It isn’t a partisan observation to say that California is a one-party state. It’s just stating a fact. The Democratic Party controls all the levers of political power in California. Consider the evidence: GOP registration is down to 23 percent of registered voters. There is a Democratic “mega-majority” (75% or more) in both chambers of the...

With Friends Like These: How Local Officials can end corporate welfare and unleash markets to create prosperity in California communities

Should the government spend money to benefit private companies? Should the government spend money to influence voters? In California, they do this all the time. There are laws specifically written to prevent this, but they are undermined by aggressive exploitation of loopholes combined with lax enforcement. And to be fair, genuine ambiguity often makes it...

A new union-sponsored study lowballs today’s pension costs by around two-thirds and overstates the net costs of corporate welfare. The Washington Post’s Lydia DePillis recently reported on a new union-sponsored study from Good Jobs First that claims that corporate welfare payments from state governments dwarf the costs of public employee pensions. To begin, we shouldn’t take this corporate welfare/public...