Jon Coupal is the president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.
Editor’s Note: For a summary of how state legislators may be prevented by law from increasing taxes any further, this article by Jon Coupal is as good as any. In a nutshell, Prop. 4 (the “Gann Limit”), passed in 1979, then modified by Prop. 111, passed in 1990, limits increases in state and local spending...
By Jon Coupal
Editor’s Note: In this article, author Jon Coupal describes most of the problems with California’s “Secure Choice” pension plan for private sector workers, but he omits a big one: The plan is designed using realistic financial assumptions, i.e., relatively high contribution rates and relatively low rate-of-return assumptions, and a very modest retirement benefit formula. Put another...
By Jon Coupal
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...
By Jon Coupal
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...
By Jon Coupal
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”,...
By Jon Coupal
Governor Brown has just released his spending proposal for 2017-18 and taxpayers should not be blamed if they feel like they are walking down a dark alley in a high-crime neighborhood. While the governor’s proposed budget has been described as austere, it still represents a spending boost of five percent, a rate of increase only...
By Jon Coupal
Editor’s Note: Back in the early years of the 21st century, when California’s tech sector had collapsed and the stock market was down sharply, local government budgets were so strapped that they started closing their offices on Fridays, and applied “furloughs” to their employees to save money. But no public worker took an actual pay...
By Jon Coupal
Editor’s note: During 2015 the average pay and benefits for a full time state worker in California was $104,867. County workers averaged $108,856, and city workers averaged $121,430. These averages do NOT include members of public safety. The 2015 average pay and benefits for full time state highway patrol and corrections employees was $136,828, for county...
By Jon Coupal
Human beings prefer freedom to collectivism and tyranny. Only those in complete denial disregard the negative consequences of policies that suppress liberty. Consider North Korea versus South Korea. And recall that in Berlin during the Cold War era, people weren’t shot trying to go from West to East – not that anyone tried anyway. Finally,...
By Jon Coupal
The usual suspects are digging deep into their pockets to make sure that California’s borrowing binge remains unchecked. Contractors, unions and bond houses that benefit from state debt are contributing millions to defeat Proposition 53, the Stop Blank Checks initiative. This straightforward proposal simply requires voter approval of state issued construction bonds larger than $2...
By Jon Coupal
With all the state and local taxes on the November ballot, one would think that government at all levels in California was starved for revenue. But even a cursory review of the Golden State’s “tax machine” reveals that the tax burden is already too heavy for many to bear. California has the highest income rate...
By Jon Coupal
The Legislature is in adjournment, and with lawmakers at home campaigning for reelection, they are unable to engage in their favorite pastime of undermining Proposition 13 and its protections for California taxpayers. However, this time out is only a brief respite from the Sacramento politicians’ inexorable pursuit of taxpayers’ wallets, the ferocity of which matches...
By Jon Coupal
Election month is rapidly approaching. That’s right, “election month” because, since 2002, California voters have been freed from casting ballots in person on the official Election Day, which this year is November 8. Voting by mail begins October 10. Polls show that many voters are disenchanted with the coming election because the major candidates for...
By Jon Coupal
Editor’s Note: This article by Jon Coupal provides an update on what has to be one of the biggest con jobs ever perpetrated on California’s voters – “High Speed Rail” that will never make a profit, will never move significant numbers of people, will not even be “high speed” in many sections of track, cannot...
By Jon Coupal