California’s bullet-train may be the state’s most high-profile transportation money-sink, consuming a projected $135 billion with no clear path to the finish line. However, taxpayers shouldn’t overlook the other transit boondoggles torching public funds. Chief among them is Orange County’s 4.15-mile OC Streetcar: proof that you can pour high-speed-rail-style money into a monument to tunnel...
California’s first Fourth of July was celebrated in the rugged hills of present-day San Bernardino, when the region was still under Mexican rule. On that day in 1842, Daniel Sexton, a Louisiana-born carpenter and early American settler, raised an American flag and celebrated Independence Day with an unlikely group: Native Americans of the local Cahuilla...
For the last few decades in California, the conventional wisdom has been that farmers and urban water consumers have to improve efficiency and reduce consumption. To the fullest extent possible, rain and snow falling on watersheds must proceed unimpaired from the mountains to the ocean, and if water is reserved in reservoirs, releases of the...
When it comes to self-congratulatory, performative environmentalism, San Franciscans probably lead the pack. They declared a “climate emergency,” and then, in defiance of a court ruling, they banned natural gas hookups in new buildings. To further their war on personal automotive transportation, they closed Highway One to traffic, a vital north/south thoroughfare. And they’re creating “urban biodiversity” by planting trees and “restoring natural...
Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign has been light on policy specifics, but her political inheritance provides clues. Harris is a creature, after all, of the California political machine. What real-world results has that machine produced? The Golden State still has a powerful economic base, though its government budgets are once again in deficit territory. California’s success,...
As the 2024-25 school year is underway, Californians await the results for last school year’s CAASPP testing. CAASPP (California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress) assessments measure student achievement in the areas of English, math, and science, and are taken in the spring; Results are then publicly released the following fall. The release date for...
Probably the most consequential and controversial water policy decisions in California involve how much water to pump out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and into southbound aqueducts, and we’re in the middle of another one right now. For the last several years, as summer turns to fall, state and federal regulators reduce the amount of...
If you have ever tried to reason with a San Francisco Bay Area progressive liberal, it’s easy to become a pessimist. These implacable fanatics are backed up by trillions of dollars in big tech wealth, along with the most powerful tools of mass hypnosis and Pavlovian conditioning the world has ever seen. If you question...
The governor’s State of the State address — or rather, his pre-recorded speech spliced throughout with a campaign-style video montage — was filled with fact-spitting errors. Let’s consider just a few: HOMELESSNESS: “No state has done as much as California in addressing the pernicious problem of homelessness that too many politicians have ignored for too long.” During his...
Everyone knows the ancient joke about the two exhausted kids walking through a sun-blasted and waterless land. Sunburned and still miles from their destination, they come upon an immense pile of animal manure blocking their path. The boys stop for a moment to consider the obstacle mounded before them – feculent, still (in my telling)...
Gavin Newsom once bragged of a surplus, but California is underwater. While finalizing the upcoming fiscal year’s state budget back in May 2022, California Governor Gavin Newsom boasted of an extraordinary projected surplus: $97 billion. The governor immediately collaborated with an enthusiastic state legislature to spend it all. Of course, new spending on new programs...
A very contentious election season is upon us. To better navigate the deluge of political propaganda, here are a few thoughts about choosing the best candidates who can stand as bulwarks of freedom from those who want to selfishly rule and reign over Californians. A campaign speech can reveal much about the timber of someone...
This month, Governor Newsom released his proposed state budget for 2024-25. The $291.5 billion budget proposal sets aside $76.5 billion in state funds for K-12 education. This amount exceeds the proposed budgeted costs for transportation ($19.55 billion); corrections and rehabilitation ($18.12 billion); general government ($10.68 billion); legislative, judicial, and executive agencies ($10.72 billion); natural resources...
October 19, 2023 Late last month, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order in an attempt to address the insurance crisis in California that’s leaving scores of homeowners without coverage. The executive order comes after State Farm and Allstate, the first and fourth largest home insurers in California, announced this year they would no longer...