Will Swaim is president of the California Policy Center. A journalist for nearly three decades, he began by covering international business in 1990, was founding editor and publisher of Village Voice Media’s OC (Orange County) Weekly, and editor of Watchdog.org, a national network of investigative reporters. Will graduated summa cum laude (in journalism and with honors in theology) from the University of Southern California. He earned an MA in history from UC Irvine where he was a California Regents Fellow. A seventh-generation Californian, he has written extensively about California business, media, politics and religion, and is the winner of several print journalism awards and a Southern California Broadcasters Golden Mike award for public affairs commentary. With CPC board member David Bahnsen, he hosts National Review’s Radio Free California podcast. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, LA Daily News, the San Diego Union-Tribune, Orange County Register, the Wall Street Journal, New York Post and National Review.
Will Swaim is president of the California Policy Center. To contact Will, email him at will@calpolicycenter.org. You can also follow him on Twitter @WillSwaim.
Money in politics has been a recurrent theme in this election cycle. Campaign finance reform advocates, mainstream media and certain candidates have repeatedly driven home the idea that corporations and rich conservatives are biasing the political process by making big-money donations, often without disclosure. Much of the narrative – advanced by authors such as New...
By Will Swaim
For Immediate Release July 18, 2016 California Policy Center Contact: Will Swaim Will@CalPolicyCenter.org (714) 573-2231 California Policy Center Responses to Monday, July 18, 2016 Earnings Report For reporters and commentary writers, the California Policy Center can make available two public finance experts. We also offer for publication these immediate responses to the CalPERS report: ED...
By Will Swaim
For Immediate Publication July 18, 2016 California Policy Center Contact: Will Swaim Will@CalPolicyCenter.org (714) 573-2231 Latest earnings report is more evidence California retirement agency will reform or die By Ed Ring | California Policy Center The officials who run California’s public-employee retirement system should have released today’s earnings report with sound effects – a flugelhorn, maybe,...
By Will Swaim
What started in Stanton, California as an anomaly is spreading quickly across North Orange County – the push to create local sales taxes in order to pay off the rising pay and benefits of public employees. Stanton voters passed a one-percent sales tax in 2014, giving residents in one of OC’s poorest cities the county’s...
By Will Swaim
CHAPTER 1: PIGS (ala Portugal, Italy, Greece & Spain) In March 2011, facing a $4 million deficit, panicked Stanton City Council members met in special session and voted unanimously, dramatically to declare a fiscal emergency. It was the sort of thing we’d been hearing from Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain for months—a government’s tax revenues...
By Will Swaim
Downtown Stanton, 1913: More innocent times. STANTON, Calif. – It was a Wednesday afternoon in early March, a more innocent time in Stanton, California. Gathered in the community center of the Plaza Pine Estates, we were like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden before they ate the apple that gave them a second-grader’s...
By Will Swaim
Kobe lives here – the NBA star, not the beef, though that’s often what’s starring for dinner. And Gwen Stefani grew up here. Orange County has the NHL Ducks and baseball’s weirdly named Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. Television has honored this place (and mocked it) with Arrested Development, Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County,...
By Will Swaim
Stanton city officials have taken to the streets to fight a November ballot measure that would repeal the city’s one-year-old sales tax. In 37 community meetings and in a stream of communications from City Hall, officials tell residents the tax is essential to the city’s survival – and that its victory at the polls in...
By Will Swaim
Stanton has become the stage for a political brawl: in one corner, city officials and the public employee union leaders who backed the measure to give Stanton – Orange County’s smallest city and one of its poorest – the county’s highest sales tax; in the other, residents and business owners working to repeal Measure GG,...
By Will Swaim
a new form will got here