(CA) GOP budget plan: no new taxes, no cuts to schools

Source: San Francisco Chronicle

(05-12) 10:50 PDT Sacramento -- Republicans in the Legislature released a plan this morning to eliminate California's remaining $15.4 billion deficit that they say does not cut education or require tax increases and extensions that have been proposed by Democrats.

The GOP proposal comes as Gov. Jerry Brown is finalizing his revision of his spending plan that is scheduled to be released Monday.

The GOP plan includes deeper cuts to services - cuts that were proposed by Brown but rejected by Democrats - and a 10 percent cut in state employee compensation.

Assembly Republican Leader Connie Conway of Tulare, who so far has not been part of budget negotiations, sent the plan to Assembly Speaker John Pérez, D-Los Angeles, this morning. In a letter accompanying the plan, Conway said, "The Assembly Republican proposals that we put forward today represent our roadmap to a no tax increase budget. These are specific and detailed proposals to balance the budget with no new taxes."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/05/12/BAGT1JFDL9.DTL

is a tax increase.

workers have to sacrifice but not the very rich. My understanding is that majority of Californians agree that taxes needed to be increased (for a short period of time), including, tax increases for the upper class. This would avoid major cuts especially to schools.

Many teachers, clerical and others have been laid off. The ones that remain have to take furlows (without pay). Where in the "F" are the sacrifices from the rich?

There are 428,134 state employees.
Their monthly salary is $1,497,886,455
Their yearly salary is $17,974,637,460
10% is $1,797,463,746
So that's approximately $1.8B on the backs or 428,134 people out of approximately 40,000,000
So that means that 1% of the population has to take a 10% cut in pay

There are 15,975,100 civilian workers in California. Plus the 428,134 from state employees,
means that there are 16,403,234 workers in California.

So instead of burdening 438K state employees with $1.8B in salary cuts
we could tax all 16M workers an average of $109.58 per year extra, which is approximately $9.13
per month. (The cost of 1 lunch?)

of data. It makes you realize how phony the whole budget crisis bullshit really is and how easily it could be fixed even if it were real. Keep up the good work.

We've had generations of McCarthyism to shut us up.

As someone who works in higher education, we've been at the receiving end of the ax for far too long. I'm even more pissed that it's the repukes who are finally giving us break with their proposal for no more cuts while our democrat governor, who was widely supported by education/labor, has failed us miserably.

If you work for UC or CSU, you're getting a 10% salary cut with
the Republicans budget.

Even if you don't, the Dems will not allow this to go through without
some form of tax increase or offset budget cut which will include
the education system. Unless they get bailed out by the Feds again.

and we're not even one of the bigger campuses. We've lost positions this past year, increased tuition, and cut classes. I can't even wrap my brain around a cut this huge. And this is coming from our "pro-education democrat" governor. I can't tell you how happy we were when he got elected. After all the blows Arnie delivered to education we finally thought the bleeding would stop. It only got worse. We just had a meeting with our university president today who told us to expect pink slips to start rolling out in June. I'd take the salary cut -- hell, we did that last year to save us from layoffs, as hard as that was -- over job loss any day.

you're going to get both salary cuts and layoff notices.

My wife works for the UC system.
So I know what you're going through.

...and cramming down a cut and going the Wisconsin route of bypassing collective bargaining is not an improvement.