You’ll be happy to know that Charles “Porn Surtax” Calderon got re-elected. Now we have this guy:
FREMONT, california — With California’s finances still in a nose dive, Assembly Majority Leader Alberto Torrico, [pictured] D-Newark, has pushed for various tax increases. He has called for oil companies to pay more, millionaires to pay more, and soon he plans on asking connoisseurs of pornography to pay more.
During his annual State of the Assembly District speech Thursday at the Newark/Fremont Hilton, the Democrat who represents the state’s 20th Assembly District said he plans to introduce legislation to fund the electronic surveillance of sexual abuse and domestic violence parolees through taxes on “the goods and products associated with the adult entertainment industry.”
If passed, the legislation also would make California the 12th state to require that domestic violence parolees wear Global Positioning System tracking devices, Torrico spokesman Jeff Barbosa said.
The specific facets of the adult entertainment industry to be taxed haven’t been determined, Barbosa said. The legislation could be introduced within a few weeks. Torrico’s most pressing concern these days, he said, is the state’s ever-worsening budget crisis, which he blamed primarily on legislative Republicans.
California’s debt is expected to exceed $40 billion over the next 18 months. If nothing is done, Torrico said, the state will run out of funds for infrastructure projects in eight days and run out of cash altogether by March.
“In a word, California is in a financial meltdown,”
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he said.
Torrico said he wants to get the deficit under control in part by raising taxes on California’s wealthiest residents and by allowing the state to reassess property tax valuations on commercial lots.
However, with a two-thirds majority needed to pass budgets, he and other legislative Democrats — who have majorities in both legislative chambers — have talked tough, but ultimately surrendered tax hike proposals to reach deals with Republicans.
“I think we don’t win because they delay, and shutting down the government is what Republicans want,” Torrico said after the speech.
Torrico, the Assembly’s No. 2 Democrat — behind Speaker Karen Bass of Los Angeles — favors keeping lawmakers in session through Christmas in order to reach a compromise.
“My hope is that being locked in the chamber during Christmas will help both of us move past our partisan ways,” he said.
Torrico’s electronic surveillance bill would expand Proposition 83 — the 2006 voter-approved measure requiring that sex offenders wear GPS devices for the rest of their lives — to apply to parolees convicted before the proposition took effect, as well as to domestic violence parolees.