How Gov. Brown Can Help Veterans

John Seiler:

I’m a U.S. Army veteran. Four years in the U.S. Army, 1978-82. So I appreciate it that Gov. Jerry Brown cares about us. Reported SignOnSanDiego:

Saying “we owe our veterans the best when they come home,” Gov. Jerry Brown Tuesday established a statewide council charged with improving services for Californians who have served their country.

Through an executive order, Brown directed this new “California Interagency Council on Veterans” to identify needs and prioritize steps necessary to provide services at all levels of government.

But we veterans don’t need another council or another bureaucracy. In a few sentences, I’ll tell the governor what California veterans need now:

1. Tax cuts. Not increases, as he keeps pushing — but tax cuts. California already has among the highest taxes in the country. And as the recent example of Illinois’ tax increases shows, tax increases kill jobs.

He could embrace the revenue-neutral, flat-tax reform of his friend, economist Arthur Laffer, which I wrote about earlier. In 1992, Brown himself, in his presidential campaign, backed a national flat tax. A state flat tax would get California’s economy booming again, creating new jobs for veterans — and everybody.

2. Suspend AB 32, the Million-Jobs Killing Act of 2006. Jobs creation in California can’t start until this absurd measure is itself killed.

3. Reform state pensions. Veterans are on the hook — like everybody in the state — for state and local pensions now an incredible $884 billion in the red, as former Orange County Treasurer Chriss Street detailed yesterday.

4. Restore the Gann Limit, which Brown himself backed when it was passed in 1979. It worked great in the 1980s. Then it was basically eliminated in 1990, and we’ve had nothing but budget problems ever since. It would limit increases in the state budget to the increases in population plus inflation.

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