by Monica Showalter
Democrats are usually circumspect about their tax hikes until they are safely ensconced in office and no one can stop them.
Not Xavier Becerra, who's running for governor of California.
He's waxing happy about his big plans for new taxes on Californians, speaking to KCRA'S Ashley Zavala:
It's a valuable interview, because Becerra hasn't shown up for any of the scheduled debates he agreed to, obviously not wanting to debate tax-cutting Republican candidate, Steve Hilton.
As the California Post transcribed:
“Everything should be on the table,” Becerra said in an interview with KCRA’s Ashley Zavala, when asked whether he would support a mileage-based tax as governor. “Our roads aren’t maintained just by some magic wand. We have to pay for it. Do I want to tax people more than necessary? No. Should we pay a gas tax? Yes. Should people who drive electric vehicles, who don’t need gas, pay for those roads to be repaired as well? Absolutely.”
But now he's talking to Zavala in an obviously cozier setting.
That tells us a lot about Becerra, that he's willing to open up one-on-one to a high-value journalist before the outcome of California's elections, outlining his plans for new taxes across the board, most of them payable by everyone except illegal aliens.
He's out to tax mileage, a proposal that went over like a lead balloon with voters in San Diego and was subsequently dropped. A mileage tax is not only Orwellian in its surveillance, it hits the working poor who are forced to live in the suburbs and backland boondocks. owing to not being able to afford a home close to work in the cities the hardest of all. Becerra loves the idea, and says it's 'on the table.
And after the state cajoled drivers into buying electrial vehicles to save the planet, he's now got a new plan to tax them for the use of the roads for it. The new tax would be on top of the electricity tax they pay, highest in the nation, on what is used to power their cars.
He's got a new plan to tax high-income earners, suggesting that he knows the billionaire tax proposal, which has driven away many billionaires from the state and is opposed by even some unions, still leaves lots of high income earners on the table for the tax harvest. Why focus on the state's mere 900 or so billionaires anyway when the state's high income earners number in the hundreds of thousands and are still 'on the table' as he likes to put it?
He's also against the cutting or ending the detested gas tax, smugly saying the roads have got to be paid for, blithely ignoring that Californians pay the highest gas taxes in the nation, one which adds about two dollars to the price of gas, while the 49 states that manage to repair their roads through the ordinary tax base.
Turns out Democrats have been peddling this line for years, arguing for tax hikes to repair roads and bridges.
John Merline, then at IBD, outlined just how long they've been at this, arguing for tax hikes for "crumbling infrastructure" and warning the sky will fall if they dont get it.
I added some commentary to that, here.
What's worse, once they got the gas tax hikes they wanted from voters, as they did on 2019's Proposition 6, they turn around and spend it on backfilling public employee union pensions and on greenie crony boondoggle projects, as happened with that bill, too bad about the crumbling roads. I wrote about it here.
But Becerra, ever the unoriginal, cookie-cutter machine pol, is throwing out those arguments again as if voters hadn't heard them.
All it does is either suggest he is a boob with no political sense, or more likely a brazen election cheat who knows the fix is in and therefore can campaign on tax hikes in the most taxed, most defrauded state, and still win.
His latest ad appearance was an appeal to stop a voter identification measure, and he seemed to have been trotted out because the measure may have been losing (Politico reported it was winning, according to two polls.) Is the fix in? You decide.
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