Tom Elias: California has a lot to lose in the next Bush term

The Daily Breeze

Monday, December 20, 2004

California has a lot to lose in the next Bush term

For starters, the president has shown no interest in this state or its problems.
By Tom Elias

As President Bush gets set to begin his second term, the question for California is whether he'll continue the non-violent "war" many Californians feel he's waged against this state for the past four years.

Bush and his aides have made sure California remained a "donor" state, getting back just 76 cents for each tax dollar it sends to Washington, D.C., and thus subsidizing many of the "red" states that twice voted for Bush. By comparison, while Bill Clinton was president, California got back about 84 cents of every federal tax dollar paid. The eight-cent loss could have built a lot of roads, school buildings, sewage plants and libraries.

Bush canceled national monument status for parts of the Sierra Nevada Mountains that Clinton had ordered preserved, he opened parts of the Mojave Desert to off-road vehicles for the first time in decades, he's forcing all California drivers to pay higher prices for gasoline by continuing to insist it include ethanol, and he refused to buy back offshore oil drilling leases along the California coast, as he did with those in the Gulf of Mexico near Florida, where his brother is governor.

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Then there are the base closings. California lost 29 military bases and 93,000 jobs in previous rounds of shutdowns. It's true that some of those derelict bases have been converted to other productive uses. But the new functions have not replaced nearly all the old jobs, either in sheer numbers or in the level of pay they offer.

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For base closures can devastate communities. A recent study by the Los Angeles Economic Development Corp., for example, showed that the Los Angeles Air Force Base contributes $16 billion to the state's economy every year, even though it doesn't even have a runway.

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http://www.dailybreeze.com/opinion/articles/1154737.html

Tom Elias can be reached attdelias@aol.com.

time for you to Pump the chimp up!

They lost the right to self-determination between Enron Cheneying them over and then Arnold muscling in to finish the job. There isn't any democracy left in California if the powers-to-be can trash the political rules.