Jerry Brown says California’s finances are rosy once again.

Daryl Cagel, MSNBC.com

I say rose is just another shade of red, and say that by ignoring the state’s growing debt and unsustainable pension obligations, Jerry and the Dems are ignoring two very large elephants in the room.

Today, my not-so-rosy view got additional support as the California Public Policy Center announced that it has tabulated all the government debt in California – the state, cities, counties, school districts, the whole government complex – and when they hit the total button, here’s what they got: $1,126,200,000,000.00. Hint: When reading that number, start with “One trillion ….”

That translates as an $80,000 debt burden on the shoulders of every household in the state.But actually, since one percent of California households pay 80 percent of the state’s taxes, your true burden is probably just a wee tiny bit smaller. Of course, when the one percent get hold of this info, they may be calling the moving vans, and your burden will go back up.

If you want more detail on this, read Ed Ring’s excellent piece in today’s CalWatchdog.

A new proposition just cleared for signature gathering proposes to ruin the best thing the California economy has going for it – huge oil and reserves – while wasting even more money on that perpetual fiscal sinkhole, the education system.

The as-yet unnumbered proposition would impose a 9.5 percent tax on the value of all oil and natural gas extracted in the state, which would raise an estimated $1.5 billion to $2 billion a year.

The windfall would be spent as follows: 60% on education (designated for classroom instruction – how that will get by the teachers and administrators is a mystery to me – and split equally between UC, CSU, community colleges, and K-12 schools); 22% to clean energy projects and research (think Solyndra and Fisker); 15% to counties for infrastructure and public health and safety services, and the last 3% to state parks, where massive secret piles of cash have been squirreled away.

After 10 years, the revenue split would be 80% to education, 15% to counties, and 5% to state parks.

I know what you’re thinking. Opponents will point out that this will lead to a 9.5% increase in California’s energy prices, which are already among the highest in the nation, leading to the quick death of this new tax and spend scheme.

Not so fast. The sponsors of this bit of demented direct democracy have that covered, writing this into the Proposition:

Prohibits passing tax on to consumers through higher fuel prices.

Until the proposition language is released, it’s anyone’s guess how that can be constitutional – and if it is, how fuel producers can stay in business if they can’t pass the tax through to consumers.

Education is already California’s #1 expenditure, consuming well over 40 percent of general fund revenues. For all that, our K-12 schools are perpetually in the near-cellar of schools nationwide. Only a tax and spend addict would ignore the need for systemic reform and come up with a scheme to put even more money into the broken system.

Who would think that way? How about UC Berkeley students? They’re the ones who wrote the act, which is officially sponsored by Harrison “Jack” Tibbetts, who now carries the lofty title of Campaign Manager, Californians for Responsible (i.e., “No”) Economic Development, but whose only other job was being an intern at the World Forum on the Future of Sport Shooting Activities.

If you’d like to share your thoughts about taxing oil and spending it on schools, you can call Jack at (707) 495-7438.

April 1, 2013 – Crazifornia heard today from credible sources that Jerry Brown will soon resign as governor and return to his earlier pursuit of Nirvana somewhere other than Sacramento.

“If I can’t push California at least a little bit in the right direction – and Lord knows, I haven’t – then no one can,” Brown told our source, who ran into the soon-to-be-ex-governor Saturday at a coffee shop in Williams, California, near the governor’s Colusa ranch .

Jerry Brown meditating at his Colusa ranch.

We’re told Brown continued, “The very thought that I considered myself capable of fixing California is an indication that I am lost in my ego. It’s time to move my inner being out of Sacramento and back to a simpler way, so it’s bye-bye bogus budgets and last-minute legislation and hello mediation mat.”

We called two prominent California politicos with the news and found them shocked, but respectful of Brown’s ability to at least appear he’s doing more than most recent governors toward improving California’s desperate condition.

“Sure, he promoted the high speed rail fiasco in spite of all logic and his attack on public employee pensions was more of an ‘excuse me’ than the needed frontal assault, but he was better than Gray Davis,” said state GOP leader Jim Brulte in one of the best examples of damning by faint praise we’ve heard recently.

Senate president pro tem (and likely candidate to replace Brown) Darryl Steinberg told us, “I had to fight Jerry from time to time because he kept trying to look too much like he was actually trying to do something to slow down our union, trial lawyer and trust fund baby benefactors, but even so, he was better than Schwarzenegger.”  Wow – faint praise seems to be the new trend in Sacramento!

We expect Steinberg, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsome and two or three hundred other hangers on, goof balls and wannabes will run for the vacant seat in a special election currently scheduled for October 31.

What’s up with Californians?

A new Field Poll of California registered voters reveals that 48% of them say the state is heading in on the right track. That’s not a majority, but it’s a plurality, as just 44% believe the state is going in the wrong direction. (That’s my bunch, in case you were wondering.) The usual six percent is too stupid to know which way anything is going.

It wasn’t that long ago, May 2011, when two thirds of Californians felt the state was headed in the wrong direction, according to PPIC. Have things really gotten that better?

It may look that way. There was no big budget fight this year. A lot thought that was a real breakthrough for the better. But it was just because the Democrats had more than enough votes to pass it, given the newly passed 50 percent (instead of 2/3) threshold for that vote. And lately the Gov has been crowing about all the new money that’s coming in since the voters passed the Prop 30 tax hikes in November.

I make the case that the Field Poll number is an indication things are actually getting worse. Think about it. In the November election Barack Obama got over 60 percent of the California vote compared to Mitt Romney’s 37 percent, and in 2010 Jerry Brown beat Republican Meg Whitman by almost 13 points. So it’s clear: California has a ton of Democrats. And the Dems own the governor’s office, the State Senate and the State Assembly.

And what do we know about those hoards of Democrats? They’re the ones responsible for California’s high taxes, deep debt, anti-business policies, expensive over-regulation and unsustainable kowtowing to public employee labor unions. All of that has been, and will continue to, send California off in the wrong direction.

And really, since the Democrats so dominate the state’s demographics and politics, 60 percent of the people should think the state is headed in the right direction.  The fact that it’s just 48 percent tells us a lot of Democrats are smarter than the state’s Democrat Party.

Like I said, I’m with the 44 percent on this one. So is CalWatchdog, which sums up the reasons very well:

Brown’s promised that, if voters approved the Prop. 30 tax increases and he cut spending, his 2013-14 state budget would achieve a budget surplus of $851 million – the first surplus in a decade.  …

But yesterday, Brown began negotiations for new contracts with the public-worker unions that represent 350,000 state workers — engineers, administrative staff, librarians, corrections officers and more. The contracts are due to expire this summer.

Even though the average state worker’s salary in California is $70,777, nearly $16,000 higher than the national average, these unions expect a big pay raise for providing the millions of dollars for campaign ads and thousands of campaign foot soldiers that caused the passage Prop. 30.  Brown has already promised to “restore” $817.6 million in pay in the current budget, offer $502.1 million of 2 percent to 5 percent pay raises next year and add coverage for higher health care costs.

He indicated executive branch salaries also will increase nearly 10 percent, to $15.7 billion.  None of these increases includes the $10 billion increase I estimate that is required to keep the current state pension system solvent.

The state of California is now facing an even bigger crisis than before the passage of Prop. 30.  It’s now feeling the economic impacts of the highest state sales tax at 7.5 (even higher in come counties), top income tax rate of 13.3 percent and second-highest gasoline tax at $.67 per gallon.

As those higher taxes kick in, expect tax receipts to drop as capital moves out of state to seek lower tax rates elsewhere. (The Laffer Curve)  Brown & Co. will have spent the temporary largess instead of putting it away for the inevitable rainy day, and we’ll be worse off than before the tax hikes.

I really hate being a pessimist. I’m really a very positive guy. It’s just hard to keep smiling and whistling cheerily when you write about California.

Uglies, Goodies and Don’t Bother Me’s make the Crazifornia Proposition Voter Guide a Must!

When I was interviewed by The Weekly Standard for an upcoming article about this November’s flock of Crazifornia ballot initiatives, that’s how I categorized them: “Five uglies, four goodies and two don’t bother me’s.” (I’m still not sure how to spell that last one!) Coming up with that summary took hours of research, which you can save yourself with The Crazifornia Propositions Voter Guide.

Here are my recommendations, in ballot order, with those in red being the most critical:

Prop 30 – Ugly

It’s hard to even get by the name of this one – Temporary  Taxes to Fund Education, Guaranteed Local Public Safety Funding – without uttering that most common of election season bromides, “How stupid do they think we are?”

This proposition’s position at the top of the ballot is the result of Gov. Jerry Brown’s strong-arming of the system to gain advantage, and that pretty much sums up this initiative. Its advertising campaign is basically strong-arming, too; picture an image of a sweet classroom teacher with a gun to her head and the slogan, “Pay up or the teacher dies!” Brown could have linked passage of his tax  hike to the jobs of bureaucrats, regulators and tax-collectors instead of teachers, but we know how that would turn out.

If Proposition 30 passes, California will have the highest income taxes of all 50 states, and its already secure ranking as the state with the highest sales tax will become more secure.  California spends three times more per capita on social welfare programs than it should, based on national per capita averages. It doesn’t need more revenue, it needs more disciplined spending. Vote NO.

Current Around the Capital Polling Average: Closing steadily at 50.8 yes, 39.9 no. We might still defeat this one!

Prop 31 -  Goodie

If the LA Times is against it, we must be for it. This latest effort from California Forward would create a two-year budget cycle for the state in order to reduce end-of-the-session craziness (I doubt the craziness would disappear, but still like the idea of taking more time with budgeting), require the legislature to find off-setting cuts for any new expenditure of $25 million or more, require performance reviews of all state programs, plus a few other good ideas.

The LA Times doesn’t like it because “it could only be revised by another vote of the people.” Exactly! Leave it to the legislature and they’ll be back to their old tricks in no time.  Vote YES, but note that OC Supervisor John Moorlach, a leader in the fight for fiscal responsibility let me know he’s voting no because it “forecloses on the Laffer curve” by limiting the legislature’s ability to enact tax decreases. Like all things from California Forward, 31 is a mixed bag.

Current Around the Capital Polling Average: About one-third are still undecided so this one could still flip. Yes: 30.7, no 37.8

Prop 32: Goodie

Here’s another run at “paycheck protection” or curtailing the power of unions (and corporations) to mandate paycheck deductions used for campaigning and lobbying. Of course, corporations don’t do mandatory payroll deductions for lobbying, so clarity demands saying that this is an effort to curtail union power.

And it needs to be curtailed if California is every going to gain the fiscal sensibility it must gain to become healthy once again. Public employee unions own Sacramento now, as just the two biggest public union funders of lobbying in Sacramento spend more than the pharmaceutical industry, PG&E, Chevron and ATT&T combined.

The unions are spending really big to stop Prop 32, contributing nearly $60 million thus far. Until Charles Munger responded with a $23 million contribution in support, opponents had outraised supporters five to one. They’re still up by about $13 million.Vote YES

Current Around the Capital Polling Average: A long-running dead heat, with 44.4% yes and 43.8% no.  The 11.5% undecided are going to be barraged with ads from both sides.

Prop 33: Don’t bother me

This is Mercury Insurance CEO George Joseph’s second run at insurance regulation tweaking via the ballot box. Last time around (Prop. 17, 2010), Mercury spent about what they’ve spent this time – $17 million – trying to accomplish the same thing, which is to blah, blah, blah, zzzzz.  I figure they figure they’ll make more than $17 million off higher premiums if it passes.

One reason to vote for it is that Harvey Rosenfield is against it. This is a guy who has milked propositions for millions in personal gain, so I lean toward supporting what he opposes. But this kind of junk shouldn’t be clogging our ballots, so Don’t Vote.

Current Around the Capital Polling Average: Holding at 54.8% yes, 33.6% no.

Prop 34: Ugly

Propositions, as you’ll learn in Chapter 1 of Crazifornia, were the Progressive’s wet dream of the early 1900s. Prop 34 shows why, as it would take capital punishment off the table in California, thereby moving the state closer to Europe.

Arguments fly on both sides of this longstanding and controversial issue, but here’s one that works for me: If the death penalty is no longer in a prosecutor’s bag of tricks, the number of plea bargains and confessions will drop dramatically. Even with delays that are far too long before sentencing and execution, the chance of taking up residence on death row remains the penultimate bargaining chip. I don’t want it taken away, and neither should anyone else who puts victims and justice ahead of criminals and legal technicalities. Vote No.

Current Around the Capital Polling Average: Steady and unbelievably tight at 43.9 yes, 44.9 no.

Prop. 35: Don’t bother me

Don’t bother me, but don’t get me wrong. I’m no fan of human trafficking, a subject I wrote passionately about quite frequently in my Cheat-Seeking Missiles days. It’s the sinful side of the human nature played large and its perpetrators will need Christ’s forgiveness; they’re certainly not getting mine.

But why is it on the ballot? Even the inept California legislature has done enough law-passing to discourage the practice and incarcerate the perpetrators. Since it won’t make any difference in the results, Don’t Vote.

Current Around the Capital Polling Average: Yes 79.7%, no 12.3%.

Prop. 36: Goodie

I was all for the first three-strikes proposition, but it turns out that it had unintended consequences, as so many propositions do. Prop 36 corrects this while keeping the intent of the original proposition intact.

Basically, it separates truly heinous offenders from run of the mill bad guys, with the former still subject to life in prison without parole on their third strike and the others not. California spends way too much on prisons for a lot of reasons, one of which is that we simply have too many prisoners. Let’s save some money by letting some bad but not too bad guys do their crime and serve their time. Vote Yes.

Current Around the Capital Polling Average: Yes 71.5%, no 17.3%. It looks like even Californians can agree on this one.

Prop. 37: Ugly

If California’s recent voting trend holds, Prop. 37 will pass because it has a lot of corporate money against it. Yes, a big majority of Californians are anti-business and it shows on proposition votes (and when rich Republicans run for state office, right Meg?). And this one has a lot of corporate money flooding the opposition.

But the current Around the Capital Polling Average indicates that might not happen this time. The yes vote is strong at 56.2%, but the no vote is climbing at 32.7%, and a lot of money will be spent on NO ads in the next two weeks.

It made my ugly list because Prop. 37 is the new Prop. 65.  In other words, it was written by trial lawyers for trial lawyers. Like 1986′s Prop. 65, it has a seed of a good idea. Then it was that people shouldn’t be exposed to carcinogenic chemicals without knowing it; now it’s that they shouldn’t be exposed to genetically engineered foods without knowing it. But like 65 was an elaborate ploy to funnel millions of dollars to trial lawyers (almost $500 million to date, in fact), so is Prop 37.

Don’t be fooled. Prop 37 is not about informative labels for you. It’s about label regulations that are so complex that farmers, processors, manufacturers and retailers are bound to make mistakes. And when they do, they’ll be sued by a pack of legal mutants. Vote NO.

Prop. 38: Ugly

Prop. 38 is another tax increase, but with this one the money is earmarked for schools. Why, if 1988′s Prop. 98 guarantees they’ll get over 40% of the general fund anyway? And why, since all that money has done nothing to lift our schools out of the cellar?

Well, it turns out the state legislature routinely steals Prop. 98 money from schools and rarely pays it back. In Crazifornia, I put the current IOU at $3.6 billion. Surprised?

But what good would even $3.6 billion do? At a luncheon yesterday, political mastermind Dan  Schnur quoted a Harvard study that found it would take $1 trillion a year to raise California schools to mere mediocrity if nothing is done beyond money to improve the system.

So let’s force the schools and the legislature to fix education by not giving the schools more money. Let’s force Sacramento to drop regulations that cost school districts $400 million a year to keep up with. Let’s let classrooms get bigger again because we’ve learned that all we’ve gotten from small classrooms is more mediocre teachers. Vote NO.

Current Around the Capital Polling Average: Yes 42.1%, No 47.0%

Prop. 39: Ugly

This one will pass for sure because it taxes the other guy, and Californians don’t mind taxing the other guy, as they do regularly with smokers, drinkers and millionaires. (Hm, strange company there!)

Be that as it may, there are two things wrong with Prop. 39 that definitely make it ugly. First, it taxes business. Yes, they’re out of state businesses, but Californians are more addicted to taxing business than smokers are to cigarettes, drinkers are to booze and millionaires are to … success. They’ve hit bottom. It’s time for an intervention, not another hit.

Second, about half the money raised – a stunning $500 million a year – will go to “create energy efficiency and green energy jobs” in California. Haven’t we had enough Solyndras and A123′s? Vote NO.

Current Around the Capital Polling Average: No surprise at 54.2% yes and 30.7% no.

Prop. 40: Goodie

Here’s something more rare than a California gnatcatcher eating an elderberry beetle: A GOP-sponsored proposition that’s polling very favorably. But that may be because it’s just the precursor to the really big vote that will follow.

Prop. 40 would subject the California senate district lines drawn by the California Citizens Redistricting Commission to a vote of the people, with interim boundaries for the next state-wide election set by court-appointed officials. California Democrats smartly and unethically took over the Citizens Redistricting Commission so the boundaries need to be redrawn. This proposition will make that vote possible. Vote YES.

Current Around the Capital Polling Average: 44.2% yes and 25.8% no. It should win, but with 30% undecided, it could still go south.

John Seiler, who was an editorial writer for the libertarian-leaning Orange County Register before taking a gig as managing editor of CalWatchdog, had good things to say about Crazifornia in his recent Amazon review:

I’ve been writing about California for 25 years — for the Orange County Register and for CalWatchDog.com, where I’m now managing editor. This is by far the best description of how California, the Golden State, became Crazifornia — a place only the insane would live in if it weren’t for the incredible weather.

Maybe that explains why there are so many insane politicians here doing so many insane things!

When I checked this morning, Crazifornia was No. 22,402 on Amazon. I actually felt pretty good about it.

I just checked in again, six hours later, and I’m No. 7,246 – and No. 45 in local history books! To all of you who have purchased the book, THANKS!

Crazifornia, “the most insightful book on California’s perilous condition – ever,” (Hugh Hewitt) is available on Amazon!

Be among the first to hold a copy in your hands! This is a preview announcement, preceding the larger marketing effort that will kick off after the Kindle version is launched … which should be any day.

To buy your own copy of Crazifornia, just click here for its Amazon page.

John Moorlach, the Orange County supervisor and crusader against unsustainable public employee pensions, provided this chart to his email following today.  “OCERS” is the Orange County Employees’s Retirement System and “UAAL” is short for Unfunded Actuarial Accrued Liability.  In other words, if all the county’s employees live as long as the actuarial tables say they will, this is how much in the hole we’ll be as of today.

You’ll notice that until 2001, the liability hovered around half a billion dollars or less. It started climbing in 2002 and now has grown about eight fold and is approaching $5 billion – or about $1,650 dollars of debt hanging like a rotting albatross around the necks of every man, woman and child in Orange County.  What happened?

That’s an easy one. In 2001, the Orange County Board of Supervisors granted retroactive pension increases to public safety employees – a move that made their post-9/11 hearts go putter-pat, but was about as stupid and consequential as not dodging icebergs with the Titanic. Payments into the county pension fund for these employees were being made at an amount determined by the actuarial projections for how long they’d live and how much they’d take out of the system before they died. When the Supes upped the payout without jumping into the Way-Back Machine and upping the contributions throughout the many years of the employees’ careers to pay for it, they locked in the increasing UAAL you all see here.

Mororlach forced the OC Supervisors to sue the OC Sheriffs to get the retroactive increases killed.  I tell the inside story in Crazifornia, complete with what Moorlach said during closed sessions. It’s great stuff.  Too bad a couple judges – state employees waiting for their own retirement pensions – threw out the lawsuit in a most arbitrary and self-serving manner.

Moorlach closes his constituent email by saying, “As the old expression goes, liars can figure, but figures can’t lie.  The County’s pension offerings are in dire need of an overhaul.  And this overhaul needs to be addressed by some paradigm-shifting actions on the part of current employees.”

In other words, Orange County’s public safety employees have to admit that they’re shamelessly sticking it to us by benefiting off the hurt one stupid action by five stupid supervisors has caused all us taxpayers, and voluntarily dial back their pensions to pre-2001 levels.

Think they’ll do it?

No. In Crazifornia, I pose a possible solution: a RICO lawsuit brought under the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act. Most people I’ve talked to, including Moorlach, think this little idea of mine could work by ruling that insanely unsustainable pensions be thrown out even though they’re contracts because the contracting process was “racketeer influenced.”

Image hat-tip: Latina Magazine

Just in time for L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s big spotlight at the Democratic National Convention – as the #2 speaker, just before fellow womanizer Bill Clinton – the Daily Caller ran my opinion piece The Villaraigosa Dossier. Here’s an excerpt:

 

The Democratic Party gave one of its best speaking slots at this week’s Democratic National Convention — the slot immediately before former President Bill Clinton’s — to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. That’s a sign that Villaraigosa’s career is on an upward trajectory despite his dismal record as mayor. The city of Los Angeles is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and is expected to run a $1.4 billion deficit over the next four years.

In addition to being a bad mayor, Villaraigosa has issues with his zipper. Already the father of two illegitimate children from his college years, Villaraigosa was busted by his wife in 1994 for philandering while she was struggling with thyroid cancer. The mainstream media has been slow to draw parallels between Villaraigosa and Newt Gingrich. In 2007, Villaraigosa was caught having yet another affair, this time with Telemundo news anchor Mirthala Salinas, who covered his administration.

Despite the scandals (or maybe because of them), the mayor is said to have “impeccable progressive credentials.”

Villaraigosa is a product of the Los Angeles Unified School District, where he landed after being expelled from Catholic schools for fighting. He then latched onto an Upward Bound program and attended East Los Angeles College, where Chicano studies has its own department but history and African-American studies are tucked away in the school of social sciences.

Please go to the Daily Caller to read the rest of the piece. Besides it being fascinating reading, they track the traffic their authors generate, you know.

The Daily Caller piece is excerpted from Crazifornia – and you’ll be able to read the whole thing later this month. I have one more proof to check, then it goes live.