dollars and sense
Wow, what a news day yesterday. Enough to keep your finger poised over that “refresh” button. In the very early morning PST, Obama announced his first pick for the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor. By ten AM, the state Supreme Court announced their split decision in the first – and likely last – major legal challenge to Prop 8, ruling that the 18,000 gay and lesbian couple who wed while it was legal to do so will have their marriages recognized, despite the court’s upholding the controversial proposition.
And somewhere in the mix, the state’s head-hanging economic quandary caught the attention of the NY Times’ Paul Krugman, whose column dissected the sorry fix of California’s finances, laying out what has become a now familiar recitation of our circumstances. As Krugman points out, California’s revenue stream has been choked ever since the 1978 passage of Prop. 13, which froze property taxes and put a stranglehold on the state’s finances, forcing leaders to hike income taxes higher and higher, thus, according to many, creating an inhospitable climate for new business and general economic growth. And because further tax increases in the legislature require a two-thirds vote – again, thanks to our broken proposition system – state Democrats and Republicans remain at perennial loggerheads over whether to increase tax rates or slash spending, neither of which the state’s voters finds palatable, but both of which – in the eyes of virtually every reasonable observer – are necessary to square up our finances.
And there’s a fascinating thread of intersection between all these stories. Obama’s Sotomayor pick is an encouraging one: she’s an empathetic and progressive thinker, without being overtly ideological. And yet the California state Supreme Court ruling demonstrates the limits of judicial power. Without proper precedent, the argument of gay rights attorneys – that Prop. 8 represented a significant revision to the state Constitution, one that must be filtered first through the legislature before going to a popular vote – could not, in the eyes of the court, stand.
The major Prop. 8 proponents are religious organizations. By even the most generous estimations, it’s virtually impossible to make a case against gay marriage without falling back on the circular logic of religious dogma. So why not drag the issue out of the realm of philosophical discussion and focus instead on an important secondary facet: the simple dollars and cents of it? We should legalize gay marriage for the tax revenue alone. Think of all those marriage licenses, not to mention the secondary sources of stimulus – ceremony venues, restaurants and catering, clothing, and on and on.
I’ve made this case before on this blog, but why are we suffocating a growth industry that could rack up millions, even lure a whole new strata of affluent taxpayers to the state? This solution won’t generate the sort of sums needed to fix our spending gap, but what a windfall that whole equal rights gig might generate. A little more cash in the bank makes for a win-win all around.
