California Legislators' "Taxorexia" Addiction

Senator Ted Lieu (D-Redondo Beach) never loses an opportunity to loose his opposition to the most minimal and meandering of problems in his district.

The Argonaut recently radiated a full frontal exposure of Senator Lieu’s opposition to tanning for minors. In spite of rising crime rates, reduced educational opportunities, and increasing deviance among youth in Southern California, the South Bay Senator has decided to wage war on skin cancer. If there is one addiction that Senator Lieu needs to treat, it is his obsession with press releases for picayune legislative proposals. The over-bronzing of our skin is a private matter, one which every citizen is responsible for treating. The spread of red ink from Sacramento to Washington D. C. is a more devious and aggressive cancer, one which requires immediate attention.

Reading over the article again, I thought that I spied a typo in the column, which printed “taxorexia” instead of “tanorexia”, the terrible condition which compels suffers to seek out tanning salons to the detriment of their health. On second glance, I believe that this editorial faux pas was in fact the mot juste for what really ails our state representatives.

If there is one addiction that Senator Lieu, Governor Brown, and the liberal political class of Sacramento must be weaned away from, it is indeed “tax-orexia”, a terrible condition in which politicians keep heaping and hyping up tax initiatives to close the growing budget gaps which they have created. Of course, “taxorexia” inevitably leads to and exacerbates the more sinister condition of “tax-ulimia”,  in which the state gorges itself with rapacious rapidity on taxpayer dollars, only to wretch this revenue excessively and effusively on the most inane and inconsequential of initiatives, like limiting juvenile “tanorexia”.

Voters across the state must stage an intervention. Our politicians will never break free from this destructive cycle of “taxorexia-taxulimia” unless we the voters stand up and confront them. We must love our legislators into wholeness, encourage them to admit that they are powerless, that they are making our lives unmanageable. They may deny that they have a problem. They may hide or minimize their bingeing and purging, but we  must show that we care, that we want what is best for them, and by extension ourselves, our state, and our future.

If Senator Lieu and his addicted political pusher-peers want to stimulate recovery in this state, they must seek a power greater than themselves -- we the voters --and turn their will and life back to legislating and leading according to the best interests of all Californians.