California Governor's Proposed Tax Relief for Teachers Criticized.

Publication: The Boston Globe (Boston, Massachusetts) (via Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News)

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COPYRIGHT 2000 The Boston Globe

Byline: Lynda Gorov

May 16--LOS ANGELES - The gesture caught everyone off guard - the governor's friends and foes alike.

Over the weekend, California Governor Gray Davis unveiled a plan that calls for credentialed public school teachers to pay no state income taxes on their salaries. By yesterday, some police officers, nurses, and other professionals who consider themselves overworked and underpaid were wondering where the call for their tax relief was.

Even some educators, while lauding the gesture, dismissed the governor's proposal as fiscally unfeasible, not to mention adding too little money in teachers' pockets. Davis's Republican opponents were openly derisive. Democrats hardly sounded more supportive of making public school teachers the first and only group to enjoy such an exemption in California and perhaps the nation.

The plan, said Assembly Republican Leader Scott Baugh, "smacks of special-interest politics." Senate President pro tem John Burton, a Democrat, said it was a "laudatory goal...

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