with minor leagues and pre-election financial support networks Elected officials start out on financial support, long before they’re elected. Here’s one example to show how it works. In 2018, the ACLU of Southern California filed a class action lawsuit against Riverside County, alleging that a county program to intervene in the lives of at-risk youth was oppressive...
Bryan is also sponsoring a bill to gut California’s 112-year-old initiative and referendum process so voters no longer have veto power over California’s Democrat-controlled legislature. It isn’t hard to figure out who controls everything Assemblyman Isaac Bryan does in the California State Legislature. In the November 2022 election, every single one of the first 29 of...
California’s state government is spending twice as much as it did a decade ago, and by every metric that matters to ordinary Californians, things have only gotten worse. Even without further analysis, this is an incredible fact. California’s state government, in constant dollars, is spending nearly twice as much per resident as it did a...
There is only one answer to this question: Public sector unions. Anyone who argues otherwise is either misinformed or has a personal or professional motivation to delude themselves and others. Before offering evidence of the financial power of public sector unions, consider the power these unions wield that is not explicitly financial. These unions operate...
Investigating the relationship between stressed public finances and rising misdemeanor fines and penalties By Reiss Becker, David Vasquez, Zane Zovak BACKGROUND California Policy Center analysts have documented the state’s collapsing public finances over the past few decades – not just the rising level of public debt, but the subsequent effects of crumbling infrastructure, slashed government...
When government fails, public-sector unions win. When society fragments, public-sector unions consolidate their power. When citizenship itself becomes less meaningful, and the benefits of American citizenship wither, government unions offer an exclusive solidarity. Government unions insulate their members from the challenges facing ordinary private citizens. On every major issue of our time; globalization, immigration, climate...
Class conflict: Santa Ana schools are spending more and more on fewer students. (U.S. Air Force file photo) School officials in California’s sixth-largest school district are working overtime to promote a massive $1.2 billion bond tentatively scheduled for a districtwide vote in November. Yet behind their chatter about improving Santa Ana Unified facilities is a...
Sacramento — In its argument in the U.S. Supreme Court’s Janus case, which challenges the right of unions to collect union dues for collective-bargaining purposes, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees argues that collective bargaining is not inherently political. But the plaintiff Mark Janus, an Illinois state employee, argues that everything a...
Sacramento – In the seven years since Gov. Jerry Brown shut down California’s redevelopment agencies, their defenders have managed to resuscitate their image. Never mind that these controversial agencies ladled out corporate welfare, wantonly abused eminent domain on behalf of developers and diverted $5 billion annually from public services. A new bill would bring them...
Have you experienced water faucets that spray tiny jets of water onto your hands? You know, those eight tiny jets of water, each about 1.0 millimeter in diameter, that are emitted with so much pressure that the paltry quantity of water bounces off your skin before you can get it wet enough to apply soap,...
As the ethnic composition of America changes from mostly white to a kaleidoscope of color within a generation, there is no better way to fracture society than to teach everyone to resent everyone else. Nurturing tribal resentment is a winning strategy for government unions, because a swollen, authoritarian, unionized government becomes the referee. Government union...
“A public employer shall provide all public employees an orientation and shall permit the exclusive representative, if applicable, to participate.” – Excerpt from California State Assembly Bill AB 52, December 2016 In plain English, AB 52 requires every local government agency in California to bring union representatives into contact with every new hire, to “allow...
A story that still makes the rounds in Sacramento is that Governor Jerry Brown, speaking off-the-record to a group of business leaders back around 2009, admitted that the worst political decision of his life was signing legislation to permit public employees to form unions and engage in collective bargaining. Whether or not Governor Brown actually...
Last week the California Policy Center released a new study that compared the average full-career government pension to the average annual earnings of a full-time private sector worker. Not surprisingly, at least for anyone paying attention, ex-government workers make 26% more than people make in the private sector who are still working. The average government...