California Construction Trucking Association (CCTA)

The income tax deadline is quickly approaching and I have been filing away my 2010 receipts and double-checking all of my “legal” tax deductions in anticipation of visiting my accountant. A strange thought just came into my mind:

“What if I lied to the IRS the way that CARB and their paid-for “scientists” have lied to all of us about the dangers of PM2.5?”

What if I worked for a private company and lied about my degree that I didn’t have, like Hein Tran did to his boss, who is also an attorney educator at UCLA, Mary Nichols. She covered up the entire sordid affair until Dr John Telles blew the whistle and she had to publicly acknowledge the fraud and cover-up. One would think the code of ethics at UCLA, much less state government, meant something to this woman –

I forgot she is an attorney – and her lips were moving.

If I committed fraud like this, the IRS would confiscate my possessions to pay the taxes I would owe, and if that wasn’t enough to satisfy my debt, they would put me in jail. Also in the case of lying to a private company, you would be fired immediately and probably escorted off of the company’s property. Meanwhile Mr. Tran still works for CARB and basically got a slap on the hand.

It’s hard to believe that this country and our state surrendered so much power to the environmental activists. They are able to kill major projects and destroy businesses by increasing operating costs with their regulations to the point that we make nothing these days.

The mass exodus of businesses continues from California to places like Texas and Idaho. Meanwhile Jerry “Green-Beam” Brown and his band of liberals in Sacramento are oblivious to the cause. They think business can shoulder all the burden of over-regulation and high taxes. They don’t understand that if you don’t make enough money, to say, meet your payroll, you have to lay-off some employees.

On the bright side, CARB has extended the deadline for registration in their on-road diesel program (arb.ca.gov/msprog/onrdiesel/reportinginfo.htm) until March 30. You need to register your entire fleet if you don’t meet the 2012 requirements for 1996-1999 trucks (diesel particulate filters or 2010 engines for each truck), which is highly unlikely for most of us.  Another reason to register is if you want to designate some of your trucks as low-mileage vehicles to get a couple extra years of compliance time.