By Annette Fuentes|January 4, 2011 12:30 p.m. |In Budget Crisis
Where, oh, where, will new Gov. Jerry Brown and his legislative colleagues find billions to fill that humongous budget gap (up to $26 billion, give or take) they face going into the new year? Well, commentator Peter Schrag has a compelling idea. According to calculations by Citizens for Tax Justice in DC, when President Obama and Congress voted to extend the federal Bush-era tax cuts for uppermost income earners, they voted to save California’s 5 percent richest people about $20.5 billion in taxes every year.
Schrag, former Sac Bee editorial page editor and columnist for the California Progress Report, notes that such a sum is about 75 percent of the projected deficit and suggests that tapping just a bit of that bounty from the state’s most affluent—about three-quarters of a million people—could go far to saving the state’s most vulnerable institutions. Like public education.
Brown, who was sworn in yesterday as governor, has certainly hinted at the possibility of raising taxes to rescue the state from its crisis. And he called out public schools and education in general as a priority. Would California’s richest residents rebel at revenue raising to rebuild schools? We might find out.