Yesterday, Governor Newsom released his revised state budget, required annually by May 14th. In what promises to be a challenging budget process due to rising state costs, the Governor and legislature will have to grapple with the consequences of poor budget management in order to pass a budget by the June 15 deadline. While serving...
Published May 15, 2026
By now, almost every Californian with eyeballs and a memory of the recent past can tell you the story of the failed High-Speed Rail – how voters in 2008 approved a roughly $33 billion project to carry passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in lightning speed beginning in 2020. We’re six years past that...
For most of the previous century, Californians successfully designed and built big water infrastructure. In sixty years, from 1910 through 1970, we built the most impressive system of interbasin transfers in the world. The Los Angeles Aqueduct, Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct, Colorado River Aqueduct, Delta Mendota Canal, Friant-Kern Canal, and California Aqueduct. Altogether these conveyances are...
California’s entertainment industry doesn’t need another taxpayer-backed “rescue” from Sacramento. It needs the freedom to experiment, compete and succeed without politicians inserting themselves into the middle of the process. In this new California Policy Center report, Lights, Camera, Growth: How Paramount’s Bet on 30 Films a Year Could Propel California’s Economy, economist Jeff Ferry analyzes...
When asked in a recent interview why California has the highest gasoline prices in the nation, Jodie Muller, the President of the Western States Petroleum Association, began by stating the following: “You can’t point a finger at one particular person, because, unfortunately, it is decades of policies layered on top of one another. You have local air...
SAN BERNARDINO, CA — The Chino Valley Unified School District (CVUSD) has filed a motion to dissolve a 2024 court-ordered injunction that blocked the district’s parental notification policy. Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Mirabelli v. Bonta, Chino Valley is going back to court to remove the original injunction against it. In March,...
A bill quietly moving through the Legislature would gut California’s 2013 pension reforms and plunge the state back toward the kind of fiscal crisis that forced lawmakers to enact the Public Employees’ Pension Reform Act (PEPRA) in an effort to stabilize a system that was spiraling out of control. AB 1383 (McKinnor) would expand the...
Why students’ history proficiency goes unmeasured, and how a politicized framework is undermining classroom instruction. California has no reliable way to measure whether students are meeting state history and social studies standards. In Gavin Newsom’s State of the State speech in January 2026, he claimed that California has seen “improved academic achievement in every subject...
Even if the most dire climate scenarios are accurate, and humanity must transition away from fossil fuel, it can’t happen overnight. The rational approach is to first develop alternative sources of energy without precipitously destroying the industries that reliably produce oil and natural gas. Once alternatives are available at a competitive price and in sufficient...
California’s state legislature may succeed in destroying its own oil industry, but it won’t change anything in the world. It will only export jobs and raise the cost-of-living here at home. Here’s a reality check. According to the Statistical Review of World Energy, in 2024, oil, natural gas, and coal contributed 87 percent of the world’s...
Last week, KCRA 3 in Sacramento reported that the Newsom administration’s January budget contained a roughly $2 billion accounting error tied to CalPERS pension contributions. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office flagged the problem in February. Legislative leaders knew. The public didn’t find out until April. The story is genuinely newsworthy, but not for the reason...
Abundance, and its political twin, affordability, are now bipartisan mantras, but cannot be realized if the only permissible avenues are via urban infill, renewable energy, and water rationing. California is uniquely positioned to do much more. Breakthrough technologies and big projects, both pioneered here, could unite a powerful coalition of farmers, energy companies, high tech...