State Budget Should Include New Taxes

Re “To Win the Budget Shell Game, Keep an Eye on the Fee,” Jan. 13: Patt Morrison does have some novel ideas for new state revenues. To add some obvious methods to get some fiscal stability in this great state, why not start with a sales tax on food? There is no good reason why $25 fillets should not be taxed the same way as a new mousetrap. Food-stamp people could be given extra stamps. An added gas tax is on any rational government list until the shortfall is overcome.

It doesn’t make fiscal sense to pay back $30 billion to a bond fund because we can’t afford $15 billion now. The governor seems to forget that we would have the regular, hard-to-fund budget to pay, besides the $30 billion, down the road.

Along a different angle, the new governor would be a star if he got a proposed amendment on the ballot to reduce the two California state assemblies to just one.

John Bartlett

South Pasadena

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“Unworthy of Californians” -- Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D-San Francisco) has it right (Jan. 13). I don’t understand this no-tax-increase religion. It’s going to cost lives. Not theoretically, but in fact.

I’m on hemodialysis at a Santa Ana dialysis center. Seventy percent of the patients there are on Medi-Cal. I’m one of the few with private insurance. Any take-aways will kill. Simple as that.

Cut transportation, and somebody’s not going to get to the center for life-sustaining treatment; it’ll be goodbye, so long, forever.

Cut 5% from Medi-Cal and somebody won’t be able to afford a certain medicine without which, again, it’s goodbye, so long, forever.

Is this no-tax-increase absolutism really more important to Californians than the lives of my fellow patients?

Money before life. What sort of family value is that? Shamefully un-American.

Jack Kent

Huntington Beach

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Republicans are fond of saying that if the state would only go back to its spending levels of 1998 we would not have a budget crisis. A better approach would be to do the same with taxes for the top 1% of income earners.

We don’t really need to raise taxes on the super-rich, per se; we need only to restore at the state level the tax breaks given to the top 1% at the federal level under President Bush’s successive tax cuts. The wealthy would not be paying any more in taxes than in 1998, and we would have the best-funded schools, parks, police, fire, public safety and public health systems in the nation.

Paul Gulino

Santa Monica