Thursday, January 19, 2006

More on the Mystery of The Bonds

The San Franciso Examiner also carried a story this morning on the call for Robert Klein to resign. The piece by Marisa Lagos had a couple of interesting tidbits that we have not seen elsewhere.

One involved these two paragraphs:
"Daniel Perry, vice president of the national lobbying group the Coalition for Advancement of Medical Research, said the report 'poisons the atmosphere.'
"I think [the criticisms] are unfair and unwarranted, and certainly not respectful of a decision that a majority of California voters made,' he said."

The other came from Lagos' exclusive coverage of a speech Klein gave earlier this week in San Franciso. According to Lagos, he discussed the controversy about the question of whether the California stem cell bonds would be taxable to investors as opposed to nontaxable. Varying estimates place the cost to the state of the taxable bonds at more than $500-million over the cost of nontaxable bonds. The San Francisco Chronicle reported last year that Klein, during the campaign for Prop. 71, concealed the fact that taxable bonds were likely to be required. That deception was one of reasons for the call for Klein's resignation.

However, Lagos says that in his speech earlier this week, Klein argued that "even if all the bonds are taxable, they will still end up costing taxpayers less than $6 billion, the number sold to voters."

Klein has never fully laid out a response to the Chronicle story. His latest comments will keep the issue alive.

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