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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (135133)	3/29/2001 11:46:13 PM
From: Windsock	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1584664

Ted - Re"And the basis for your conclusion is that taxes have remained at a certain percentage of income over time. So what....that means nothing at all..its a number...it does not address changes..." There is another change that Tim does not address is constant $$. If you take $0.35 in 1975 it is $1.00 today. So assuming that there was NO population growth and NO increase in needs, you would have to spend 3 times as much today to equal yesterday. Tim says there was a 75% CA budget growth from '78 to present that sounds like a starvation diet to me. This starvation diet placed CA school spending in the recent past at 49th in the nation below every state except Mississippi. What an accomplishment.

To: tejek who wrote (135133)	3/30/2001 10:53:29 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1584664

False? Right! Yes, right. And not just right obviously right. Note I am not talking about the overall issue here only your specific statement that CA was "one of the most agressive places to reduce taxation in this country". It is possible for you to be right on the overall issue and still be wrong on that claim but it is obvious that you are at least wrong on that claim. All you have shown is that tax revenues have grown in the past 20 years in CA, and then concluded, based on your supposition, that the growth was aggressive. And the basis for your conclusion is that taxes have remained at a certain percentage of income over time. So what....that means nothing at all..its a number...it does not address changes in the population make up, changes in the state's needs, changes in the condition of the infrastructure, changes in income........ Taxes have become a higher percentage of personal income over time, and have become much higher in real per-capita dollars. When measured by the second figure then it is a matter of simple fact that taxes have gone up agressively. This would be true even if the needs and desires for spending have gone up faster. If all of CA's public infrastructure had to be replaced within 5 years obviously infrastructure spending would sky rocket. This would result in agressive tax growth. If you accept the reality that the taxes have gone up a lot then we can debate if the "a lot" was too little, just right, or too much. That particular debate however is less subject to simple fact checking like my research in to tax and spending rates. How much government spending is "enough" will always be an ideological issue at least as much as it is a factual one. Tim