Posted on 01/15/2009 9:03:44 AM PST by ElkGroveDan
Great to finally see Tom in Congress!
ping
Remarks by Congressman Tom McClintock
House Floor
January 15, 2009
Mr. Speaker:
I rise today to express my hope that this President will not leave office before using his pardon to correct one of the great injustices of our time: the imprisonment of Border Patrol officers Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean. They’re the officers who wounded a drug smuggler as he tried to escape. The drug smuggler got immunity; Ramos and Compean got lengthy prison sentences.
This injustice sends a chilling message to Border Patrol officers who are heroically trying to defend the integrity of our borders against enormous odds and with inadequate resources.
It cannot be allowed to stand.
If McClintock was CA governor now, instead of the “other Conservative” Arnold(pardon me while I try to keep from laughing)CA would not be in the financial mess it is now.
Now I'm looking forward to watching his work in Congress. He will make a difference.
and (as you probably say too)
DON'T BLAME BE I VOTED FOR MCCLINTOCK
Good job, Tom!
I beg to differ. California would not be in as deep a mess as it is, but they would still be in a mess. There has been too much spending mandated by the voters through the initiative process and taken off the discretionary budget to allow for really fixing this problem.
That is partly true, but the growth in the last five years has been discretionary at the hands of the Legislature. A good governor could have vetoed all that.
Yes, he would have.
But your demographics, tax base and other issues would have you hitting the wall in a couple years anyway. There’s just no way around it in California any more.
California Tax revenues were soaring through the entire period. The only slowdown came last year, when the rest of the country took a similar hit.
That’s nice, but the problem is that your expenditures were soaring too, and many of these expenditures are on auto-pilot, thanks to how the voter initiatives have set much of this spending in stone, outside the reach of legislative review. Nearly 70% of the California public spending can’t be touched by the legislature.
This situation was first seen not last year, but in 2001 to 2003, when the income tax base took a serious slump as a result of the dot-com implosion. The systemic imbalance was first seen then. Then Sacto started with the budget games, trying to play catch-up with fees, borrowing and thimblerigging to make the income match the spending. Well, it now comes down to this: your income base is crumbling, your ad valorem base is collapsing (and never was sustainable in the first place, due to unsustainable housing valuations) and business taxation won’t carry the day as businesses will likely use this downturn as an opportunity to leave the state.
Sooner or later a recession was going to happen. Sooner or later the housing valuations were going to collapse. 6.5X median household income as a housing valuation is simply not sustainable. You’re now at about 3.4X, and you need to get down to about 2.8X. Anyone who had a sound head on their shoulders has seen for years that the tax base in California has become increasingly unstable. That’s why I quit buying bonds out of California after 2002. The homework I did back then was what made me implore the CA GOP to leave Davis in office and allow the DNC to own the whole mess. Ahnuld merely pushed the impact with the wall out a few years. Y’all were going to get into this situation regardless of who was in office. The exact year was the only thing open to debate.
Now you’re there. Your situation is intractable. Some of the spending enshrined in these silly voter initiatives has to be put on the chopping block.
I understand about automatic spending. But I also know having worked in that building for 15 years that a good Governor like Tom McClintock could have whipped the state into financial sanity. The 2001-2003 windfall was spent by the legislature on ongoing budget line items. All of those could be reversed and even eliminated in future years. Yes, the initiative process has created automatic spending burdens, but none of that is insurmountable with a real fiscal conservative at the helm.
Thank you for your rant. You must be insufferable to live with. I don’t disagree with anything you said. I know all about the state’s finances it’s been my life since 1990. Arnold and the Democrats drove our state into the ditch and Tom McClintock could have saved it. That’s my only point. End of discussion. Get lost.
I might be insufferable.
But I compensate for it by being very profitable.
And that makes people tolerate a whole lot of my crap.
I do. Your argument is pure ignorance; very similar to the big lie structure of most liberal presentations.
In this case: Nearly 70% of the California public spending can’t be touched by the legislature.
100% of California's public spending can be manipulated by a super majority of its Legislature with the concurrence of the executive.
California's budget is not a genetic monster, but rather a rudderless ship. Their is not a will in either the liberal legislature or the equally liberal executive to control spending.
Good point. I was just getting sick of the guy.
What ever happened to the Tom McClintock ping list?
Good question. I would be great to see it alive again. I get the feeling that Tom is going to become more visible on the national stage, and certainly around Northern California.
>>What ever happened to the Tom McClintock ping list?
It (i.e. me) was on a long (unplanned) vacation. ;-)
FYI, if that ever happens again, I put it on my profile page (in tiny print at the bottom.)
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