Later this month, we should hear some rare good news from CalPERS. Portfolio returns for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2017 may exceed 10%. The strong performance on the back of Donald Trump’s bull market that many think has ended may provide a respite for state and local governments struggling with increased pension contributions....
Across California, many local governments have raised taxes while cutting services. Local officials desperate for union support have made irresponsible deals with public employee unions, creating staggering employee costs. Taxpayer money meant to provide essential services to the least well-off instead goes directly to higher salaries and benefits. In Santa Barbara County, the 2017-2018 budget...
Mainstream media are taking a short break from their 24/7 Trump-Russia conspiracy theorizing to bash the Senate Republican healthcare proposal. Viewers are being told that the proposal would gut Medicaid and kill thousands. Like any piece of complex legislation, the Senate bill is far from perfect, but it is an important step in the right direction...
It is easy to see how tightly the state micromanages our lives and businesses. Our high tax burden, powerful unions, government debt, and overbearing regulations all speak to California’s low economic freedom. Whether one examines the United States, California, or each of its counties, Californians live in an economic prison. Country Freedom The United States...
California State Senate passage of an especially bad single payer health care bill earlier this month is testimony to the economic and fiscal illiteracy of RoseAnn DeMoro, the California Nurses Association leader who is pushing this bill through the legislature. DeMoro makes over $350,000 per year ostensibly to protect nurse’s salaries and benefits, but she...
Sacramento Legislators announced a budget deal last week that spends a record $125 billion in the general fund. But most interesting isn’t what’s in the deal, but what isn’t. There’s plenty of new spending, of course, but not so much that it outpaces the rate of inflation. There are controversial “trailer” bills that attempt to...
The state Senate’s vote to pass Ricardo Lara’s single-payer healthcare bill last week was a singular act of fiscal malpractice. By failing to control costs and access to the program – and by leaving unanswered how or whether federal funds could be leveraged – Lara’s Healthy California Act amounts to a blank check for hospitals,...
California’s state legislature is poised to pass two bills that will have profound effects on citizens’ rights to obtain documents from their governments under the California Public Records Act. One is a step forward for citizens (AB 1479) and one is a step backward (AB 1455). AB 1479 passed the Assembly by a vote of...
At last week’s budget press conference, Governor Jerry Brown warned of the threat of a recession and the risk to California’s budget from federal health care legislation, but the details of his 2017-18 budget plans failed to mirror his cautionary rhetoric.
The Brown administration decided to (kind of, sort of) tackle the state’s massive and growing level of unfunded liabilities – i.e., the hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer-backed debt to fund retirement promises made to the state’s government employees. It’s best to curb our enthusiasm, however. The governor didn’t have much of a choice.
Climb into a time machine with me and voyage back to Dec. 8, 2016. A slightly younger Barack H. Obama is still the nation’s president. Four weeks after his electoral shock therapy, President-elect Donald Trump has just been named Time magazine’s Person of the Year. And the California Policy Center has filed a state public...
SACRAMENTO – California Democrats prattle endlessly about helping the working poor, but their latest vote against a bill that would tangibly help financially struggling people shows that Democratic leaders are more interested in serving their real constituencies: state bureaucracies, public-sector unions and the interest groups that want to keep out the competition. The latest example involves...
C alifornia school and community college districts are contributing $5.6 billion to CalSTRS and CalPERS during the current school year. These contributions will total $6.7 billion in the next school year, and, according to CPC’s analysis of actuarial projections, they will reach $11.3 billion in the 2022-2023 school year. In 2015-2016, CalPERS and CalSTRS collected...
For the last few years, using data provided by the watchdog organization CalTax, we have summarized the results of local bond and tax proposals appearing on the California ballot. Nearly all of them are approved by voters, and this past November was no exception. With only a couple of measures still too close to call,...