Edward Ring is the director of water and energy policy for the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. He is also a senior fellow with the Center for American Greatness, and a regular contributor to the California Globe. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, National Review, City Journal, and other media outlets. Ring’s undergraduate degree is in Political Science from UC Davis, and he has an MBA in Finance from USC. Ring is the author of several books, including “Fixing California – Abundance, Pragmatism, Optimism” (2021), “The Abundance Choice – Our Fight for More Water in California” (2022), and “Solutions – Innovative Public Policy for California” (2024).
They are overshadowed by one of the most tumultuous Presidential primary campaigns in decades, but California’s June 7th primary ballot has local tax and bond proposals in numbers that, in aggregate, ought to be generating vigorous public debate. Next week voters will be asked to approve 46 local bond measures totaling $6.18 billion in new debt, along...
By Edward Ring
Financialization – “a pattern of accumulation in which profit making occurs increasingly through financial channels rather than through trade and commodity production.” – Greta Krippner, University of Michigan (source Wikipedia) If you want one word to describe the biggest threat to the American economy, “financialization” would be the prime candidate. This is a threat that...
By Edward Ring
Imagine for a moment that two premises are beyond serious debate: (1) That there will be another financial crisis within the next five years that will equal or exceed the severity of the one experienced in 2009, and (2) That the political power of public safety unions will prevent local governments from enacting pension reforms...
By Edward Ring
When the next market downturn hits, every public employee pension fund in the United States will face severe challenges. Because public employee pension funds are not subject to the same rules that private pension funds have to adhere to – namely, the restrictions on risky investments as specified in the federal Employee Retirement Income Security...
By Edward Ring
It came as a shock to learn that some of those who were around when unions first started infiltrating local and state governments actually welcomed the process. These were the days when unions were driving jobs overseas because of their unwillingness to negotiate new contracts in the face of foreign competition. “Let them come,” some...
By Edward Ring
Remember Bell, California? Back in 2010 the Los Angeles Times reported that Bell city officials were receiving unusually large salaries, perhaps the highest in the United States. For example, Robert Rizzo, the City manager, had received $787,637. By September of that year, as reported on CNN, the California Attorney General filed charges against eight former and current city officials....
By Edward Ring
The City of Stanton contracts with Orange County for public safety services. Like many cities in Orange County, and in an arrangement that is typical of many small cities in California, it makes financial sense for the city to pay the county in exchange for an allocation of police and firefighters who protect the citizens...
By Edward Ring
If someone told you that they were going to invest their money, but if that money didn’t earn enough interest, they were going to take your money to make up the difference, would you think that was fair? When it comes to pensions for local government workers, that’s what’s happening all over California. San Jose’s...
By Edward Ring
In a move of breathtaking hypocrisy, California’s legislators have unveiled a financially sustainable retirement security program for private workers, while keeping financially unsustainable pensions for public workers. What private sector employers and private sector workers need to ask, more than anything, is if this new retirement security scheme is so great, why aren’t public employees going...
By Edward Ring
California’s minimum wage is set to rise to $15/hour over the next six years. While this topic has been beat to death, it is seldom pointed out that the inflation-adjusted minimum wage, based on 78 years of precedent, at most should only be around $10 per hour. A recent UnionWatch post “Raise the Minimum Wage, or...
By Edward Ring
Rolling back the power of government unions in a state like California is almost impossible. Their power has been unchallenged for so long that they now virtually control the state legislature, and their grip on local politicians extends to nearly every city, county, school district and special district. But there have been reforms in some...
By Edward Ring
Everyone supports public safety, but conservatives are a special case. In modern times, it was conservatives, reacting against the rebellious sixties and the lawless seventies, who supported law enforcement when it was fashionable for liberals to see them as pawns of a discredited establishment. It was also during the 1960’s and ’70’s that we saw public...
By Edward Ring
During the industrial age, labor unions played a vital role in protecting the rights of workers. Skeptics may argue that enlightened management played an equally if not greater role, such as when Henry Ford famously raised the wages of his workers so they could afford to buy the cars they made, but few would argue...
By Edward Ring
California’s civil infrastructure was once the envy of the nation. During the 1950’s and 1960’s the state wisely invested in transportation, water and power infrastructure, delivering capacity well in excess of the needs of the state’s population at the time. Even today, the scale of California’s network of aqueducts and pumping stations to transfer water...
By Edward Ring
a new form will got here