Wesson Offers New Budget Plan
Assembly Speaker Herb Wesson plans to offer a budget plan today that will include $1 billion in new spending cuts. It also includes a half-cent sales tax increase and a hike in income taxes paid by the state´s highest earners.
The speaker´s proposal comes after Republicans in the Senate have twice rejected a similar budget plan from Democrats that included only the sales tax increase.
Wesson says he will propose the plan knowing it´s almost certainly dead on arrival.
Wesson and most of the other Democrats in the Assembly spent much of the week traveling throughout the state, talking with local officials and community leaders in hopes of generating support for higher taxes to help erase a record $38.2 billion budget deficit.