Our state elected representatives are at it again, producing a blizzard of new bills during the 2021 session.
Just who of everyday Joes on the streets is going to know anything about any of these?
These bills are for the biggest paying supporters or the biggest attention getters. Most of these bills are “penny dreadful, junk bills.”
The basic problem is that California has a 120-member “full-time” paid Senate and Assembly, with expense accounts, so these fellows have nothing to do but pass bills. Each representative is allowed 40 bills, but this was increased to up to 50 bills for the Assembly in the 2019 term.
If you thought what we had was bad, they just made it worse. For 2017, Gov. Jerry Brown signed 857 bills into law and rejected only 118. For 2019, there were 1,000 new bills proposed.
But each bill passed costs the taxpayer money in taxes! Every bill costs us one way or another. Every bill must be managed, so when your reps stand up before you at town hall meetings and say, “Look what I have done for you.”
Remember that they are giving us more taxes and it is not necessarily a gift. Every aspect of government has to be paid for. More government means more taxes for all of us. The new “gun laws” will require thousands of new state employees to register the millions of guns and ammunition applications.
We should ask ourselves, why are our reps not telling us how much they have reduced the government and how much they have reduced our taxes? How about giving us the number of cancelled old bills each year?
Don’t we care? Why don’t we give them incentives to do so? Is voting them out of office the only incentive?
There are so many bills becoming law that the everyday taxpayer has no idea what they are. And without any malice of his own, he can be found guilty of violating one or more of the new laws, only to be told by some politically appointed activist judge that his ignorance is no excuse.
At the rate we are going, we will all become criminals at some point in our lives in California by simply going outside our house. It is no wonder that California has more people in prisons than any other state and most countries and the most highly paid prison guards in the U.S.
A certain outcome for all of these bills is to paralyze the state of California from doing anything sans committing a crime. Total dysfunction is in store for us.
To help limit this out of control bill-passing train wreck from continuing, let’s insist that our representatives sponsor a bill that limits the number of bills in every two-year session to one per representative. A provision of this bill will be to review and eliminate past bills, every year and to notice them in public.
However even this restriction, if passed, would still result in 120 bills every two years, still more that any citizen could read.
If the governor can pass all those other bills for special interests, why not this one for the taxpayers?
Justin M. Ruhge
Concerned Taxpayers Inc.
Lompoc
