Posts tagged budget
Crazifornia on CalWatchdog
Jan 10th
The good folks at Pacific Research Institute’s CalWatchdog blog – Steve Greenhut, to be specific – posted another one of my op/eds today. Here’s a little intro to encourage you to read more:
If Gov. Jerry Brown has any chance of draining California’s budget swamp of red ink, he’s going to need more than aggressive spending cuts and votes for more taxes, as he proposes. He’s also going to need a resurgence in California’s business environment, but at one of the state’s few commerce success stories, the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, there are more signs of classic California non-competitiveness than there are of a return to health for the state’s business sector.
Yes, activity is up by single digits over last year at the ports, which are America’s busiest, as companies slowly bring in more goods from Asia to rebuild inventories they had let drop through the Great Recession. But even as more than 12 million containers will be unloaded at Southern California docks this year, there are grave threats to the future of Southern California’s logistics behemoths, and they’re posed by exactly the same elements that threaten the rest of the state’s economy – powerful unions and California’s incessant compulsion to be a world leader in the environmental movement without thought to the cost.
To read the rest of the piece, click through to CalWatchdog.
Here are the other Crazifornia op/eds they’ve run:
From RINO to Redux
Jan 2nd
(Please read this post at The Daily Caller, since they’re interested in how much traffic their authors generate. Thanks!)
Today, Arnold Schwarzenegger signs his last gubernatorial documents and spiffs up the governor’s office so he can get his security deposit back as the next tenant prepares to move in tomorrow.
The man who promised his charisma was sufficient to break down the boxes that hobble Sacramento leaves the place with all its boxes intact, and more than a few new boxes to boot – they’re just painted a greener shade of regulatory over-kill. As it turns out, the Schwarzenegger legacy isn’t governmental and budgetary reform; it’s AB 32 and SB 375, California’s hysterical global warming twins, and the passel of business-strangling regulations spawned in their wake. The incoming governor is apparently intent on protecting Schwarzenegger’s green legacy with the appointment of John Laird, co-author of AB 32, as Secretary of Natural Resources, ensuring that natural resources, not resourceful humans, will continue to be the focus of California state government. The leftist YubaNet.com declared the Laird appointment “sets off green fireworks,” adding:
On the first day of the New Year, Governor Brown showed that he is committed to a green agenda by appointing John Laird as the Secretary of Resources. … From waste reducer to wildlife protector Laird is sure to make 2011 a great year for the environment.
But California’s regulatory crusade to coddle the environment without care for the cost is not going to be the focus for Jerry Brown, as much as he might like it to be – it’s going to be the budget, debt and the ever-less-sustainable public employee pension funding gaps. If Jerry Brown is going to succeed on that score, he’s eventually going to have to take on the public employee unions he empowered in the 1970s when he signed the law giving them truly impressive collective bargaining rights.
It was the unions that terminated the Terminator. When Schwarzenegger put four mostly sensible reform initiatives on a special election ballot in 2005, he was handily disposed of by the unions, particularly the California Teachers Association, which mortgaged its headquarters to buy even more anti-Schwarzenegger ads. By most accounts, Brown is also plotting a special election strategy to fix the budgetary mess. First, he will get a budget through Sacramento (now, thanks to Proposition 25, requiring only the votes of the Legislature’s Democrats) that will include sweeping cuts in spending for popular state services, then he will call a special election and ask the voters to do what even the state’s all-powerful Democrats don’t have enough votes to accomplish: raise taxes and fees.
He should be able to count on union support for the higher taxes, but the voter’s mid-term rejection of Prop 21’s “park tax” and their approval of Prop 22’s and Prop 26’s restrictions on Sacramento’s non-tax revenue generation tricks indicates Brown’s going to have a tough time pulling off a special election win. Even if he does – and especially if he doesn’t – he’s still going to have to deal with pension reform if he has any hope of fixing the state’s fiscal mess. Meaningful reform seems just about impossible under Brown, as Orange County Register opinion columnist Mark Landsbaum wrote today:
Considering their clout, if public employee unions had a better candidate to run for governor, wouldn’t they have run him? Why didn’t they? Because Jerry Brown’s candidacy was their dream come true.
California’s future will be anything but golden unless Brown pulls off a “Nixon goes to China” with the state’s public employee unions and brokers sweeping and significant changes to public employee benefits. Tweaking at pension formulas isn’t going to be enough. Even the wholesale selling out of younger public employees by older pension-rich ones isn’t going to pull California out of the hole. No, dialing back California’s half-trillion-dollar unfunded pension liability before the state’s finances collapse entirely is going to take the kind of reform that will pose a threat to the future clout of the very public employee unions that swept Brown into office.
Can he do it? I don’t think so. His appointments thus far, while still few in number, indicate that the Jerry Brown we’re getting is the Jerry Brown we feared we’d get – Moonbeam Redux. He will use the Democrat’s complete control of Sacramento and the money and influence of his union benefactors to do everything he can to protect the status quo, because unlike where Sacramento was when he first came into office on the heels of Ronald Reagan, Sacramento today is exactly as he would like it to be – fat with government jobs and programs, committed to environmental over-regulation, and firmly in the hands of the unions he knows and loves.
Jerry Brown’s real challenge arises from the fact that the status quo will be impossible to protect unless the state’s businesses shake off the national recession and the state’s obsession with business-flogging and somehow begin to generate more jobs and more tax payments. Short of that unlikely salvation, it’s anyone’s guess how Brown will succeed in keeping his benefactors happy while dodging California’s looming fiscal black hole.
Thank God for California’s Public Employees!
Dec 23rd
Cross-posted at the FlashReport Weblog on California Politics
I’m looking sadly at the family refrigerator, imagining it as barren white slab, stripped of all the children’s artwork that makes it such an emotional focus of our home. And I’m thanking God for California’s public employees, because they made it possible for the Pearce clan, and all California clans, to enjoy the best of Crayola art while we put away the milk and cold cuts.
And it’s not just that. Without the fine folks whose paychecks are signed by John Chiang, we would be living in a gloomy and dangerous place. (I thought California was a gloomy and dangerous place, but now I know better.) We wouldn’t have known of this great debt we have to our state employees were it not for Willie Pelote of the American Federal of State, County and Municipal Employees, who wrote an open letter to Jerry Brown and published it in today’s California Labor Federation blog,
“Imagine being unable to take a walk in a park on a sunny afternoon or being unable to borrow books from the library or to hang a picture drawn by your child at school on the refrigerator.
“Imagine traversing potholed roadways or waiting hours to catch a train or bus home after work or telling your children that you can’t afford to send them to college.”
Pelote tells us that’s not just what could happen, no, it’s what already is happening for “the majority of Californians who have to work for a living” – as opposed, I suppose, to that minority of trust fund baby Californians who sit around drinking champagne and sending their butlers to cash their dividend checks. Why? Because we’ve bought into the false reality of thinking we can balance the budget by doing with a smaller state government. Foolish us!
I’m so glad Pelote made this an open letter instead of one of those infernal closed letters, because now I understand the risks to the very bedrock of American ideals – equal opportunity and a fair deal – that we would face if we ever eliminate a single additional state employee from the payroll. It’s not just that these folks are “stewards of the sources of our common wealth,” why they’re “necessarily more highly educated, more highly skilled, and more highly experienced” than the rest of us schleps. And that’s why they all rush to retire at 50 or 55 with their full salary and benefit package for life – if they didn’t, they’d become so much more educated, skilled and experienced that their heads would probably explode.
Pelote is really trying to help the incoming governor, because Lord knows, the man’s got a Gordian knot of problems to deal with. I’m sure Brown is relieved that the solution to it all is so clear. First, Pelote says, we’ll drop those pesky Enterprise Zones and the tax credits they provide to evil private sector employers. Then we’ll eliminate all those nasty corporate tax loopholes because they might encourage private companies to hire people who otherwise could become AFSCME union members. And the state should just knock off this crazy hiring of private contracting firms because, as Pelote has already explained, the public sector guys and gals are better educated, more skilled and more experienced – and let’s not forget, they’re nicer, less self-centered and more responsive, too!
Then, just to make sure there’s enough money flowing in to keep those benefits dollars flowing out, we’ll raise taxes. Not just any taxes, but taxes on capitalist, free-market types by taxing stock trades. That’ll hurt Wall Street, and we all know it’s Wall Street that we have to blame for our ills, not public employees, like the ones that forced Wall Street to give home loans to just about anyone, and the dedicated state employees who invested CalPERS money in top-of-the-market real estate. With the bureaucrats doing such a smashing job, why bother with a free market anyway, Pelote asks?
“If the free market is really as ideal a mechanism for creating wealth as its supporters claim, then why must taxpayers subsidize the operations of private sector companies?
“In fact, since the private sector has so far been unwilling or unable to produce the kinds of jobs we need to pull California out of recession, that is all the more reason to be vigilant with our tax dollars.”
Amen! Now that we’ve regulated and taxed it into oblivion, let’s just do away with that burdensome private sector entirely. Pelote and his union friends, smart as they are, can see a better world, where California agencies, departments, commissions, boards and councils will employ all of us, and as our union fees go to feather Pelote’s bed, we’ll spend our time writing regulations for each other in one big, happy festival of oversight and micromanagement, with comfortable salaries and splendid retirements for all.
It’s interesting that Pelote – who, after all, is just a consonant and a vowel away from “Pelosi” – couldn’t find a way to get the words “retirement benefits” or “pension spiking” into his open letter, or that with all his talk of rosier state finances he eluded any mention of the state’s $500 billion unfunded liability for the retirement and lifetime health benefits of our cherished older stewards of the sources of our common wealth. I’d probably understand why he did this if only I were better educated, more skilled and had more experience.
California Agencies Oblivious to the Budget Deficit
Dec 20th
Why in the world would California – caught as it is in a budgetary black hole – give $250,000 to some outfit in Oregon to build a government-subsidized fish market at Fisherman’s Wharf, California’s foremost free market fish market?
The answer to that question and much more on the budgetary obliviousness of California’s 300-plus departments, agencies, commissions, councils and boards is given in my new Daily Caller opinion piece, which you can read here.
Alternative Energy Makes State’s Budget Redder
Dec 20th
My friends at CalWatchdog just published my critique of the state’s insane energy policies. Why does California give incentives to folks to buy electric cars when every electric car sold takes money out of our all-too-broke budget? Why do people in Washington and Oregon fear California’s commitment to green energy?
Find out here. Please click through – it’ll make Steve Greenhut very happy.
