A few years ago, former US Senator Phil Gramm published a book that offers important insights into the status of low-income communities in the United States. Titled “The Myth of American Inequality” and scrupulously researched, the book evaluates U.S. household income by quintiles. It concludes that the bottom quintile (the lowest 20 percent) actually has...
Daniel Lurie’s moderate promises clash with a city drowning in ideological dysfunction. Can he deliver, or will the status quo swallow him up? A City Choking on Its Own Excess San Francisco has always fancied itself a laboratory for progressive ideas. This is a place where progressive theory gets its field test, often with little...
California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed a “landmark package of bills” to overhaul the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). He took the unusual step of holding up the budget until the Legislature passed them. For the blissfully uninitiated, CEQA, signed in 1970 by Gov. Ronald Reagan, is California’s gift to litigators, bureaucrats and every special interest that...
California’s “disaster recovery” plan isn’t about rebuilding homes—it’s about replacing homeowners with tenants and handing their land to corporate-government cartels. Remember Gavin Newsom’s first visit to the sites of devastating fires last January in Los Angeles, when he vowed to streamline California’s paralytic regulations so people could quickly rebuild their homes? In that interview, while...
On July 1st, Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation that he hailed as “the most game-changing housing reforms in recent California history.” The bills, bundled into a budget trailer package, include selective exemptions from California’s destructive environmental law, CEQA — a bureaucratic nightmare widely blamed for strangling housing development and deepening the state’s affordability crisis. But...
You would have to dig into the fine print of legislation signed yesterday to see how non-union business owners and workers got screwed, again. If A Tree Falls In The Forest And No One Hears It – Did It Make A Noise? What we witnessed yesterday afternoon should alarm every Californian who values free enterprise...
California’s governor tries — and fails — to blame the state’s homelessness epidemic on someone, anyone else. Confronting yet another calamitous state budget deficit, California Governor Gavin Newsom took time last week to blast the real public enemies: Donald Trump and someone called Amy Bublak. You know Trump. His tariffs have indeed produced volatility in the stock...
Presiding over the decline of California’s public schools ain’t enough, so California schools chief Tony Thurmond wants to enter the real estate game, building 2.3 million homes on public land for the benefit of teachers. He’ll fail in that endeavor. But building millions of homes for teachers isn’t really Thurmond’s goal. His real purpose in...
California could make a major dent in its homelessness problem merely by reversing some of its most destructive policies. Half of America’s so-called unsheltered homeless live in California. It’s not hard to understand why. Along with having the most hospitable weather on earth, California is a welcoming place for drug addicts, petty thieves, and anyone else attracted...
We’ve seen Gov. Gavin Newsom impose questionable — even dangerous and illegal — policies by declaring states of emergency or merely “crisis” with regard to Covid, climate and energy. He’s done it again on the issue of housing. The problems of housing affordability and homelessness constitute a crisis so compelling, the governor says, that they...
Earlier this month a guest column in San Jose Spotlight defended efforts by homeless nonprofits to end homelessness in Santa Clara County. The author, Ray Bramson, is Chief Impact Officer at the nonprofit “Destination Home,” a tax exempt organization that collected over $62 million in contributions and grants in 2020. The CEO of this organization made a reported $335,404 in that...
The Recall Gavin campaign appears on track to gather just over 2.0 million signed recall petitions before their March 17 deadline. If there is a special election, the recall ballot will have two questions. The first will be “do you support removing Newsom from office, yes or no?” The second question, on the same ballot,...