Gov. Jerry Brown is leaving office after the midterms, but the California Democrat plans on engaging in one last brutal campaign to defend an extremely unpopular gas tax he approved in 2017.
Brown is pledging to raise $25 million in a campaign to fight the repeal effort. He is also soliciting help from business and labor leaders, who view the gas tax as an instrument to build up California’s roads.
Supporters of the repeal are eager to knock it around with the 80-year-old governor.
“This has nothing to do with taxes,” Brown said of Prop 6, which seeks to repeal a gas tax the governor passed in April 2017. “This is engineered by the Republican congressional delegation to prop up their vulnerable Republicans,” he said in a June 6 interview with The New York Times.
The Road Repair and Accountability Act imposes a 12-cents-a-gallon increase on Californians and raises the tax on diesel fuel by 20 cents a gallon.
It also implements an additional charge to annual vehicle license fees ranging from $25 to $175 depending on the car’s value. The measure gained has become a hot-button issue in the Golden State.
California currently ranks seventh highest in the country when it comes to total taxes and fees, according to figures calculated by the American Petroleum Institute.
And the recent increase makes California the second-highest gas tax in the country behind Pennsylvania. The state’s gas tax would increase from 40 to 52 cents per gallon (CPG).
Nearly 46 percent of likely voters said they would vote to repeal the law and 33 percent said they would vote to keep it, while 22 percent are undecided, according to a SurveyUSA poll in June.
Former San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat campaigning for California’s governor’s mansion, publicly announced his support for the tax increase during a gubernatorial debate in May.
The tax was sold to the voters to help repair roads, but recent reports show the bulk of the revenue is going toward other programs.
The California State Transportation Agency announced in April grants to recipients for some $2.6 billion of the transit funding raised through the law.
The awards include $28.6 million for 40 electric buses and $40.5 million for light-rail vehicles in Sacramento.
Nearly 28 projects were awarded cash from the gas tax increase. None of them involves road repair and that’s not sitting well with supporters of the repeal.
The gas tax is “killing the working class of this state,” Carl DeMaio, a former Republican congressman in San Diego who is spearheading the repeal process, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
“It started off with a recall of Josh Newman,” DeMaio said, referring to the successful campaign to recall state Sen. Josh Newman, a Democrat in Southern California who supported the tax. “Jerry Brown was shocked. He didn’t think we were going to get the signatures for a recall. But we did. Then we went for the repeal.”
He added: “Either get on board or continue to be irrelevant.”
Analysts believe Brown and the Democrats will have to reconfigure the narrative if they intend on saving the law.
“If it’s talked about as the gas tax, I don’t see how it survives,” Robert Shrum, the director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California, told reporters. “You have to talk about it in terms of safe bridges, a decent road system, the economic future, and jobs.”
Brown, a veteran politician with several decades of experience defending unpopular initiatives, appears to understand that the measure can’t win-out unless he changes public perception.
“They don’t give a damn about the roads in California,” Brown said of Republicans and advocates of repeal. He crafted a similar narrative while campaigning for the initiative’s passage.
“The Republicans in Sacramento want to fix our roads,” Brown said during a legislative session in October 2017, but “they expect the tooth fairy to pay the $5 billion every year.”
The tactic worked to goad California lawmakers to pass the measure, but that was back when gas prices were lower than they are now.
California gas prices are spiking. The average price for regular fuel is $3.66 a gallon in the state, far above the national average of $2.80, according to figures compiled by the AAA.
A gallon of gas cost roughly $3.00 a gallon when legislators passed the tax. The 66 CPG increase is not sitting well with Californians and they are putting legislators on notice.
Opponents of Brown’s law managed to place a voter referendum on the November ballot to repeal the gas tax. It would reportedly lower the price of gasoline in the state to $2 a gallon by 2021, Politico reported in May.
Republicans have now collected more than one million signatures, even though only 365,880 were needed to put it on the ballot.
Read more at Daily Caller
Above proofing error S/B .
The cost of the carbon tax alone on Natural Gas now exceeds the actual commodity cost of the product .
The cost of the natural gas commodity is $1.54 per GJ and the carbon tax is an additional $1.73 per GJ . What products do you buy where the tax exceeds the cost of the product ? Oh and to add insult to injury the Federal GST tax is added on the total .
So leftie Liberals good riddance . Under Governor Browns watch California is a mess .
Politicians are so brave as they head for the exits and their gold plated pensions .
Gordon Campbell a liberal leftie pulled the same kind of stunt by imposing a carbon tax
that now makes British Columbia the highest priced gasoline in North America .
The cost of the Carbon tax alone now exceeds the actual commodity cost of the product .
Imagine going in to by a $30,000. car and the tax on top was an additional 32,000 making that purchase $ 62,000 .
The Liberals lied about the tax being “revenue ” neutral .
The Liberal politician’s sat back and enabled organized crime to turn Vancouver and surrounding area into the laundered money capital of North America .
The consequence …. zero . The
There was a time when Governor Brown respected the will of the people and provided good leadership. No, I haven’t just taken a mind altering drug. I lived in the state when its Proposition 13 passed. Housing prices were rapidly raising and so were property taxes that were tied to the inflated prices. Families who brought their homes when the prices were much lower were having trouble paying the inflated property tax. What made things worse from the view point of the voters at the time the state had a huge budget surplus.
Proposition 13 rolled back the assessments for tax purposes and limited how fast they could increase. When a home was purchased, it started out at the new value.
Even though he opposed it, when Proposition 13 passed by a large margin Governor Brown who was in office at that time said that it was the will of the people. He provided excellent leadership and made it work.
He is now morphed into someone who seems to think that voters are low life peasants and he has no respect for what the people want. He knows what is best and he will impose it, as we see with the gas tax.
This change may not be unique to Governor Brown, but an indication of a change with the entire liberal leadership.
That’s all what Liberal Democrats are about TAX & SPEND TAX & SPEND TAX & SPEND and Moonbeam Brown is no different always was and still is a Liberal Democratic Idiot
I once wrote to a commissioner pointing out what the people wanted on a particular issue. He answered back that as an elected official it wasn’t his duty to do what the people wanted, but rather, do what he thought was best.
I find this elitist attitude appalling. From the article, “Brown, a veteran politician with several decades of experience defending unpopular initiatives” shows that Brown is definitely an elitist who believes he knows best and will impose his will on the people.
You don’t have to be in politics to have this attitude. My daughter belongs to a fencing club in Seattle and many of the members believe that a small class of elite knows what is best and their will should be imposed on everyone else.
It is very common for Democrats to miss use tax money. This is especially true of taxes that are supposed to go for roads.
Yet, despite his support of the gas tax, Gavin Newsom will probably win the election to be the next governor because he is a Democrat. I find it astounding how people continue to vote for representatives that do not represent their wishes.