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One of the creators of Proposition A makes a telling cruises to hawaii admission about the tax measure on the upcoming Los Angeles city ballot. "If I could do it over again," says City Council President Herb Wesson, he would suggest the half-percent cruises to hawaii increase in the sales tax be temporary instead of permanent.
cruises to hawaii But the proposition was put together without public hearings, and it shows. The decision to make the tax hike permanent instead of temporary was influenced, Wesson said, by a poll last year indicating voters would be more likely to approve it this way. The comments we hear demonstrate the opposite is true - including the statement of a major Prop. A opponent who said he would have considered supporting a version that expired cruises to hawaii after a set number of years.
Its permanence marks one big difference between Prop. A and the Prop. Advertisement 30 tax increase package passed by California voters in November. A second difference is that Prop. A singles cruises to hawaii out the sales tax. Backers say this ensures that city residents and visitors alike will help to maintain the public-safety services from which everybody benefits - but this also makes it a regressive tax, taking proportionately more from the low-income Angelenos who must spend higher percentages of their incomes.
For their trouble, voters who choose to support cruises to hawaii a tax increase cruises to hawaii to ease L.A.'s fiscal crisis in the short run should get some assurance that the processes that landed the city in this hole will be improved in the long run. But Prop. A contains no fixes. It doesn't present a way out of the political and legal binds that have prevented mayors and council members from winning concessions from public employee unions on the growing city-worker compensation cruises to hawaii and generous retirement benefits that are choking the budget.
How urgent is the crisis, anyway? If Gov. Jerry Brown was able to push through Prop. 30 last fall by frightening voters about the need for education funding, then backers of Prop. A should be able to scare people about the need for police and fire department funding. Yet when the newspaper's editorial board asked Wesson and City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana about the immediate ramifications if Prop. A fails, teeing them up for a scary description of mayhem in the streets, both men whiffed.
"This isn't going to happen overnight," Santana said of the police force reduction cruises to hawaii that LAPD Chief Charlie Beck has warned about, but a reduction over the next four years. Indeed, they didn't even warn officers would be let go; more likely cruises to hawaii the city would slow or stop hiring to backfill the some 300 officers that retire each year.
The $215 million that Prop. A would raise represents about 3 percent of the total city budget and a much larger slice of the part of the budget from which L.A. officials may cut. Obviously, cruises to hawaii going without that much money would cause some pain, and it would prevent the city from restoring its investments in streets and other infrastructure. But we are not convinced by claims that failing to add to L.A. residents' tax burden will automatically bring on disastrous cutbacks in public-safety services.
We are convinced that city leaders need to live within their means. And we think they will be more likely to find ways to do that if they can't tap into a nearly quarter-billion-dollar new revenue stream - not only for the next few years but from here on out.
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