This article originally appeared in The American Spectator. Former Clinton-era Labor Secretary Robert Reich, now a public-policy professor at the University of California at Berkeley, has warned that “we are heading back to levels of inequality not seen since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century,” invoking the term applied to a society festering...
This article originally appeared in The Capitol Weekly. Back in 2012, then Treasurer Bill Lockyer called for an early warning system that would give state officials time to proactively address local government fiscal emergencies before they wound up in bankruptcy court. We are now five years closer to the next recession and its attendant set of...
What Hertzberg and big government bureaucrats want to do, however, is to use water rates as another opportunity to engage in social engineering. They wish to charge those water users they perceive as “bad” more per gallon than those users they perceive as “good.” The beauty of “cost of service” rates, however, is that they...
Editor’s Note: This analysis by economic strategist Michael Lebowitz joins three other articles of his that we published last year, all of them warning of unsustainable growth in investments. For over forty years the United States has been on a debt binge, trading long-term, sustainable growth for growth fueled by debt accumulation. In this article, Lebowitz...
In the wake of unrest on the UC Berkeley campus last week, Robert Reich has managed to get himself some fresh national news coverage. Reich served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, and is currently a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Reich made news by suggesting the rioters who forced cancellation...
Editor’s Note: In a previous article, we explained why projected greenhouse gas emission savings from California’s High-Speed Rail project are overstated. The High-Speed Rail Authority’s Environmental Impact Review is based on inflated ridership numbers and does not take into account automotive emission savings that will arise from the transition to electric vehicles. Here, Mark Powell...
Cronyism is alive and well in San Francisco Fourteen months have passed since San Francisco voters passed Prop J, the establishment of a Legacy Business Historic Preservation Fund. This is a government-sponsored grant program devised by then-Supervisor David Campos to help traditional San Francisco businesses keep their doors amidst rising costs. We recently checked the...
Governor Brown, California Attorney General Becerra, legislative and other government officials are fixated on battling the new administration in Washington with almost total disregard for California’s major problems and unmet needs. Failure to address these pressing problems threatens the viability of a state whose status is rapidly being transformed from “golden” to “tarnished.” To help...
In a January 2017 study we estimated that California state and local governments owe $1.3 trillion as of June 30, 2015. Our analysis was based on a review of federal, state and local financial disclosures. This debt equals about 52% of California’s Gross State Product of $2.5 trillion and does not include the substantial cost...
Earlier today the California Policy Center released a study that provided facts about government compensation. It examined state and local payroll data provided online by the California State Controller and proved that the average pay and benefits for a full-time state/local government employee in 2015 was $121,843. At the same time, the study found that the average...
According to the high speed rail authority’s website, the bullet train is expected to reduce CO2 emissions by just over one million metric tons annually by 2040. This reduction is supposed to be achieved by replacing almost 10 million miles of motor vehicle travel each day, and eliminating between 93 and 171 daily flights. But...
Editor’s Note: Anyone who thinks the drought is NOT over should read this weather blog – more authoritative than ANYTHING coming out of the mainstream press. View the graphics, all of them from official sources, depicting California’s current (1) percentage of normal precipitation, (2) soil moisture, (3) streamflow, (4) Sierra snowpack, (5) “Palmer drought index”,...
California has a reputation for fiscal mismanagement, so I was surprised to see several Golden State cities at the top of a city financial strength ranking I recently compiled for The Fiscal Times. The fact that California has some judicious public agencies does not necessarily negate the fact that, taken as a whole, the state’s...
A just released study calculates the total state and local government debt in California as of June 30, 2015, at over $1.3 trillion. Authored by Marc Joffe and Bill Fletcher at the California Policy Center, this updates a similar exercise from three years ago that put the June 30, 2012 total at $1.1 trillion. As...