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Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's state budget is like a gun held to the head of California and its most vulnerable populations: children without health insurance, people with HIV/AIDS, Alzheimer's, and mental illness, college students who need Cal Grants, and, state prisoners and whomever they might harm if the Governor proceeds with his plan to suddenly dump 58,000 of them out of the ghastly gulag he created, with no plan for rehabilitation or re-entry, now that California's out of money. (Or, so say Schwarzenegger and the Republican minority, though California is rich, rich in natural and human resources that Californians simply need to claim. )
Standing adamantly against what he calls the governor's "petulant, vindictive budget, the budget of a two-year-old," and urging Californians to more vocal protest, and State Democrats to stronger leadership, is State Assembly Majority Leader Alberto Torrico.
Torrico points out that Schwarzenegger's cuts will cost Californians more billions, in federal matching funds than the cuts themselves, and that the oil and gas in the State of California belongs to the people of California, many of whom now tremble, and protest, as Arnold Schwarzenegger takes aim, cocks the budget trigger, and insists that Big Oil shall pay no severance tax for what Torrico calls "the privilege of severing oil and gas from the earth or the water in this State." California is the only state that charges no oil and gas severance tax, at the wellhead, and, were it a nation, it would be the only nation.