On June 9th Reuters ran a story entitled “California’s Brown set for fight over pension reform” that has some interesting quotes from his Democratic counterparts in the state legislature. According to the article, Warren Furutani, an assembly member representing Long Beach. who co-heads a joint committee that will craft pension legislation, had this to say:...
California, like Greece is perpetually in fiscal trouble. Overoptimistic revenue forecasts coupled with spending $2 billion more than expected has California in a deep hole. Governor Jerry Brown has the same non-solution as ever, hike taxes. Brown wants a “temporary” (as in seven years) tax hike. Given we all know there are no such things...
A new USC study pointing to a much-slower population growth rate in California has been greeted by demographers and urban planners as good news, in that it supposedly gives our state’s leaders a little breathing room to plan better for the future. The rate of growth has slowed to about 1 percent a year, the...
Governor Pat Quinn rammed through the largest tax hikes in Illinois history last year. On January 13, 2011, Governor Pat Quinn signed off on a 67% hike in personal income taxes and a 46% hike in corporate taxes. The result is not what the governor thought. Businesses have fled, more have threatened to leave and...
The proverbial can will rust away to nothing if it is kicked often enough. That is what Police in Stockton, California have found out and that is what the pensioners in the entire Illinois retirement system will soon find out. Stockton Can Suspend Police Accrued Vacation Payouts A California Superior Court Judge says Stockton Can...
Editor’s Note: In this report Mike Shedlock references an acknowledgment by the state of Illinois that their best current estimate of the underfunding of their state employee retirement obligations is $137 billion. That’s just the underfunded portion, not the amount of the entire liability. But what is even more staggering is the fact that Illinois...
Last August, Big Labor attempted to undue Governor Scott Walker’s initiative to cure Wisconsin’s massive debt, incurred as a result of years of Big Labor collective bargaining gone wild. The plan was to hold recall elections on six state Senate Republicans in order to regain the majority in the Wisconsin senate, but the plan failed...
Distressed cities are finally doing what they should have been doing long ago, declaring bankruptcy to force concessions from public unions. Numbers are still a trickle, but at soon as a major city such as Oakland or LA selects that option, we will likely see a torrent of municipal bankruptcies. At a packed, two-day conference...
I am pleased to report the end of collective bargaining at the national level. Unfortunately, I am talking about the UK, not the US, and also unfortunately, local wage bargaining will remain in place. The Telegraph reports National pay rates will be scrapped in budget. Millions of teachers, nurses, civil servants and other public sector...
Many scholars are better versed on the history of public employee unions than I am, but there is one credential I can claim that they cannot: I am a taxpayer in the People’s Republic of New Jerseystan. That makes me an authority on how public sector unions—especially at the state and local level—are thwarting economic...
Economist Allan Meltzer once quipped that “Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin. It doesn’t work.” Americans have been witnessing this axiom on a broad scale, as government efforts to prop up industries, bail out the financial sector and protect select private businesses from failure have only caused a prolonged financial crisis. Without failure,...
California Tax Revenue Plunges Inquiring minds have noticed a huge plunge in California Tax Revenue for the month of February compared to February 2011. That is a 22.55% plunge in spite of the fact that this February was a leap year adding a day to the calendar. Madeline Schnapp, at TrimTabs Investment Research sent me...
Stockton, Calif., a hard-pressed industrial city of nearly 300,000 people in the agriculturally lush Central Valley 80 miles east of San Francisco, is grabbing national headlines because it might become the largest U.S. city yet to enter Chapter 9 bankruptcy. First, it must go through a 90-day mediation process mandated by a new California law...
In the worst possible form of kicking the can down the road, at the worst possible time as well (given the lofty overvalued condition of the stock market), To Pay New York Pension Fund, Cities Borrow From It First. When New York State officials agreed to allow local governments to use an unusual borrowing plan...