Check out this great video that draws a straight line between Chevron’s lavish contributions to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the dismal ballot choices for plugging the awful state budget hole. We don’t have any position on Propositions 1D and 1E on the state ballot, which the video’s makers oppose. But it was amazing how fast Schwarzenegger’s trial balloon about putting an extraction tax on oil drilled in the state—which every other oil-producing state has—popped and sank.
I was thinking about the extraction tax today because I heard from a source in Sacramento that it might not be completely dead. That $1 billion a year it could raise would go a long way toward easing the harm to the state’s neediest citizens from deep budget cuts. But we won’t believe it until it’s signed, sealed and delivered.