Posts tagged government
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.
CA Forward Offers Slate of Phony Fixes
Feb 15th
CalWatchdog picked up the op/ed I wrote after sitting disgustedly through two hours of dangerous ideas, mumbo-jumbo and government-speak from the reformers at California Forward – the folks who brought us the insane “budget with a 50% majority” and open primaries propositions. Here it is:
One of my daughters is an esthetician, and as she studied for her state certification so she could be sanctioned by Sacramento as worthy to give facials and wax eyebrows, she had to learn two completely separate and conflicting approaches to her chosen work. First, she learned how to give facials and wax eyebrows. Then she learned how to pass the California’s esthetician certification exam, which is based on practices no one uses anymore and maybe never did.
I thought of her experience on Friday afternoon as I found myself in a conference room with several other business people, trying as hard as we could to share our point of view about how to fix what ails California with two representatives of California Forward, the outfit that brought us open primaries and new state budgets on a simple majority vote. They’re cooking up some new reforms that made me so frustrated I could have ripped out my eyebrows – if I didn’t have a daughter who knew how to wax them. At the same time in Sacramento, a group of state employees was in another conference room with another group of California Forward representatives, sharing their perspective of the same topic. I have a feeling they had a much easier time of it.
The two meetings were part of California Forward’s current effort to gather input from all over the state so it can by synthesized into a new model for governing California, one that would fix things for good, with consensus support. Or, as the group puts it on its Web site, “We want a government that is small enough to listen, big enough to tackle real problems, smart enough to spend our money wisely, and honest enough to be held accountable for results.” Good luck with that – especially that last bit about honesty and accountability. After all, we live in the state that designed the California esthetician certificate examination.
Read the rest of the piece – and my proposed California reform measure – here.
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.
Crazifornia in The Daily Caller: Keep Your Eyes on California
Dec 7th
The Daily Caller, my new favorite national political news portal, ran a piece by me as its lead opinion piece in this morning’s edition. Here’s the link (where you can sign up for a Laer Pearce RSS feed!), and here’s the piece as it appeared:
Keep Your Eyes on California
Don’t think California is done messing with America
By Laer Pearce
After the 2010 midterms, you could almost hear conservative pundits dismissing California as the land of fruits, nuts and irrelevancy. They couldn’t be further from the truth. Even though California doggedly stayed left while nearly every other state veered right, it still remains the supercharged engine for America’s progressive movement. If anything, the midterms just stomped down its accelerator.
California’s accelerated national influence is evident in what many dismiss as a loss for liberals, the defeat of Proposition 19, the marijuana legalization initiative. Most conservative commentators saw the vote against legal pot as proof that even California isn’t that crazy, but look again. More Californians voted to legalize marijuana than voted for Republican Meg Whitman for governor, even though Prop 19’s supporters spent a mere $4 million on their campaign, compared to Whitman’s $163 million.
Like earlier society-bending propositions on the California ballot — gay marriage and global warming are recent examples — the measure blazed the trail for similar efforts in other states. Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the pro-legalization Drug Policy Alliance, put it this way, “California’s Proposition 19 may not have won a majority of voters yesterday, but it already represents an extraordinary victory for the broader movement to legalize marijuana. Its mere presence on the ballot … elevated and legitimized public discourse about marijuana and marijuana policy.” Students for Sensible Drug Policy, another pro-legalization group, added, “One of the greatest hidden victories of the Prop 19 campaign was that it trained the emerging generation of marijuana reformers on how to run a legalization campaign, and left virtually all of them wanting to win on this issue in 2012.” Colorado is a likely target.
Similarly, California’s rejection of Prop 23, ensuring the state would continue its plunge into cap and trade even as Congress is backing away from similar legislation, has reinvigorated global warming activists. As the Daily Green blog put it, “The federal government needs to take a close look at the result.”
Prop 19 was on the ballot in California, not Kansas or Alabama or even Massachusetts, because supporters of liberal social change know they’ll get more publicity and possibly even a winning vote in unrepentantly liberal California. The state nurtured progressivism a century ago and has given the movement staying power through its modeling of liberal legislation and policies and the sheer number of progressives churned out by its universities — so much so that it’s not likely Barack Obama would be president today were it not for the very blue Golden State.
While the established political parties and their consultants will ignore California and pore over campaigns in other states for clues on how to capitalize on — or crush — the Tea Party’s influence, the Left will be studying what happened in California, so they can replicate it the next time around. What they will find is not so much a magic formula but a vast progressive infrastructure they will then work to replicate elsewhere.
I call this infrastructure the PEER Axis, for the progressives, environmentalists, educators and reporters who collectively run California and influence the underpinnings of America. The PEER Axis remains powerful because politicians and political movements may come and go, but government bureaucrats and regulators, environmentalists and social justice activists, and their supporters in education and the media are pretty much forever. The structure of California ensures that appropriately indoctrinated college graduates will continue to fill the personnel pipelines that run from Berkeley, UCLA and other liberal universities straight into the progressive movement.
Many end up in government offices in Sacramento, where they write policies that are parroted in other states around the nation, as evidenced by the fact that the federal government is following California’s lead in setting the next round of vehicle fuel economy standards. Others will go to work at California’s giant environmentalist organizations, social justice NGOs and activist law firms, or the powerful public employee unions. Some will stay on the campuses, turning out future generations of progressives and writing studies to reinforce and justify progressive government policies, and those who graduate into the media will publicize these efforts and belittle any contrarian thinking. Many will find jobs in California’s foremost culture-bending venture, Hollywood, where they will pummel all the world with green messages (The China Syndrome, Avatar), anti-corporate tirades (Metropolis, Wall Street), anti-war propaganda (Apocalypse Now, In the Valley of Elah) and movies challenging conventional values (Milk, Juno).
Wherever they end up, they will be greeted by like-minded alumnae ready to show them the ropes so they, too, can form and implement policy, bring lawsuits, and mold the next generation. Don’t be lulled into dismissing California’s influence just because of one election, because the California progressives will not be content to limit their focus to west of the Sierras. As Gavin Newsome, the San Francisco mayor and newly elected Lieutenant Governor of California, put it when he declared San Francisco open for gay marriages, “It’s gonna happen, whether you like it or not!”
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Laer Pearce, a veteran of three decades of California public affairs, is currently working on a book that shows how everything wrong with America comes from California.
CalWatchdog Runs “California’s Brain Drain”
Dec 6th
Thanks to the good folks at CalWatchdog for picking up my column, “California’s Crippling Brain Drain.” The piece explains how, besides saddling the state with a half-trillion dollars of unfunded pension obligations, public employees are retiring years before private sector workers do because the formulas used to compute their pensions encourage them to ditch their jobs just when they’re well seasoned. It concludes:
You’d think the very least our public sector cohorts could do would be to give their all for another 10 years or so, since it’s going to require all the brain power we’ve got to get California through the next decade. They did their part in getting us into this mess, so why are we paying them so generously to not take part in getting us out of it?
If you haven’t bookmarked CalWatchdog yet, you should. It’s a continuing source of good stuff on Crazifornia.
Utter Obliteration
Nov 24th
Twenty-two days after the midterm elections, Steve Cooley has just conceded to San Francisco left-wing DA Kamala Harris in the attorney general race, making the devastation of the California GOP complete. With the Secretary of State no longer reporting any “close races” on her website, we now know that Dems hold every state-wide position, and every Dem incumbent running for Congress or the Legislature was re-elected.
And, of course, Prop 25 made the GOP irrelevant in the budget process, since the Dems will be able to pass whatever monstrosity they wish upon California with a simple majority.
The GOP train has officially wrecked. Is anyone ready to stage the come-back that’s supposed to happen at this point?
A relevant bit on Harris from Wikipedia:
[C]ritics argue that San Francisco sends fewer people to jail per arrest than other counties throughout the state. The San Francisco DA’s incarceration rates are among the lowest in the entire state of California—fully 10 times lower than in San Diego County, for example. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “roughly 4 of every 100 arrests result in prison terms in San Francisco, compared with 12.8 out of 100 in Alameda County, 14.4 of 100 in Sacramento County, 21 of 100 in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, 26.6 of 100 in Fresno County, 38.7 of 100 in Los Angeles County and 41 of 100 in San Diego County.”
On the plus side, her inability or unwillingness to incarcerate dangerous felons may be just what California’s ruined prison system needs.
Did California Become Irrelevant Nov. 2?
Nov 21st
As commentators broke down the midterm election results on election night and the next day, you could almost hear them dismiss California as the land of fruits, nuts and irrelevance. It’s easy to see their point. The rest of the nation looked at the mess we’re in and did something about it; Californians looked at an even worse mess and voted to make it worse.
You know the talking points: We re-elected every single incompetent, egotistical, out-of-touch politician that contributed to the mess – as of this point in the ballot counting, not a single member of the California congressional and legislative delegations was sent packing. What a stunning endorsement of idiocy! But it didn’t end there. Californians passed Prop 25, giving the Democrats complete control of the state budget, as an award for their effectiveness at destroying the state’s economy. And they ensured that the California would stay mired in recession when they voted for draconian economic mandates by voting down Prop 23.
So, as voters in nearly every other state set new courses, it’s easy to count out California as a powerful national influence. But it’s wrong.
Ever since Republican Hiram Johnson became governor of California in 1910 and told voters he spoke for the insurgents, defining insurgency as “opposition to the looting of the people by the unholy alliance between big business and politics,” California has been the nurturer of America’s Progressive movement. The state’s modeling of Progressive legislation and policies and the sheer number of progressives churned out by its schools and universities has given the movement staying power – so much staying power, in fact, that it’s unlikely Barack Obama would be president today were it not for California’s Progressives, right up to Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi, Henry Waxman and, once again, Jerry Brown.
Sure, politicians, think tanks and campaign managers will be studying election results everywhere else to see how to capitalize on, or crush, the Tea Party’s influence, but just as surely, Progressives, environmentalists, social justice advocates and union bosses will be studying what happened in California, so they can replicate it in their state next time around.
Besides, California’s influence on government goes much deeper than mere elections. We kid ourselves if we think our elected politicians control the show. They come and go, but the bureaucrats, regulators and legislative staff are forever, and they’re where the rubber of government really hits the road. Because California trains so many Progressives and pushes them into government, the state will continue to influence America, even if voters are trying to steer a different course.
This was evident when federal eco-bureaucrats followed Californian’s lead when they started setting the new federal vehicle fuel economy standards, just as it was evident in the eleven states that recently announced they would blindly follow California down the trail to eco-economic lunacy by adopting our Low-Carbon Fuel Standard. Like California, they will force industry to switch to low-carbon fuels that just aren’t there or just can’t perform – if there were a ready alternative for carbon-rich gasoline, Californians wouldn’t be burning 45 million gallons of it a day.
Don’t count out California. It may be sinking into economic ruin, but plenty of states and municipalities continue to jump aboard, eager to follow our lead, no matter where it leads them.
Crazifornia, Here I Come!
Apr 14th
Even decades after Al Jolson crooned, “Open up those golden gates, California here I come!” California was a dream state, attracting hundreds of thousands of new residents yearly with its promise of great weather, terrific schools, lots of jobs, and a small government in far-away Sacramento that saw its role as supporters and facilitators of the state’s growth.
My, my, my! How nightmarishly things have changed. The Crazifornia Project documents those changes. Or more specifically, how the death-spiral trio of liberal Democrats, no-growth environmentalists and public employee unions have come together in a Progressive campaign to tarnish all that was once golden in the Golden State.
You can help! Via the “Contact Crazifornia” button above, or by email to crazifornia @ laer [dot] com, send me your own story about how Crazifornia’s ridiculous regulations, ludicrous legislation or puerile policies are driving you crazy. If I use your story, you’ll get a mention in the acknowledgments of my upcoming book,Crazifornia – How California Ruined Itself and is Poised to Take the Rest of America with It.
While you wait for the book to be published, enjoy these posts from my old blog, Cheat-Seeking Missiles, that spawned the whole Crazifornia idea.
Crazifornia: Zero Intelligence in Concord Schools
Crazifornia: Regulators Want to Ban Big TVs
Crazifornia: Imperial Imperviousness
And too early to get the “Crazifornia” moniker:
Coastal Commission Attempting to Ban Fourth of July Fireworks
