Boy was I wrong! Americans do like higher taxes!

They proved it last week – especially in Ceres where they voluntarily raised their own sales taxes with the passage of Measure P.

I’m stymied.

I guess they thought the extra penny per dollar is strictly going to public safety. Not necessarily. That extra $9.4 million each year will go into the General Fund which can be spent on everything else including medical benefits for councilmembers (which two of them have had a death grip on), parks, swimming programs, and raises for employees.

Because of Measure P, the next time a Ceres resident buys a $35,000 car anywhere in the state, they get to cough up an extra $350 to be siphoned off to Ceres City Hall. A $50,000 car purchase means an extra $500.

Your $300 Walmart shopping trip just went up $3 like that. And you were concerned about $6 gas.

So to the 57.6 percent of you who favored Measure P, congratulations on having so much money you’d so freely give it up!

Californians must enjoy paying more taxes because they just elected Xavier Becerra to the governor’s office and one week before the election he said he wants to implement a mileage tax! Don’t be mistaken – what he meant was a mileage tax ON TOP of the gas tax you pay at the pump. How about an extra $900 a year sucked right out of your bank account in addition to the estimated $357 you pay in gas tax each year?

Of course, it’s a deceptive way to force us to give up our gas burning cars and buy an EV.

Apparently Californians also favor higher rates of crime. That’s right. They voted for Becerra who like Newsom likes going easier on felons. Look for more prison closures so the inmates can run the street again. Becerra is also all in favor of all illegal immigrants – good and the very bad – to remain with free citizenship. Remember how he sued Trump over finishing the border wall in California?

And dummy me, I thought Californians were concerned about election integrity. But slamming the door on Prop 39 showed me they aren’t serious. That proposition that would have guaranteed only citizens get to vote and would have prevented voter fraud.

Their voting also tells me that this generation of Americans are wimps. Let me explain. The Greatest Generation put up with economic hardships to defeat the enemies of World War II. Today when a president wages war to prevent Iran from developing nukes to blow up American cities, they whine about gas prices going up a dollar or two. The Greatest Generation never would have punished FDR at the polls for taking on Hitler and Emperor Hirotito; in fact they elected Roosevelt four different times!

True, while there are country folks who are like that of the Hank Williams Jr. song, “Country Boys Can Survive,” the cities are full of self-centered government-dependent masses who apparently feel a sense of immunity from foreign enemy danger – until something like 9/11 happens in New York City.

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Does anything make sense about the strange candidacy of Galen Guzman? It baffles me how anyone in Ceres could have voted for the Ceres City Council candidate who didn’t bother to run a campaign. Guzman didn’t make himself available to newspaper reporter’s questions as he didn’t list any contact information, he didn’t show up at the candidate’s forum and as far as we could tell didn’t spend a dollar on any signs or campaign materials. Yet, he received over 22 percent of the vote? In what world does that happen? An uninformed world, I’m afraid.

One anonymous person posted a theory on Facebook about the puzzling Guzman candidacy. Guzman was showing up and commenting at just about every council meeting but disappeared after becoming a candidate.

It would appear that Guzman’s foray into politics saved Rosalinda Vierra from defeat. Here’s what I mean: Vierra won 798 votes as of Monday and her two opponents combined collected 1,057 votes. Translation: 1,057 didn’t want to see Vierra re-elected while 798 did. We can assume that she would have lost without a third candidate splitting votes.

So our anonymous Facebook poster asked: “Did Guzman run to split the vote in favor of Vierra? Similar to when Vierra ran for Mayor which ultimately helped Lopez?” In 2024 the mayoral candidacy of Gary M. Condit was thwarted by Vierra who came in last place and diluted the anti-Javier Lopez vote. Was that by design too?

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Americans also now don’t mind electing weirdos to office.

Alabama just elected a man pretending to be a woman to the State House, flipping a Republican seat. He (a Democrat, of course) becomes the first trans identified legislator in Alabama history. William Tyler Montgomery decided he is a woman and now goes by the new name of Allison Montgomery.

George Wallace is doing backflips in his grave.

Californians in Nancy Pelosi’s 11th Congressional District just elected moral reprobate Scott Wiener to the Congress. Wiener is the state legislator who tried to make it legal for adults to have sex with minors. He was the one in 2021 who authored Senate Bill 110 to use tax dollars to pay meth addicts to stay sober. Wiener also offered Senate Bill 357 to ban police from arresting anyone for “loitering with the intent of prostitution” or directing, supervising, recruiting, or aiding a person who is loitering with the intent to commit prostitution, or collecting or receiving all or part of the proceeds of an act of prostitution. Wiener says he wrote the bill because the law was “discriminatory towards, and unfairly targets, black women, Latino women, and those who are transgender.” If they’re breaking the law who gives a flip what color they are?

It was Wiener who in 2020 told the AP that “the root cause of homelessness is our severe housing shortage.” Really? It has nothing to do with mental illness, substance abuse, addiction, lack of good paying jobs for those with minimal skills, or people who simply don’t want to compromise?

Maybe Americans enjoy the punishment because they keep making stupid decisions.

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Lots of folks with Trump Derangement Syndrome wet themselves over last week’s election. Historical perspective is important. It’s common for second-term presidencies to see mid-term election upsets. They may not have been alive in 1994 when Bill Clinton got trounced with the loss of 54 Democrat seats in Congress and he immediately pivoted to “the era of Big Government is over.” (No, it wasn’t of course).

George W. Bush lost 30 Republican seats in 2006.

Barack Obama received a “shellacking” in 2010 when Democrats lost 63 seats!

Last week Trump saw seven Senate seats flip and over 40 seats in the House.

Sure, many are Trump fatigued. He didn’t bring down Biden era prices. People are leery of war prospects threatening their way of life and they wanted change. Some are upset that ICE has gone after aunts and uncles who should have been caught and deported generations ago. Americans didn’t sense that Trump was too sympathetic for the economic plight of average Americans who are charging groceries on their credit cards. But the fact is that Biden era prices were never going to come down; prices, on the whole, rarely do.

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There is so much intellectual dishonesty among some candidates for office but I must call out Congresswoman Norma Torres, D-Ontario, for her stupid claims.

In late October she went to Chevron (which always has the highest gas prices along with Shell), for a photo-op to draw attention to gas prices above $6 per gallon. She said: “Trump’s war in Iran is costing U.S. taxpayers so much money, it is incredible. Our economy is not sustainable.”

As of Monday, California’s average regular gas price sat at $5.75 a gallon when the national average was $4.01. California has been the most expensive gas state for years, long before any conflict involving Iran. The war did raise crude prices and pushed the national average higher but it does not explain why California remains nearly two dollars above everyone else.

California levies the highest state gas taxes and fees in the country, roughly 70 to 73.6 cents per gallon once the excise tax, sales tax component, and other charges are included, on top of the federal 18.4 cents. Most states sit well below that. The state’s excise tax alone is 63.4 cents and is indexed to rise automatically. That single line item already accounts for a large slice of the California premium.

Then comes the special fuel blend under CARB standards.

Climate programs pile on more. Cap-and-trade (now sometimes called cap-and-invest) and the Low Carbon Fuel Standard add an estimated 40 to 50 cents per gallon or more, depending on the exact calculation and market conditions. These are deliberate policy choices by state Democrats.

Also Phillips 66 shut its Los Angeles facility and Valero closed its Benicia plant, removing roughly 17 percent of the state’s refining capacity. Fewer refineries making the special blend means less flexibility when anything goes wrong. That is not a federal problem. That is Sacramento policy making energy production and refining harder and more expensive inside the state.

— This column is the opinion of Jeff Benziger, and does not necessarily represent the opinion of The Ceres Courier or 209 Multimedia Corporation. How do you feel about this? Let Jeff know at jeffb@cerescourier.com