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4A Daily News ��� Tuesday, April 9, 2013 Opinion California ��� a state of extremes DAILY NEWS RED BLUFF TEHAMA COUNTY T H E V O I C E O F T E H A M A C O U NTY S I N C E 1 8 8 5 Greg Stevens, Publisher gstevens@redbluffdailynews.com Chip Thompson, Editor editor@redbluffdailynews.com Editorial policy The Daily News opinion is expressed in the editorial. The opinions expressed in columns, letters and cartoons are those of the authors and artists. Letter policy The Daily News welcomes letters from its readers on timely topics of public interest. All letters must be signed and provide the writer���s home street address and home phone number. Anonymous letters, open letters to others, pen names and petition-style letters will not be allowed. Letters should be typed and cannot exceed two double-spaced pages or 500 words. When several letters address the same issue, a cross section of those submitted will be considered for publication. Letters will be edited. Letters are published at the discretion of the editor. Mission Statement We believe that a strong community newspaper is essential to a strong community, creating citizens who are better informed and more involved. The Daily News will be the indispensible guide to life and living in Tehama County. We will be the premier provider of local news, information and advertising through our daily newspaper, online edition and other print and Internet vehicles. The Daily News will reflect and support the unique identities of Tehama County and its cities; record the history of its communities and their people and make a positive difference in the quality of life for the residents and businesses of Tehama County. How to reach us Main office: 527-2151 Classified: 527-2151 Circulation: 527-2151 News tips: 527-2153 Sports: 527-2153 Obituaries: 527-2151 Photo: 527-2153 On the Web www.redbluffdailynews.com Fax Newsroom: 527-9251 Classified: 527-5774 Retail Adv.: 527-5774 Legal Adv.: 527-5774 Business Office: 527-3719 Address 545 Diamond Ave. Red Bluff, CA 96080, or P.O. Box 220 Red Bluff, CA 96080 California is a state of immense resources amid striking depravation. Our economy is the world���s eighth largest producing food, oil, and software to sustain billions, but we also claim the greatest numbers of Americans that are on public assistance, mentally ill, poor, in prison, or homeless. In 2011 the U.S. Census found more than 5 million California adults received some form of income-based government assistance including welfare grants, aid to the aged, blind and disabled and medical care through the MediCal program, as well as several smaller programs in which aid is based on recipients' low incomes. This number excludes those receiving Social Security payments, public employee pensions and other public payment programs that are not tied to recipients' incomes. Just over 72% of these people are capable of working, the highest rate of all states. The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) says California has 1.2 million mentally ill residents and a quarter of its prison inmates suffer from mental illness. Overall, NAMI gives California a "C" grade on how it deals with mental illness, just above the national "D." No state earned an "A" and just seven got a "B" in the NAMI survey. Nearly nine million Californians - almost a quarter of the state's residents live in poverty ��� a rate by far the highest in the nation. This stunning number fuels California's perpetual political debate over the state's "safety net" of health and welfare services, which has been reduced sharply due to budget constraints. California's 23.5 percent poverty rate under the "supplemental poverty measure" (SPM) developed by the Census Bureau is approached only by the 23.2 percent rate in the District of Columbia and Florida���s 19.5 percent. Our high poverty rate is driven largely by our high cost of living. Our corrections system cages more than 140,000 inmates into 32 prisons designed to hold half that number. To make matters worse over a quarter of them suffer from mental illness and countless more literally sit for years in county jails designed for short term detentions. The National Alliance to End Homelessness recently found that 31 states see increases in homelessness. California���s homeless population grew 3.4 percent -128,785 to 133,129 -- during the same period. Broken out by subpopulations, the data shows the largest percentage growth among family households with nearly 4 in 10 living on the street, in a car, or in another place not intended for human habitation. Homelessness affects people of all ages, races, ethnicity and geography, but peo- lions, can and should ple living in doubled up offer the most help to situations, people disthose that suffer. charged from prison, So there is the young adults aged out of conundrum, how can foster care, and uninwe improve mental sured people comprise health services and the largest factions. income parity without The California Budchasing the wealthy get Project finds that away with high taxes? California has the greatLet me offer some sugest disparity between gestions: 1) impose those in the top income fees on businesses that brackets and those at the Richard extract our natural bottom after only New resources, such as oil Mexico and Arizona. It companies which pay also claimed the second California no fees like largest increase in the they do to the states of gap between the top and Texas and Alaska, 2) middle during the precease lengthy incarcerceding three decades, ations of drug addicts, from the late 1970s with marijuana growers, only Connecticut's gap growing more. However, high- and low level three-strike offendincome Californians now pay the ers, 3) reduce constraints imposed nation's highest marginal income by Proposition 13 that severely tax rates at nearly 52 percent ��� this limit property taxes on the valuis the combined state, federal and, able properties, and 4) offer child where applicable, local income care and employment to the poor taxes, plus payroll taxes for and paroled to improve our infraSocial Security and Medicare and structure and social services. included the deductibility of While some will certainly argue some taxes. Proposition 30 added that these measures have adverse three percentage points to the consequences we must get our marginal state income tax rate for fiscal house in order and do it in California's highest-income tax- ways that better serve the mentalpayers, bringing it to 13.3 per- ly ill and poor in California ��� a cent, more than any other state. state of extremes. On the other side of the coin, Richard Mazzucchi can be those that want for nothing but tax havens to secure their mil- reached at living-green@att.net. Mazzucchi Positive Point Your officials STATE ASSEMBLYMAN ��� Dan Logue, 1550 Humboldt Road, Ste. 4, Chico, CA 95928, 530-895-4217 STATE SENATOR ��� Jim Nielsen, 2635 Forest Ave., Ste. 110, Chico, CA 95928, (530) 879-7424, senator.nielsen@senate.ca.gov GOVERNOR ��� Jerry Brown, State Capitol Bldg., Sacramento, CA 95814; (916) 445-2841; Fax (916) 558-3160; E-mail: governor@governor.ca.gov. U.S. REPRESENTATIVE ��� Doug LaMalfa 506 Cannon House Office Building, Washington, DC 20515, 202-225-3076. U.S. SENATORS ��� Dianne Feinstein (D), One Post Street, Suite 2450, San Francisco, CA 94104; (415) 393-0707. Fax (415) 393-0710. Barbara Boxer (D), 1700 Montgomery St., Suite 240, San Francisco, CA 94111; (510) 286-8537. Fax (202) 224-0454. Commentary Laughable yet deadly anti-gun propaganda Undermining my Sunday morning emotional tranquility prior to column writing, I tuned in to the Chris Matthews Show. I was rewarded when his panel of liberals, leftists and loons obsessed over the politics of gun control; wished the language was still about "control" instead of "safety;" and displayed angst over the demise of socalled "assault weapons" bans, magazine limits, universal background checks and falling public support for President Obama���s preferred legislation. Choice thoughts, blurted out by Time���s liberal Joe Klein, would have earned laughs at an NRA meeting: First, he bemoaned the polling results showing that 50 percent of those who oppose any new laws or background checks believe the government wants to seize guns through a database resulting from the new, universal check system. Then, admitting that there was a likelihood of "watered down" background checks, he said any new system would be used by the NRA, "the next time some kid goes nuts and shoots up a school," to say "we tried your way and it didn���t stop the shooting." Regarding the Newtown massacre, it is indisputable and painfully obvious that nothing but the killer���s mom locking her guns up, armed and trained personnel at the school, or mental health professionals having committed him for treatment, would have stopped him. On the first count, let���s review recent events in Cypress, where the government simply seized sizable portions of savings held in banks to boost the government���s bottom line in return for a EU bailout deal. Cypress��� citizens are effectively disarmed, being allowed minimal access to handguns and allowed, after registration and approval, to own 1 shotgun, with two chambers (side-by-side or over-under) and no semi-automatic feature or pumpaction method for reloading. With citizens so armed, (rather, disarmed), there are lots of things���money, land, second homes, extra vehicles, assets���that might fall under the apparent default governmental attitude: "What���s ours is ours and what���s yours is negotiable." I cite people deprived of the free use and control of their property via insane EPA "wetlands" regulations. I cite California���s Congressional leftist, Maxine Waters, having to check her tongue in a hearing with oil company executives as she was in the midst of telling them that she was all about socializing their ass(ets). I cite the plans, floated by some Democrats in Congress and the administration, to "exchange" the retirement accounts of Americans for governmental annuities, guaranteeing the previous owner of the account a "reasonable" rate of remuneration. A lot of the things you think you own are only yours to the extent that either the law, or your and your fellow citizens��� ability and willingness to defend them, will allow. Thomas Sowell���s piece asked, "Do Gun-Control Laws Control Guns?" (1/22, NationalReview.com); the answer is a resounding "NO!" He states the obvious: "If, as gun-control advocates claim, gun-control laws really do control guns and save lives," there should be no more problem repealing the Second Amendment than there was repealing the Eighteenth Amendment that created Prohibition." Mr. Sowell taught pistol shooting "strict gun laws" led to "lower gun mortality" and in the Marine Corps and "fewer shooting knows that you may deaths." Dr. Fleegler, need many rounds of unsurprisingly an ammunition to account "anti-gun activist who for missed targets, mul(called for) stricter gun tiple assailants or poor control measures," visibility. A law-abiding may have produced a citizen should have no technically solid study limits to their magazine but that will be for stasize for sporting or selftistical experts to defense purposes. Crimdecide. inals mostly use handWhat any lay perguns illegally obtained. son or reader of this "Most factual studies Don column can quickly show no reduction in is that, by includgun crimes, including Polson graspsuicides in his ing murder, under gun-control laws [but rather] The way study, Dr. Fleegler was not producing a balshow higher rates ��� I see it anced analysis of the under such laws." Gun relationship of gun crimes abound under the laws to gun murders. nation���s strictest laws in Chicago and Washington, DC. Suicide is self-inflicted, requires (Sowell) further writes: "When it no gun, and reflects nothing on was legal to buy a shotgun in safety from assailants. He includLondon in the middle of the 20th ed the anomalously high-homicentury, there were very few cide state of Louisiana (10 per armed robberies. But, after 100,000) in the 10 least-regulated British gun-control zealots man- states, but left out the even-highaged over the years to disarm vir- er-homicide District of Columbia tually the entire law-abiding pop- (12.45 per 100,000), with the ulation, armed robberies became most draconian gun laws. Includliterally a hundred times more ing the District in the data, the 10 common. And murder rates rose." most gun-regulated have a homiIn "New Study Finds Firearms cide rated of 4.0 per 100,000, Laws Do Nothing to Prevent while the 10 least gun-regulated Homicides" (Powerlineblog.com, are lower, at 3.5 per 100,000. 3/13), we find that the study by Fewer gun laws arguably correDr. Eric Fleegler of Boston, pub- spond to lower homicide rates, lished in JAMA Internal Medi- proven by an anti-gun-motivated cine, attempted to prove just the study. John Lott���s book demonopposite. He ranked the 50 states strated the truth: "More Guns, by quantity of gun laws, their Less Crime. effectiveness (per Brady anti-gun Don Polson has called Red Bluff campaign) and the gun homicide home since 1988. He can be and suicide rates, from 2007by e-mail at 2010. CNN and the Chicago Tri- reached bune, however, headlined that donplsn@yahoo.com.