Photo of Dale Ogden Dale Ogden, a 2010 California gubernatorial candidate ,  talks with Wikinews reporter Mike Morales about his platform. Over the past 20-30 years, the state of California has continuously increased the share of the economy that it confiscates through taxes and spends, mostly, on unionized government employees and social welfare. It has reduced the amount of money that benefits the general populace in infrastructure. I chose 1998 because that pre-dates the pension scam perpetrated by Gray Davis, the Democrats in the state legislature, and the government employee unions, in which retirement ages were reduced to absurd levels and benefits were increased by about 50\%. Were we to roll back spending to 1998 levels, we could both eliminate the state income tax and have a budget surplus. In my opinion, that process was a fraud perpetrated on the taxpayers of California and should be prosecuted criminally. The politicians took bribes in the form of campaign contributions and support and the leaders of the government employee unions paid bribes. There is no global warming crisis. The alleged warming trends do not exist and there has actually been a cooling trend over the last ten or so years. The "scientists" who raise the alarm on global warming trends have been discredited as having manipulated their data and destroying data that does not support their beliefs (if they even believe them). Billions of dollars of taxpayer money has been diverted to politically correct scientists and scammers like Al Gore who have gotten rich from this falsehood and who propose to use global warming as an excuse to control mankind's behavior (their real intent). Even if there is some minor global warming (which there has been in some earlier periods in history), there is no reason to believe that it would be harmful to the climate as a whole. Some areas may benefit and some may lose, but that would be true if we had global cooling, too. As an intellectual exercise, ask yourself these questions (originally posed by Vaclav Klaus ) As far as the UC [ University of California| ] system, it is a massive overfunded boondoggle. Higher education has been protected from price competition for many decades. The more government subsidizes education, the higher the price charged for that education with the result that the students and their parents end up paying as much as before. The cost of education has increased far faster than inflation over the past several decades. From what I've seen and read, most university professors are grossly underworked. They need to spend more time teaching; there needs to be more innovation in teaching to keep the cost down (like online education, but certainly not limited to that). Many of the services provided to students at our universities are more baby-sitting than education. We need real competition in education and we need to privatize our public universities. Let people keep their tax money and use it to decide where to go to school. I propose we sell the UC system to private owners and let it compete.
Photo of Dale Ogden , a , talks with Wikinews reporter Mike Morales about his platform. Over the past 20-30 years, the state of California has continuously increased the share of the economy that it confiscates through taxes and spends, mostly, on unionized government employees and social welfare. It has reduced the amount of money that benefits the general populace in infrastructure. I chose 1998 because that pre-dates the pension scam perpetrated by Gray Davis, the in the state legislature, and the government employee unions, in which retirement ages were reduced to absurd levels and benefits were increased by about 50\%. Were we to roll back spending to 1998 levels, we could both eliminate the state income tax and have a budget surplus. In my opinion, that process was a fraud perpetrated on the taxpayers of California and should be prosecuted criminally. The politicians took bribes in the form of campaign contributions and support and the leaders of the government employee unions paid bribes. There is no global warming crisis. The alleged warming trends do not exist and there has actually been a cooling trend over the last ten or so years. The "scientists" who raise the alarm on global warming trends have been discredited as having manipulated their data and destroying data that does not support their beliefs (if they even believe them). Billions of dollars of taxpayer money has been diverted to politically correct scientists and scammers like Al Gore who have gotten rich from this falsehood and who propose to use global warming as an excuse to control mankind's behavior (their real intent). Even if there is some minor global warming (which there has been in some earlier periods in history), there is no reason to believe that it would be harmful to the climate as a whole. Some areas may benefit and some may lose, but that would be true if we had global cooling, too. As an intellectual exercise, ask yourself these questions (originally posed by ) As far as the UC [ ] system, it is a massive overfunded boondoggle. Higher education has been protected from price competition for many decades. The more government subsidizes education, the higher the price charged for that education with the result that the students and their parents end up paying as much as before. The cost of education has increased far faster than inflation over the past several decades. From what I've seen and read, most university professors are grossly underworked. They need to spend more time teaching; there needs to be more innovation in teaching to keep the cost down (like online education, but certainly not limited to that). Many of the services provided to students at our universities are more baby-sitting than education. We need real competition in education and we need to privatize our public universities. Let people keep their tax money and use it to decide where to go to school. I propose we sell the UC system to private owners and let it compete.
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Dale Ogden, a 2010 California gubernatorial candidate
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Democrats
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Vaclav Klaus
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University of California|