Steven Greenhut is a contributing editor for the California Policy Center. He is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.
Sacramento Legislators announced a budget deal last week that spends a record $125 billion in the general fund. But most interesting isn’t what’s in the deal, but what isn’t. There’s plenty of new spending, of course, but not so much that it outpaces the rate of inflation. There are controversial “trailer” bills that attempt to...
Sacramento On first blush, the latest effort by Gov. Jerry Brown and Democratic legislators to give public-employee unions access to public agencies to hold “orientation” seminars with new hires is an unfair special privilege not normally provided to private groups. It’s even more disturbing that the legislation authorizing such access is being rammed through the...
Sacramento — If you ever wondered what’s wrong with California’s state government, then mull over this simple example: While California cuts its prison population and staff, it’s increasing the amount of money it spends to operate its massive prison system. In the private sector, a decline in the number of “customers” and workers would mean...
Sacramento — News reports last week suggest the city of Oakland may be ready to settle a civil lawsuit filed by the teenage woman at the heart of a sex-abuse scandal that rocked Oakland’s and other nearby police departments since 2015. All things considered, the city is fortunate. The reported settlement is just under $1...
Sacramento — Supporters of charter schools, homeschooling and other forms of school “choice” are so used to fighting in the trenches against the state’s muscular teachers’ unions that they often forget how much progress they’ve made in the last decade or so. Recent events have shown the degree of progress, even if they still face...
The Brown administration decided to (kind of, sort of) tackle the state’s massive and growing level of unfunded liabilities – i.e., the hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer-backed debt to fund retirement promises made to the state’s government employees. It’s best to curb our enthusiasm, however. The governor didn’t have much of a choice.
SACRAMENTO – California Democrats prattle endlessly about helping the working poor, but their latest vote against a bill that would tangibly help financially struggling people shows that Democratic leaders are more interested in serving their real constituencies: state bureaucracies, public-sector unions and the interest groups that want to keep out the competition. The latest example involves...
SACRAMENTO – Over the past six years, California legislators and the governor have increased overall general-fund spending by $36 billion but couldn’t find extra money to spend on road, freeway and other meat-and-potatoes transportation projects. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t spending money like drunken brakemen on myriad rail-related projects. Sacramento’s transportation focus has been...
Sacramento – Tens of thousands of people marched in hundreds of cities last week as part of something billed as the March for Science. The event, which coincided with Earth Day, was meant to rebuke the Trump administration’s global-warming skepticism and its plan to cut taxpayer funding for the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies...
If you’re wondering how far unions and the California officials will go to kill any reform of the state’s overburdened public pension system, wonder no more: consider instead the final chapter, last week, in a state agency’s long-running effort to invalidate San Diego’s 2012 citywide vote to reform pensions. The good news: a California appeals court rejected the...
California Democrats have in recent years complained bitterly about alleged voter intimidation by Republicans and have even gone as far as opening a “voter intimidation hotline” before the Nov. 4 election. Staffed by attorneys, the hotline would answer legal questions by voters who believed that Donald Trump supporters were trying to squelch their vote. Evidence...
Gov. Jerry Brown and Democratic legislators have caused a stir with their plan to increase taxes to pay for the state’s unquestionably decrepit infrastructure of roads and bridges. Instead of thinking of this as a new transportation tax, however, Californians should see it as a pension tax, given the extra money plugs a hole caused...
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...
When Vallejo, California was facing bankruptcy, pension reformers warned officials there that unless the city takes the opportunity to trim back pensions for current employees that it would soon be back in the fiscal tank. One official there said the city didn’t want to take on the politically powerful California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS),...
a new form will got here