A war of words erupted in recent days between the proponents of a transparency ballot measure and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, after members of the Legislature and legislative counsel dismissed the measure as full of “ambiguities” and introduced their own watered-down versions.

In a scathing letter, the Lakewood Democrat accused the measure’s proponents of allowing their “passion” for the measure “blind” them to the “shortcomings that may be obvious to others,” painting them as unwilling to work with the Legislature.

“It is unfortunate that you have become entrenched in a patently defensive, inflexible, and ultimately unproductive position, which has impeded the Legislature’s good faith efforts to help you develop a superior legislative transparency measure for voter consideration,” Rendon wrote.

But Hold Politicians Accountable — the committee formed by former Republican legislator Sam Blakeslee and Republican donor Charles T. Munger, Jr., backing the California Legislature Transparency Act — fired back that the measure was “refined by three distinguished attorneys, including a Constitutional scholar” and independent vetting by cosponsors, none of whom found fault.  

Last week, a spokesman for Hold Politicians Accountable told CalWatchdog that the versions of the measure in the Legislature are “not palatable.”

Rendon stressed a sense of urgency with the bills, with a rapidly approaching deadline for the Legislature and the CLTA proponents to work out a deal.

But Blakeslee and Munger argue that early February, when the initiative became eligible for a legislative hearing, was the time for legal analysis and negotiations “in a spirit and time frame that is conducive to collaborative rather than adversarial integrations.”

Instead, they pointed out, the first hearing was held June 15 — CLTA proponents received legislative counsel’s 10 concerns six hours prior — just 15 days before the June 30 deadline.

The bills

The CLTA is a constitutional amendment requiring the Legislature make available online the final version of a bill at least 72 hours prior to a vote on either the Assembly or Senate floor. It would also require all open legislative meetings be recorded with the videos posted online within 24 hours and would give permission to individuals to record and share their own videos of open meetings.

The Legislature-introduced versions, however, would make the 72-hour notice apply to only votes in the second house, would require the Legislature-introduced versions of bills be posted online “promptly” and would not give permission for individuals to share and record their own videos.

What’s the alleged problem with the CLTA?

Legislative counsel argues that there are 10 “ambiguities” in the CLTA language, but the proponents argue that the first three are still found in the Legislature’s version of the transparency measure. One of the legal reviews sought by the CLTA’s proponents dismiss legislative counsel’s concerns as lacking merit.

“The referenced claims of ambiguity have no merit, and in many cases, are downright frivolous,” wrote Daniel K. Malloy, a partner at a private law firm who previously served as both an associate justice on the California Court of Appeal, Third Appellate District, and counsel to former Gov. Pete Wilson.

By law, the Legislature has to hold hearings on ballot measures after they’ve reached the 25 percent mark in signature gathering. 

The CLTA is cosponsored by a diverse, bipartisan group of outside interests, including California Common Cause, the League of Women Voters of California, California State Conference of the NAACP, California Chamber of Commerce, California Black Chamber of Commerce, Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association and La Raza Roundtable de California. 

The letters from legislative counsel and the independent reply are attached. 

The initiative is a constitutional amendment requiring the Legislature to make available online the final version of a bill at least 72 hours prior to a vote on either the Assembly or Senate floor.

The measure would also require all open legislative meetings to be recorded, with the videos posted online with 24 hours. It also allows individuals to record and share their own videos of open meetings.  

“Voters are making it clear that they are fed up with special interest legislation being passed in the middle of the night, without time for input or careful consideration of how new laws impact them,” Sam Blakeslee, a former state senator and one of the measure’s proponents, said in a statement on Thursday. “We look forward to seeing these common sense reforms become a reality when all Californians have the opportunity to vote for this measure at the polls this November.”

The measure is backed by Republican donor Charles T. Munger Jr. and is supported by right-leaning groups like the California Chamber of Commerce, Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association and the National Federation of Independent Business and the left-leaning California Common Cause.

The most outspoken and public opponent of the measure is Democratic political strategist Steven Maviglio, who argues it’s just another “tool” for special interests to unravel legislative deals at the last second. 

Maviglio points to the 2008 budget agreement, the 1959 Fair Housing Act, the 2006 climate change bill (AB32) and the 2014 water bond were all tough votes taken without 72 hours notice. This measure, he argues, would subject iffy legislators to attacks from special interest groups.

“Let’s not give special interests any more tools to prevent lawmakers from doing the right thing, whether it be unnecessary delays in enacting legislation or ways to demonize the Legislature,” wrote in The Sacramento Bee. 

Charles Munger, Jr., one of the state GOP’s most substantial activists and donors, linked up with former state Sen. Sam Blakeslee, R-San Luis Obispo, to write and file the initiative with attorney general Kamala Harris. “It’s time to put government transparency on the ballot and enact these reforms through direct democracy,” the pair announced in a release, as Politico noted.

The two have kept very different profiles in recent years. Blakeslee opted against seeking re-election in 2012, instead turning his focus to academia, now the founding Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology & Public Policy at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. Munger, once credited by a Republican strategist with preventing the state GOP from being “driven into the sea,” has thrown his support behind ballot measures in the past. “He has tried to block tax hikes, diminish the power of labor unions and stop lawmakers from drafting election maps to their liking,” the Los Angeles Times recalled.

Click here to read the proposed ballot measure.

Going public

Karen Velie is the co-founder and publisher of 

Because of the DUI allegation, Social Services then took the grandchildren from her and placed them in a foster home. However, eyewitness testimony from former state Sen. Sam Blakeslee maintains that she was not intoxicated. 

Velie and her daughter, Cristin Powers, the children’s mother, are working with Social Services to get the children back. The children originally had been given to Velie when Social Services reportedly determined that Powers maintained a dirty home.

I called Lee Collins, the director of Social Services in San Luis Obispo County. His office told me that he wouldn’t be able to comment “due to legal issues. Our hands are pretty much tied.”

Police version

As to the DUI, here is the police version of the arrest, from an Aug. 23 memorandum by Police Chief Stephen Gesell to the San Luis Obispo City Council (full memorandum reproduced below):

“On 8/13/13 Karen Velie was arrested by San Luis Obispo Police Officer Joshua Walsh for Driving Under the Influence of Alcohol. Since the arrest Ms. Velie and others have made public statements in speech and print claiming she was targeted due to her position as a reporter for the Cal Coast News. Those statements are false and the Police Department is releasing the following information to provide accurate factual background as to the events leading up to Ms. Velie’s arrest….

“During Officer Walsh’s contact with Ms. Velie, he observed objective indications of alcohol intoxication, including slurred speech, bloodshot and watery eyes and an odor of alcoholic beverage consumption, which led him to believe she was driving impaired…. Based on Ms. Velie’s answers to questions and her poor performance on the field tests, Ofc. Walsh concluded Ms. Velie was driving while impaired.”

Further, a breath test “measured a Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) of 0.79 at the scene of the stop.” This was below “a per se threshold of 0.08 at which it is unlawful for any person to operate a motor vehicle” in one section of the law. Later breath tests “registered a 0.07” and “a 0.06.”

In other words, according to the BAC test, she was not drunk.

But in another section of the law, Gesell’s letter relates, violations “are based on an officer’s evaluation of the totality of the circumstances. In this instance, Officer Walsh reasonably believed the evidence he observed supported a conclusion that Ms. Velie was impaired….”

She was arrested and her court trial is scheduled for Jan. 11.

Sen. Blakeslee

I talked to Blakeslee, now an attorney at Blakeslee & Blakeslee, who told me:

“I was present the evening that she was teaching the bridge class. I saw no evidence of any impairment. She visited with me and our table, our bridge table, probably within the last five to 10 minutes of the evening. And she discussed how to bid a particularly complex hand. And I listened very attentively to her description, as I am trying to learn how to play bridge. And I am absolutely sure that if she had been impaired, I would have noticed it, because she would not have been speaking clearly, or would have been confused on such a complex topic. I thought she was completely lucid.”

According to the arrest record, also reprinted below, the incident was videotaped by the police. I requested a copy of the video from the San Luis Obispo Police Department. Captain Chris Staley replied in an email:

“Mr. Seiler, pursuant to Government Code section 6254(f), the video is considered a record of a police agency investigation, and is exempt from public disclosure; therefore we will not be releasing the video. 

“Captain Staley”

CalCoastNews, Velie’s publican, ran a story on the matter, “Grandchildren of CCN publisher spend holidays in county hands.”

The New Times of San Luis Obispo also ran story it, “Just breathe: A police report and city memo counter CalCoastNews founder Karen Velie’s account of her arrest and conspiracy claims.” The New Times story provided the links to the documents that are reproduced below.

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Katy Grimes: With the budget deadline looming, the Legislature is also facing a June 1 deadline for bills to be passed out of the house of which they originate.

In the Senate yesterday during floor debate over a bill to create a private sector pension program, Sen. Sam Blakeslee, R-San Luis Obispo, argued that  the state had no business creating a pension program for the private sector, when the state’s own pension programs were nearly bankrupt.

Sen. Pres. Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento argued that in addition to creating a private sector pension program, the Legislature would be passing pension reform. “By the end of session, we will deliver public pension reform,” Steinberg said.

But this means that a bill needs to be presented today or tomorrow.

But Blakeslee challenged back, and said that the Gov. Jerry Brown’s promised pension reform bill is already printed and waiting, but legislators have not been provided the bill’s language. Blakeslee indicated that the bill would undoubtedly be presented to legislators at the very last minute, right before taking a vote.

“We should vote on it today, and not wait until the last day to see what’s cooked up,” Blakeslee said.

In February, Republicans announced they were backing Brown’s pension reform proposals which would require public employees to pay more toward their retirement benefits, and would cut benefits for new hires.

As important as pension reform is in California, it is chilling to see that the same old legislative control games being played. The leaders of the two houses, Assembly Speaker John Perez, D-Los Angeles, and Steinberg, both have prior work experience with big labor unions and are tied at the hip to unions in California.

The fox is guarding the henhouse and real pension reform seems like a long shot. This is why the Legislature has been working so hard to prevent cities and counties from filing for municipal bankruptcy so easily.

By JOHN HRABE

Back to the campaign drawing board for California Republicans.

The California Supreme Court recently upheld the maps drawn by the California Citizens Redistricting Commission.

The immediate fallout: State Sen. Sam Blakeslee, R-San Luis Obispo, told his hometown paper that he wouldn’t seek reelection, due to the unfavorable maps approved by the court. In another swing seat, Republicans have yet even to field a candidate. State Sen. Tony Strickland, R-Moorpark, announced that he wouldn’t seek reelection in order to run for a new seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

If Republicans lose both state Senate seats, their Senate caucus will be reduced to fewer than 14 members, the all-important two-thirds threshold that gives Republicans the ability to block tax increases. At 13 Republican and 27 Democratic state senators, Democrats in the Senate could vote to impose infinite tax increases.

“It’s going to be seriously difficult for Republicans to stay above one-third in the Senate because of this,” California Republican Party Chairman Tom Del Beccaro complained to the Mercury News. “It puts the two-party system in the Senate in jeopardy.”

$2.1 Million Dollars for Useless Referendum

Republicans can now put a cost on their defeat: $2.1 million.

According to its fourth quarter campaign finance report, the Republican group Fairness & Accountability in Redistricting spent a whopping $2.1 million on its effort to put the new state Senate maps to a vote in November. The committee collected $1.7 million, or 80 percent, of its funding from the California Republican Party. That’s money that a cash-depleted party could have invested into voter registration programs for the three competitive state Senate districts.

“The CRP already spent a few million dollars on the referendum and varied lawsuit, all this while one of their best senate candidates, Jeff Miller, has no million-dollar voter registration program and can’t even afford a new URL,” observed the January 30th Redistricting Partners newsletter.

But it didn’t have to end this way for Golden State Republicans. Not if they’d followed the old maxim: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Lesson One: Research redistricting commissioners and use legislative strikes wisely.

Propositions 11 and 20 gave legislative leaders of both parties the power to strike up to two names from the final applicant subpool of redistricting commissioners. Republican leaders could have spent a few thousand dollars on opposition research reports on the backgrounds of redistricting commissioners. Or they could have spent just a few hours cross-checking applicants against the state’s campaign finance database. Had anyone at the California Republican Party done a few hours of research, they’d have discovered several campaign contributions by two commissioners.

Back in July 2011, CalWatchDog.com first reported on two redistricting commissioners’ partisan histories and campaign contributions. Commissioner Jeanne Raya failed to disclose four contributions totaling $1,000 made on behalf of her business to a state political action committee.  State law requires commissioners to disclose any civic, political or charitable donations of $250 or more.

Commissioner Gabino Aguirre made three campaign donations to Democratic candidates for state office. In November 2008, Aguirre contributed $100 to Ferial Masry, the Democratic nominee for the 37th State Assembly District. A year later, he made a $200 contribution to Gloria Romero, a former Democratic state senator. Aguirre also has extensive ties to a redistricting special interest group, the Central Coast Alliance United for A Sustainable Economy (CAUSE). The progressive social justice organization submitted its own redistricting maps for the Central Coast. It’s no coincidence that Blakeslee and Strickland’s seats, which are now likely to flip to the Democrats, are both on the Central Coast.

With just a little bit of research, Republicans could have made an educated decision to strike Raya and Aguirre. But Republican legislative leaders didn’t want to spend the money. One high-level staffer described Republican legislative leaders’ approach to the redistricting process as “an inexcusable reluctance to spend the resources to research the background of the commissioners.” Another senior staff member for a Republican legislator put it simply, “The truth is we’re idiots.”

While neither staffer wanted to be identified by name, one Republican political consultant openly defied party leadership in an attempt to save the GOP from itself.

“When you start the process telling people not to be involved and then end the process complaining that others were too involved, you have created your own emergency,” wrote Matt Rexroad, a partner with Meridian Pacific, in his rant for Capitol Weekly. “The issue that really galls me is that Republicans can cry foul all they want, but legislative leadership made it very clear that they did not want any Republican consultants to engage on redistricting.”

Lesson Two: Focus on the flawed process, not self-interested outcomes.

If they had been consistent in their objections, Republicans could have convinced the public that the redistricting process was flawed.

Republicans were right: the redistricting process was corrupted by special interest groups. Background research could have helped expose Aguirre, but the full extent of his partisan activities couldn’t have been fully brought to light in time for the legislative strikes.  That’s because Aguirre’s last and most egregious contribution, a $100 check to Democratic Assemblyman Das Williams, posted to the Secretary of State’s website nine days after the Bureau of State Audits completed its background check.

Williams had a vested interest in redistricting. Yet the commission took no action to disclose this potential conflict of interest or sequester Aguirre from Williams’ region. They did the opposite. Aguirre was put in charge of overseeing the Central Coast mapmaking.  He promptly adopted the maps suggested by his friends at CAUSE.

Jerry Roberts and Phil Trounstine, who have been highly-critical of the Republicans’ redistricting referendum, questioned the cause of Willliams’ redistricting good fortune. “When you look at Williams’ new 37th Assembly district, which is about as safe for him as can be, along with the new 19th SD, the future of the hyper-ambitious young pol looks bright indeed, whether he sits still for two more, two-year terms in the Assembly, or jumps into a 2012 race that could bring two four-year terms in the senate. Coincidence? You be judge,” the CalBuzz team wrote back in August.

Republicans didn’t concentrate on this message, in part, because they liked the configuration of the State Assembly maps. They also ignored the Voting Rights Act violations with the congressional maps because those were favorable to high-ranking House Republicans. Instead, Republicans voluntarily swapped a message about the flawed process for a pity-party about losing one-third control of the State Senate.

Lesson Three: Don’t look a gift commissioner in the mouth.

Redistricting Commissioner Mike Ward, an Orange County chiropractor with no prior involvement in state politics, demonstrated a more coherent message than Republican political pros.

“The Citizens Redistricting Commission has certified maps that are fundamentally flawed as a result of a tainted political process,” Ward said at the commission’s August 15 press conference. “This commission simply traded the partisan, backroom gerrymandering by the Legislature, for partisan, backroom gerrymandering by average citizens.”

Then Ward did what you’re supposed to do when you object to a corrupted process: he voted against all of the proposed maps. He didn’t cherry-pick maps based on those that would help his political party. The Senate referendum quashed Ward’s message about the flawed process. If the process was corrupted, why only challenge one set of four maps? Republicans’ inconsistent message impressed upon the press, public and ultimately the State Supreme Court that the referendum was motivated by partisan interests.

Lesson Four: Courts are influenced by public opinion.

Republicans’ last error with its redistricting message came with the referendum lawsuit. Republicans turned the lawsuit into a legal argument about the rule of law, the right to referendum and the will of the voters.

“In the law, the word ‘stay’ has a clear meaning. To ‘stay’ an action means to stop that action. The most authoritative legal dictionary of American law defines ‘stay’ as, ‘To stop, arrest, forbear.’ To ‘stay’ an order or decree means to hold it in abeyance, or refrain from enforcing it.” Black’s Law Dictionary, at 1267 (5th ed. 1979).

Assemblyman Don Wagner wrote in the Flash Report, “Thus, because the petition is ‘likely to qualify,’ the Supreme Court was directed by the Constitution to ‘refrain from enforcing’ the Commission’s Senate maps. In short, the California Constitution, with a simple, four letter word of indisputable meaning, stays or stops the use of the Commission lines until the people have their say on those lines at the ballot box.”

Legally, Wagner may be right. But, who cares? Not even the Supreme Court cared about legal precedents or Black’s Law Dictionary when public opinion stood on the other side.

Said the court’s unanimous opinion, “The Commission-certified Senate districts also are a product of what generally appears to have been an open, transparent and nonpartisan redistricting process as called for by the current provisions of article XXI.” In other words, the Court was influenced by press accounts and public opinion when deciding what to do with the redistricting mess.

In their stories about the court decision, neither the Los Angeles Times nor Sacramento Bee included a word about the corrupted process. Mike Ward was left out completely.

By the end of the redistricting scandal, Republicans had so badly muddled their message that there was no longer any reference to a corrupted process.

(Related: 10 Ways to improve the Citizens Redistricting Commission.)

By WAYNE LUSVARDI

Politicized environmental regulation is becoming a protection racket to collect votes.

To pass Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget, farmers along the Central Coast of California are having overkill pesticide runoff regulations imposed on them to brazenly extort votes from local Republican state Sens. Sam Blakeslee, R-San Luis Obispo, and Anthony Cannella, R-Ceres.

That agricultural pesticide runoff regulation is being used as a way to shake down opposing party politicians is not speculation or a conspiracy theory. The Santa Cruz Sentinel reported, “Jim Metropulos, a senior advocate with the Sierra Club, said it wouldn’t be the first time environmental rules got caught up in budget deals.”

Metropulos himself said, “It gets leveraged in back-room dealings to try to pick off a Republican vote. This issue dealing with agricultural runoff in the Central Coast is not something that should rise to the level of budget negotiations.”

Farmer Dick Peixoto said that new pesticide runoff regulations are “the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen in my life” and “would destroy farming in California.” When something is said to be bizarre, there typically is some government hidden agenda operating. And environmental regulations are typically the method of choice for accomplishing such undisclosed schemes in California.

What Peixoto is referring to is the proposed new rule for “zero” agricultural runoff. It would entail astronomically costly measures such as lining irrigation water detention ponds, imposing caps on fertilizer use and farmers legally having to keep records of pesticide use and runoff so that they can be sued or criminalized for noncompliance. Peixoto says such overkill measures are ignorant of farming and how subsurface water migrates and “would hold us to a standard that’s impossible to maintain.”

Nitrate Scare

At issue to environmentalists are nitrates in produce and drinking water that purportedly lead to “nervous ailments and Blue Baby Syndrome,” which is a virtually nonexistent disorder in the U.S. since the 1940s.

Nitrate is a form of nitrogen, an essential ingredient of life, particularly plants and crops. The formation of nitrates is not artificial or synthetic, but is part of the natural nitrogen cycle. As with nearly every substance, moderate levels of nitrate are harmless in food and water. Healthy adults can eat or drink large levels of nitrate with no known deleterious health effects.

Nitrates are a vasodilator used to treat angina, chest pain and symptoms of congestive heart failure.

One of the most nitrate rich foods is spinach. Neither the environmentalists interviewed, nor the news reporter, indicated that nitrates are what produce cellular energy in the human body and lower blood pressure, as reported by the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. This is the source of the notion, popularized by the cartoon character Popeye, that children should eat spinach to make them strong.

Attacking nitrates are just another environmental scare tactic to shake down a “mark” — a victim.

This says nothing about the slippery slope that regulating nitrates and fertilizers would lead to.  Once farmers are over-regulated for fertilizer use, there will be no stopping urban residential users from such controls and shakedowns too.  This will extend to use of fertilizers on home lawns and gardens. Regulating agricultural nitrates will lead to endless Soviet-style bureaucracies.

Where Are the Checks and Balances?

How can mostly outgunned farmers overcome contrived environmental pollution science and regulations about nitrates that are devised by politically appointed bodies, supported by University of California system academics, enforced by state agencies and adjudicated by California courts that are all dependent on the state budget for their livelihoods?  When every bureaucratic entity in the organizational food chain is dependent on approval of a shamelessly self-serving state budget, where are the checks and balances of a democracy?  Where is the rule of law to protect the confiscation of property with just compensation?

In California, such a system is a rigged game just as much as a protection racket.

In postmodern California, farmers must vet their farm practices through water quality control boards that are just another racket. Environmental regulation has become nothing but a legally sanctioned racket to shake down businesses, industries and Republican politicians for politicized purposes, including votes for the state budget.

The only thing that makes us think that it is not a racket is the media and the prevailing environmental ideology propagated by every educational and government entity in the state, as well as Hollywood, that obscures our social perception of what is going on.

Republican Sam Blakeslee Tuesday beat Democrat John Laird for the open state Senate seat. I hope Blakeslee is more faithful to taxpayers that was the man who previously held the seat until he left it in May to become Lt. Gov., Abel Maldonado.

Back in 2006, four long years ago, I was on a panel discussion with Laird. The guy was obsessed with increasing taxes — even during those boom times. It was that tax-and-waste mentality that dumped the state into the budget and economic mess it’s now suffering.

Here’s the unsigned editorial I wrote in The Orange County Register:

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Scapegoating Prop. 13 / Officials lament limits on taxing power

Published: 6/28/2006
And speaking of how state budgets just keep getting bigger ….

A few days ago we joined other editorial writers in questioning three government officials and an association president about state and local government finances at a forum presented by the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. Our conclusion: Government officials – at least those on this panel – want even more of your money than they’re taking now and are not all that concerned with economies in government.

Henry Gardner, executive director of the Association of Bay Area Governments, criticized “a lack of political will at the state level … a lack of political courage” to raise taxes.

Assemblyman John Laird, D-Santa Cruz, chairman of the Assembly Budget Committee, brought up that he joined 46 other Assembly members in putting “up a vote on the Assembly floor to raise the upper income bracket of income tax to fund the schools,” which was “a deal that the governor walked away from.”

He also lamented that it takes a two-thirds vote to pass a budget in California, meaning restructuring the tax system – including tax increases – requires the cooperation of the usually anti-tax Republican minority. If that cooperation were not mandatory, of course, Democrats could raise taxes at will – and crash the state economy.

(Oddly, Mr. Laird almost seemed to understand that point, remembering that when he was mayor of Santa Cruz, he went “through a groveling exercise because the Mercedes dealership was going to leave town, and the sales tax from that one car dealership in a town of 50,000 provided 5 percent of the general fund budget.” Put another way, if businesses aren’t treated right, they leave a city – even beautiful Santa Cruz – county, state or even a country.)

Betty Yee, an acting member of the Board of Equalization, said she was still optimistic “that we could revisit Proposition 13 if there were some comprehensive system of review of our revenue system.” Thus far, fortunately, Prop. 13 has been the “third rail” in California politics – touch it, and your political career is electrocuted. It will be interesting to see if Ms. Yee’s Republican opponent campaigns on this issue against her this November.

We pointed out that the state is raking in record revenue, with $5 billion in unexpected income this year, and that local governments have seen revenue from property taxes – despite Prop. 13 – go up as much as 90 percent in just the past five years. So budget problems hardly stem from a lack of revenue.

Mr. Gardner replied that, “ The short answer is the taxes don’t keep flowing in” when property values stagnate or decline, as now seems to be happening. Yes, but a 90 percent boost in five years should last a long time.

In the end, it was disheartening to us that these officials were too quick to blame Prop. 13 for the state’s lingering financial straits and to look to higher taxes for relief. But it should be clear that the real solution is not higher taxes, but lower taxes accompanied by the privatization of services and cuts in wasteful or unneeded programs. A growing, competitive and constantly innovating private sector, unburdened by high taxes and regulations, is the best guarantee that the state will have the money for the limited essential services it ought to provide.