SACRAMENTO, CA - Californians hand over 33 percent of their income to government at all levels, the fourth highest tax burden in the nation. Yet the state Assembly is worried that the people are not taxed enough.

Under AB 1690, which passed the Assembly 41-35, California cities could impose a tax of as much as eight percent of the amount a worker owes in state income tax. The bill would also allow counties to levy a tax of up to two percent. Mark Leno, the San Francisco Democrat who introduced the measure, believes it would cost Californians earning less than $100,000 annually a meager $70 per year. City voters would have to approve the measure, co-written by John Burton, president pro tem of the Senate, but AB 1690 allows cities to use a supermajority or simple majority.

Assemblyman Leno, a former San Francisco supervisor, portrays his tax escalation as a simple extension of local control that would help cash-strapped cities provide emergency services. That is clever marketing but also misleading.

Proposition 13, it might be recalled, requires that a supermajority of voters approve any tax for specific purposes such as public safety. This measure is an attempt to skirt Proposition 13, which has been under attack recently in a series of editorials disguised as news stories. The voter-approved measure is supposedly unfair because some pay higher property taxes than others.

As a glance at San Francisco will confirm, cities can be as, corrupt, inept, and bureaucratically bloated as the state government. Cities are strapped for cash not because of Proposition 13 but because, like the state, they refuse to consider cheaper and more efficient ways of providing services, such as privatization. Empowering cities to impose income taxes on workers provides cities with no incentive to cut costs and actually rewards them for ineptitude. As for the workers, it punishes them.

Californians already pay federal income taxes, state income taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, car taxes (soon to be tripled), and a myriad of hidden measures such as gasoline taxes. For many families, taxes are their major expense, and tax freedom day does not come until April 29. Relieving Californians of yet more of their hard-earned money can only be described as a shakedown scheme motivated by greed. This calls for a clarification often mentioned in this space.

Wages and salaries are not a gift from employers or from the government. Rather, workers earn their money. When workers want to retain more of what they have already earned, they are not showing greed, as many politicians contend. They want to retain what they earned through labor. When government, however, wants to take more of what people earn, simply to alleviate the consequences of their own ineptitude, and with no effort to reduce massive waste, that indeed qualifies as greed.

True local control has no need to thrust a greedy hand into taxpayers' pockets. If legislators want to revive California they should reject the expansion of taxing power to cities and counties. Instead they should lower taxes, trim bureaucracy, and attack waste.