and Tina for this opportunity.