On Tuesday, March 5, the residents of Los Angeles went to the polls to vote on Proposition A, the PERMANENT half cent increase that will raise our sales tax to a whopping 9½%, one of the highest rates in the nation. This ballot measure, rushed to the ballot in less than two weeks without any...
One early December morning, Las Vegas police moved in on the Silverton Hotel and Casino, just off the Strip and known for its 117,000-gallon aquarium. There, having located a getaway black Audi with no license plates, they arrested 31-year-old Ka Pasasouk—a Laotian immigrant with a violent history who had eluded deportation as well as imprisonment....
Last week the California Public Policy Center published a study assessing the impact of new regulations issued by the Government Accounting Standards Board. The new ruling will require public entities to recognize unfunded pension liabilities on their balance sheets. This is a major reform. But it points to a larger issue. California’s state and local...
Individuals who oppose comprehensive and fundamental reform of public employee compensation can only be considered to be in denial. Almost every government agency in the country is going broke right now. Almost all are cutting back services and reducing staff. Government is diminishing at the state and local levels before our very eyes. Our streets...
Last month writers were all aglow on the state of finances in California. For example … The Christian Science Monitor reported Surprise! California has a budget surplus Reuters reported California Governor’s budget has surprise: a surplus Accounting Anomaly Today we learn the surprise $5-billion bump in revenue in January is likely an accounting anomaly as...
“Apres moi le deluge” Louis XV If accounting standards were peasants with pitchforks, then this quote from the last King of France to die with a head on his shoulders might well describe what lies before us. Because history may remember 2013 as the last year that public entities could hide their debts and deceive...
In the classic “sword vs. gun” scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones encounters a massive assassin ominously wielding a three-foot sword. We all remember Indy taking pause, shrugging, grabbing his pistol and killing his adversary with one shot. Simple. Effective. In the ongoing Illinois pension saga, Gov. Pat Quinn and the incoming...
One of the more astute observers of public sector union impact on government policy and government budgets is Steven Malanga, a senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute. In an article just published in City Journal entitled “The Pension Fund That Ate California,” Malanga recounts the history of CalPERS from its modest inception in 1932 to...
Here’s an interesting email from John Tillman at the Illinois Policy Institute, a non-partisan watchdog of the ongoing mess in Illinois. Tillman’s source is an excellent article on Illinois Review written by Ben VanMetre, a Senior Budget and Tax Policy Analyst at the Illinois Policy Institute. Please consider a repost of Quinn’s Illinois: regulations and...
California’s modern-day progressive Democrats keep crowing about the huge success they’ve had in taming the state’s budget deficit, thanks to Proposition 30’s tax increases and other “reforms,” and now are championing the Jerry Brown model as a blueprint for the nation. Is that realistic? It’s one thing that other states have to deal with our...
Editor’s Note: In this report by Mike Shedlock, which provides details from the recent Texas State Comptroller’s report entitled “Your Money and Local Debt,” you can see that in Texas, state and local government total outstanding debt combined equals $233.2 billion, which equates to nearly $9,000 for each and every one of the 26 million...
Federal, state and local governments have generated millions of pages of unreadable prose laying out rules and regulations and asserting their authority over our lives. But the whole nation began with a Declaration of only about 1,300 well-chosen words—and perhaps the most important are the words that say governments derive their powers “from the consent...
Gov. Jerry Brown continues to pose as an iconoclast who is willing to make the tough choices necessary to keep California afloat, but his new budget is more evidence that he remains the cat’s-paw for the state’s public-sector unions. “I want to advance the progressive agenda,” Brown said at the news conference unveiling his supposedly...
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” ― George Orwell, 1984 The two largest public employee pension funds in California, CalPERS and CalSTRS, logged annual returns for their fiscal years ending June 30th, 2012, of 0.14% and 1.8%, respectively. These pension funds employ an...