Tuesday’s election results were ugly. But they may remind old folks and history nuts of 1964, when Barry Goldwater suffered one of the worst defeats in American presidential history. Lyndon Johnson carried California by nearly 1.3 million votes, Democrats controlled Sacramento, and conservatism looked like a political dead end. Two years later, Ronald Reagan –...
In 1968, Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, a neo-Malthusian book that predicted worldwide mass starvation in the near future. Ehrlich was clearly wrong, since the global population is rapidly reaching its peak and, by most accounts, is on track to then rapidly decline. But at the time, Ehrlich conjured an image that...
Last month the UC Santa Barbara Community Labor Center released the results of a public opinion poll wherein a majority of respondents expressed support for floating offshore wind. But here’s a question that might have yielded a different result: “If you learned that the electricity from floating offshore wind would cost significantly more than you...
With elections across the U.S. set for next week, the focus is on close races that will determine which party controls the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, along with who will become the next governor in 36 states. With so much at stake, it is understandable that election outcomes in California are not getting...
With a mission to explore California’s energy and water future, it would be negligent to ignore California’s just released “Fifth Climate Change Assessment.” After all, climate, and its intimate cousin, carbon, are the foundations upon which every energy and water policy and project proposal in the state are evaluated. It may be heretical to say...
Besides making billionaires pay their “fair share”, the case for Proposition 40 revolves around offsetting “catastrophic” federal Medi-Cal cuts. These cuts will likely be reversed by an incoming Democratic Congress, but, regardless, the expected cuts are not as catastrophic as Prop 40 advocates make them out to be. Last September, the campaign that later qualified...
California’s governor tried to outlaw oil production by executive fiat. A state judge has exposed the deception. California Governor Gavin Newsom has spent years making it harder to produce oil in his state, and Californians are picking up the tab in the form of America’s highest gasoline prices. Now a Kern County judge has delivered...
When the one-time money ran out, the city changed neither what it does nor how it does it. “We cannot make payroll next week.” That’s what Ana Cortez, Hollister’s city manager, told her council on October 2. A few days earlier, the city’s general fund bank account was down to $178. To make the October...
Last week, the California Department of Education released CAASPP (state standardized test) results for the 2025-26 school year. While Governor Newsom says the scores are evidence of “continued progress,” the numbers tell a different story. In a continuation of California’s chronically poor academic performance, just under half (49.3 percent) of California public school students scored...
With local tax and bond measures on the ballot across California, voters can use California Policy Center’s Local Fiscal Health Dashboard to examine the financial condition of the local governments asking them for more money. CPC has updated the dashboard with the latest available financial data for fiscal year 2025, assigning each jurisdiction a fiscal...
The state’s lawsuit deserves closer scrutiny. On September 21, I took a long tram ride through Tesla’s factory in Fremont, Calif. It was a marvel for a white-collar kid from the suburbs: helmeted men and women working in partnership amid a Jurassic Park of swinging robot arms inside 3.7 million square feet of industrial space...
Much of the unrest in the United States stems from unaffordability. Across every political contest from California to the East Coast, the affordability playbook is the same: “the cost of living is too high, and the opposition party is to blame.” The first part of this message ought to be beyond serious debate. The cost...
Inspired by the federal DOGE initiative, many state- and locally-focused groups started their own attempts to promote a more efficient government. In February 2025, Carl DeMaio’s Reform California announced a DOGE-inspired effort to audit the state’s spending. The idea predates DOGE. In his 2021 campaign for New York City mayor, Eric Adams promised that “we...
Many think of the League of Women Voters as an unbiased source of voter information. But, in the Bay Area at least, nothing could be further from the truth. LWV Bay Area has received funding from local transit agencies and is earning that support by campaigning on behalf of their $17 billion transit sales tax....