Carl Guardino has always lobbied for higher taxes and flawed, wildly expensive big gov't policies

High-speed rail. VTA. Measure A. Regressive taxes that hit low-income residents the hardest. In the long local list of hopelessly overpriced and ineffective progressive government boondoggles, there's one consistent player. It's current Bloom Energy Gov't Affairs exec and former top lobbyist for the narcissistically-named Silicon Valley Leadership Group, Carl Guardino. Guardino recently injected his personal support into San Jose’s mayoral race. Palo Alto's Daily Post editor Dave Price provided perspective on Guardino's tenure as SVLG's head.

The Silicon Valley Leadership Group's purpose is to make sure that the group’s members — the valley’s biggest corporations such as Apple, Google and Microsoft — can avoid paying for transportation projects, like extending BART to San Jose.

Over the years, {former SVLG president} Guardino has run frequent campaigns to raise sales taxes to pay for those projects. His companies pay very little in sales tax, but the poorest in our community pay a larger percentage of their income on sales taxes than the wealthy.

Every time, Guardino’s campaign would promise that a “yes” vote would reduce traffic. And it would never happen. Traffic would just get worse.

His efforts allowed San Jose to siphon off tax dollars paid by Palo Alto, Los Altos and Mountain View residents. After the BART project would get the lion’s share, the North County would get the crumbs left behind.

Now he is quitting {his post at SVLG--this piece was written in January 2020} just as he was gearing up to pass a 1% sales tax in all nine Bay Area counties in November.

The press was also worshipful of Guardino {during his tenure}, never pointing out how his organization was all about shifting the costs of tech companies onto the backs of the little guys.

What’s Guardino’s legacy? Next time you’re stuck in a traffic jam or the next time you don’t have money for something important because taxes have driven up the cost of that item, you can thank Carl Guardino.

Editor Dave Price’s email address is price@padailypost.com.

Read the whole thing here.

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Photo taken by Karin Dalziel.