While you and your friends are marking the “No” box on your ballot for Proposition 23, be sure to do the same for its less glamorous and more underhanded cousin, Proposition 26. If it passes, this proposal will shift enormous costs for pollution and its effects from rich corporate polluters over to California’s cash-strapped taxpayers, i.e., you, me, our kids, and our neighbors.
Proposition 26 is a deliberately disingenuous attempt by oil, tobacco and alcoholic beverage companies to prevent new fees to be levied on the products or consequences of their industries. Oil companies, for example, want to avoid having to pay new fees that would help pay for the clean-up of oil spills they cause. They instead want to force California taxpayers to pay for their oil spills. They cravenly hide this agenda behind the pleasantly mainstream-sounding slogan, “No Hidden Taxes.”
As if you needed further evidence that many CA voter initiatives are advertised as being the exact opposite of what they truly are, the truth of the oil companies’ slogan is more like, “No Taxes for Us, but Hidden Taxes for You.”
The Consumer Federation of CA, the American Cancer Society, the American Lung Assn of CA, the League of Women Voters of CA, and every CA newspaper, city and county are against Prop 26, which is funded by Chevron, ExxonMobil, Phillip Morris, and others.
The language of Prop 26 contained in the CA Attorney General’s official Voter Information Guide states, “Requires that certain State and local fees be approved by two-thirds vote. Fees include those that address adverse impacts on society or the environment caused by the fee-payer’s business...Requires that certain state fees be approved by two-thirds vote of Legislature and certain local fees be approved by two-thirds of voters.....”
Summary of Legislative Analyst’s Estimate of Net State and Local Government Fiscal Impact: “Decreased state and local government revenues and spending due to the higher approval requirements for new revenues.....Increased General Fund costs of $1 billion annually....unknown potential decrease in state revenues.”
In other words, the oil co’s and their allies want to make it dramatically more difficult for the CA State Legislature to approve fees that they, not us, would have to pay for the costs of their products and their pollution. And in the process, this would shift the burden of paying for those costs to we CA taxpayers. As economists would put it, the backers of Prop 26 are seeking to externalize their costs rather than internalize them, thereby shifting those costs to society.
Vote No on Proposition 26, and please urge your friends to do the same. Send Tweets, post notices on your Facebook Walls.
Here are links to more info:
http://www.noonproposition26.com/
http://www.noozhawk.com/local_news/article/102610_megan_birney_propositions_23_and_26_say_no_to_protecting_polluters/
http://www.consumercal.org/article.php?id=1435
http://www.californiaprogressreport.com/site/?q=node/8310
http://ca.lwv.org/action/prop1011/prop26.html
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