Vision Circle

Death and Taxes

This morning on the radio it was announced that one of the local hospitals under the jurisdiction of the County of Los Angeles, is going to have to shut down barring a judges injunction. The County Health Department is going broke.

State Republicans have decided within the week, to begin borrowing money to make up for the state's budget shortfalls. The state will borrow as much as 11 billion dollars just to cover two month's cash flow.

Supporting $10 billion in borrowing represents a major concession by his party, said Assemblyman John Campbell, R-Irvine, who is vice-chairman of the lower house's budget committee. The number is what the deficit is expected to be June 30.

"We don't like to do this. We think this is actually a bad idea ... but it's better than tax increases and so we offer it as a compromise," Campbell said.

We have now reached the point at which the tax rebate in every pot policy, blindly aped by Republicans since the days of Proposition 13, has gone beyond selfish to foolish. Democrats too have been petrified of raising taxes. The California Legislature has resorted to all sorts of strange fees and and as usual, politicians make themselves appear to be respectable by standing opposed to them.

There have already been fourteen cases of SARS reported in California, so I am waiting, with some trepidation, for SARS to make an impact in Los Angeles County. There will be a run on N95 masks as the hospitals are quarantined and run out of beds. Our politicians have a multivolume cookbook filled with recipies for disaster. This one seems poised to move to the front burner.