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.
Before Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker became a recall target for his efforts to reform collective bargaining in his state, I was a guest on a Madison radio show discussing the influence of public-sector unions and the significance of the state’s unfunded pension liabilities. Instead of “Wisconsin Nice” – a euphemism for the polite, conflict-avoiding nature...
Democrats and Republicans in the California Legislature once again have broadcast this troubling fact: They are far more concerned about the ever-expanding demands of a relatively small group of public-sector union members than they are about the welfare of the citizens of our state. On May 17, the Assembly voted 68-0 to support the most...
Occupy Wall Street protesters are reminiscent of writer R. Emmett Tyrrell’s criticism of radical feminists: They don’t know what they want, but they want it very badly. On May Day, the protesters tied up the streets of Oakland, San Francisco and elsewhere. They are mad as hell, and they are not going to take it...
A new USC study pointing to a much-slower population growth rate in California has been greeted by demographers and urban planners as good news, in that it supposedly gives our state’s leaders a little breathing room to plan better for the future. The rate of growth has slowed to about 1 percent a year, the...
San Jose union officials are celebrating a decision last week by the Sixth District Court of Appeals, which struck some city-drafted language from a June ballot measure designed to reduce pension benefits for newly hired city workers and require existing workers either to pay more for their current pension plan or switch to a lower-benefit...
California’s public schools continue to lay-off teachers, and the process by which they do this is as convoluted and illogical as one would expect in a bureaucratic system in which the needs of the students falls fairly low on the list of priorities. That’s my take-away from a new report by the state’s Legislative Analyst’s...
Economist Allan Meltzer once quipped that “Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin. It doesn’t work.” Americans have been witnessing this axiom on a broad scale, as government efforts to prop up industries, bail out the financial sector and protect select private businesses from failure have only caused a prolonged financial crisis. Without failure,...
Stockton, Calif., a hard-pressed industrial city of nearly 300,000 people in the agriculturally lush Central Valley 80 miles east of San Francisco, is grabbing national headlines because it might become the largest U.S. city yet to enter Chapter 9 bankruptcy. First, it must go through a 90-day mediation process mandated by a new California law...
In my last column, I documented how California’s pro-union Attorney General Kamala Harris provided an unfair and dishonest title and summary to a pair of pension reform initiatives submitted to her office, thus effectively killing the measures. Last week the unions tried—and almost succeeded—with an even nastier stunt designed to undermine democracy. In San Diego,...
We expect all sides in politics to fight hard, given the stakes involved, but our system rests on the broad acceptance of a set of fairly applied rules. We know, for instance, that no matter how nasty the coming presidential election becomes, the loser ultimately will cede power after the final count is in. This...
Years ago, after starting to report and editorialize on news events in an old factory city in Ohio, I was quickly dubbed a “negative” for pointing out the disastrous government spending, housing and tax policies embraced by city leaders — policies that were keeping a nice place wretched. Anyone who made similar criticisms was dismissed...
Over the summer, the website I edit, CalWatchdog, published a series of articles documenting the way that the political Left exploited the redistricting process in California to assure strong gains for the Democratic Party. The report included an exclusive interview with a redistricting commission member who alleged partisan behavior by his supposedly nonpartisan commission colleagues....
As the public employee pension and health care benefit crisis sweeps across the nation, some states are dealing seriously with these multibillion-dollar threats to public services and treasuries. And other states remain in deep denial. California, to no one’s surprise, is moving stridently in the wrong direction. The tiny state of Rhode Island, for instance,...
To say that the unions have undue influence in the California Legislature, as many critics allege, is to understate the problem. The unions – and the public sector ones in particular – don’t just control the Legislature. They are the Legislature. Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, previously worked as an attorney for a...
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