ABC News: California Gov. Tells Voters to Raise Taxes or Education Funding Gets Slashed
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/12/california-gov-tells-voters-to-raise-taxes-or-education-funding-gets-slashed/
The governor of the largest state in America has issued an ultimatum to its citizens: vote to raise your own taxes or the state will gut funding to public schools and public safety. … This recent onslaught of Democratic proposals to up taxes on high-income earners is due less to the growing inequality between America’s rich and poor, a gap that has been growing for decades, and more to the economic pain of the recent recession, said Alan Auerbach, director of the University of California Berkeley’s Robert D. Burch Center for Tax Policy and Public Finance. “There is definitely more sentiment for it now than a few years ago,” Auerbach said. “A lot of people right now aren’t doing very well, so they are looking around for causes of the problem.”

Sacramento Bee: Dan Walters: Jerry Brown's tax plan tries easy political route
http://www.sacbee.com/2011/12/07/4104882/dan-walters-jerry-browns-tax-plan.html
The governor's proposal takes the path of the least political resistance. Polls indicate that education is the most popular spending and that sales taxes and income taxes on the wealthy – the much-debated 1 percent – are the most popular ways of increasing major revenues. … Why should we pay more when we already have one of the nation's highest tax burdens, when the Legislature is handing out raises to its staff, when politicians haven't curbed rapidly increasing pension costs, when they're wasting billions on prisons, when they've shunned a spending limit, when they've squandered money on a hapless bullet train project and unworkable computer systems, when they're spending tens of millions on illegal immigrants' college educations, and – most importantly – when the state is mired in recession and 2 million-plus are jobless?