California already had some of the highest taxes in the Nation, before California Democrats saddled California residents with a massive gas tax increase. They defend this highly regressive tax by claiming that the voters approved it via Prop. 6, which has been widely held to be one of the most misleading ballot descriptions ever.

Adding insult to injury, Democrats in Sacramento tout a $21.4 billion budget surplus but conveniently leave out that California’s unfunded pension liabilities total $1.5 trillion.

Our unfunded pension liabilities are seven times the size of our surplus!

The mounting debt, boondoggle pet projects like High-Speed Rail, and businesses fleeing the state are pushing us closer to the edge of the fiscal cliff.  Compounding the problem is that the liberal super-majority in the legislature refuses to restrain themselves and sees the California taxpayer as a bottomless piggy bank.

Much like the Gas Tax/Prop. 6, Democrats in California are fond of slipping extreme and dangerous policies past California voters with egregiously misleading language on the ballot.

Prop. 47 – “The Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act”

(Then Attorney General Kamala Harris has the shame of naming it that.)

On the surface, they claimed it would reduce certain nonviolent crimes from felonies to misdemeanors.

But in the fine print, “nonviolent offenses” included: possession of narcotics (meth, opioids, etc.), theft of items under $950 (most handguns cost less), possession of date rape drugs – just to name a few.

With the easing of sentencing for street drugs months before a tidal wave of local homelessness and opioid use, law enforcement has their hands tied in how best respond on the ground to these new conditions.  In essence, someone can break into your car and steal from you and provided the value is less than $950, they are only charged with a misdemeanor.  Same is true for possession of dangerous street drugs fueling our homelessness crisis – slap on the wrist.

District Attorneys used to have the threat of felony to force people into treatment by offering to lessen the sentence.  Also with a felonies, law enforcement can match DNA to the crime data base that has helped solve murders, rapes and a host of other heinous crimes that we were only able to solve because we were able to charge someone that had done something severely wrong with a felony.

I will not rest until we can limit the impacts of Prop. 47 and pass legislation that makes serious and violent crimes a felony again.  The public safety of our neighborhoods is no place to test or wait and see what the impacts are.  Those “impacts” are lives lost to drugs, deaths, property damaged, and that is not the community we chose to live in.