Archive for May, 2011
More Evidence Proposition Reform is Needed
May 31st
With California’s legislature barely breaking into double digits in favorables, it’s not easy to make an argument for stripping the people of their power to make their own laws through propositions and overturn unpopular laws through referendums. But then a couple proposed propositions come along that make compelling arguments for reform.
That’s the gist of my latest “Crazifornia” piece in the Daily Caller, which ran this morning. Here’s the intro:
California’s system of initiatives, referendums and recalls, which started nearly a century ago as a defiant act of progressivism under the mantra of “people power,” has performed pretty much as one would expect. It’s brought the system to its knees.
Fiscally, propositions have given the people control over as much as 80 percent of the state’s budget, which has made balancing budgets impossible. Legally, propositions have been a boon for the trial lawyers who write them and then fleece any corporation that runs afoul of their arcane, ever-changing provisions. And morally — well, morally, California is doing all right, having remarkably held back propositions to legalize gay marriage and marijuana, even if more voters voted for legal pot than voted for Meg Whitman, the 2010 Republican candidate for governor. Still, most conservatives in the state feel a pro-gay marriage proposition eventually will prevail, and advocates for legal pot say the loss in California was a victory, making the issue mainstream and opening the door for future activism here and in other states.
Last week, news came of two new initiative drives, one statewide and one in San Francisco, that could potentially overshadow all earlier propositions in their negative impacts on life in California. The first is a clever bit of wordsmithing that would force the state’s two nuclear power plants to shut down. The second would ban circumcision in San Francisco.
Crazifornia Highlighted in Flash Report
May 26th
Flash Report, the top conservative news aggregator in the state, has linked to just about every opinion piece I’ve written, so I wrote an exclusive for Jon Fleishman, the site’s politically powerful patriarch. It ran today at the top of the site, in its #3 slot.
The subject is the growing trend of outsourcing by California cities that are struggling to deal with salaries that are too high and benefit/pension plans that are out of control. As an afterthought, it just occurred to me that Jerry Brown’s Sacramento is not following the cities’ lead. Why not? Could it be because he, unlike electeds even in liberal strongholds like Marin County, remains a cowering coward in the face of public employee union bosses?
Maybe. So, here’s the lead of the Flash Report piece:
In June of 2010, the tiny Los Angeles County city of Maywood admitted what many of us have known for some time – city employees are just too expensive. Maywood’s admission came in the form of laying off every single one of its employees.
The city, a neighbor of the infamous city of Bell, had already outsourced its parks department, landscaping and street sweeping to private contractors and was happy with the results. City officials said, in what CNN called “an odd twist,” that the outsourcing the rest would allow Maywood to provide its residents with better service for less. There’s nothing at all odd about that, unless one has a CNN-style belief system.
The New York Times later found the city council’s prediction that Maywood’s residents wouldn’t notice a difference in service to be true, writing, “The [expected] apocalypse never arrived. In fact, it seems this city was so bad at being a city that outsourcing – so far, at least – is being viewed as an act of municipal genius.”
Cities don’t have to be bad to benefit from outsourcing, and many municipalities across the state are following Maywood’s lead.
To read the rest of the piece, click here.
Smelt Corpses Should be Piling Up Like Debt in DC
May 25th
Something fishy is going on in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Thanks to plentiful run-off from heavy winter snow in the Sierras, the pumps of the State Water Project have been running at levels we haven’t seen in years – yet the Delta smelt refuse to go along with the predictions of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and its environmentalist suitors (as in lawsuits by the truckload), whose “science” would have us believe increased pumping would cause smelt corpses to be piling up quicker than debt in DC.
My piece on this fascinating mystery ran today in The Daily Caller. Here’s the set-up:
In Tracy, California, where the massive California Water Project pumps stand ready to move up to 15,450 cubic feet of Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta water southward every single second, it’s been a busy spring.
The pumps have been a mere shadow of their old selves ever since U.S. District Court Judge Oliver Wanger began ratcheting them down in 2007 in response to environmentalist lawsuits brought under the auspices of the Delta smelt. The environmentalists blamed the pumping for the precipitous drop in the smelt population, ignoring any number of other Delta ills that could be decimating the little fish, including ammonia from Sacramento’s sewage plant, farm chemical runoff and hungry non-native bass prized by the very sports fishermen who joined the environmentalists in blaming the pumps.
But the 2010-2011 storm season has been a wet one, with about twice the average rainfall and snowfall. That, and his growing skepticism of the adequacy of the science justifying restrictions on pumping, has loosened Judge Wanger’s grip on Southern California’s spigot, and the pumps have been running at up to 80 percent of their capacity.
For the very interesting kicker, read on here.
California Leads the Nation … In Failure
May 14th
When it comes to the gaping abyss that is public employee pension and health care unfunded liabilities, Democrats continue to try to obscure reality at all costs. At a dinner meeting earlier this week, the smokescreen was so thick that I actually had to interrupt Orange County Democrat Party Chairman Frank Barbaro, who was participating in a panel discussion at a meeting of city electeds and city managers.
Barbaro had just said, “We hear about the outrageous public employee pensions, but do you know what the average pension for a retired public employee under the CalPERS system is? It’s just $22,000 a year.”
“What is the average for CalPERS-covered public employees who retired last year?” I asked in a voice that all in the room could hear.
He seemed shocked by the interruption, but feigned ignorance. “I don’t know, what was it?
“It was $60,000 a year, and it will be going up every year from now on until pensions are controlled. That’s the pension cost the people in this room are concerned about,” I said as some City officials applauded and others nodded their heads in approval.
You have to call these people out. You have to say you’re not putting up with their papering over of the problem, even if, as in this case, their response is to go back to the lame Dem message points, pretending the real facts simply don’t exist. Against that context, here’s the intro to my most recent Daily Caller column, covering a bit of reality Democrats wish they could ignore, that California now leads the nation in public employee pension fund losses, but in terms of total losses and percentage of fund losses:
California, once a state that could easily justify the adjective “golden,” nowadays seems to always find itself at the bottom of lists Californians would rather be at the top of — like quality of education — and at the top of lists they’d like to be at the bottom of — like the most recent: largest public employee pension fund losses.
The data is from a pretty reliable source — the U.S. Census Bureau — and it shows California lost $136 billion in 2009, or 21.2 percent of the total national losses in public employee pension fund assets. The state has 12 percent of the nation’s population and 18 percent of all state pension fund assets — which in itself is a sign of how comfortably the state’s public servants will spend their retirement years.
The one-year loss equals $3,677 for every man, woman and child in the state — and since we’re on the hook for any shortfalls, that’s a bill that could come due. Heaven forbid that public employees would ever be asked to accept pension cuts like the poor folks who must work to produce something other than taxes, fines and regulations.
Advice from Crazifornia to Texas
May 2nd
I strayed a bit far afield in my most recent opinion piece in The Daily Caller, focusing on an environmental story out of Texas. But there’s a connection – what oil producers in Texas are facing at the hands of radical environmentalists is exactly what California went through a few years back when the Natural Resources Defense Council tried to stop land development in Southern California by seeking the listing of the California gnatcatcher as an endangered species.
In that battle, which I was deeply involved with on behalf of developers, we ultimately prevailed thanks to intervention from a most unlikely source: a newly elected president by the name of Bill Clinton. Do you think the Texas oil producers can count on Barack Obama to extend a helping hand?
Here’s how the Daily Caller piece gets started:
There couldn’t be a better friend to radical anti-oil environmentalists than the sand dune lizard. No, wait. Perhaps the alternative energy true believers in the federal government, from the president down, are even better friends to the radicals. We’ll know soon enough, thanks to a fight that’s pitting lizards against oil producers.
The sand dune lizard caught the eye of environmentalists because it lives exclusively in the Texas and New Mexico counties located in the Permian Basin, the most productive energy-producing land in the Lower 48. As such, it is probably the single best species to latch onto if you want to stop much of our domestic oil and natural gas production in its tracks, since there’s nothing like an endangered species listing to keep people from doing much on the listed critter’s habitat.
Please click through to read the rest – it’s guaranteed 100 percent interesting and The Daily Caller would sure like to see you pop onto their website!
