Posts tagged Jerry Brown
Finished!
Jan 17th
I can’t believe it! I just finished the manuscript for Crazifornia, wrapping up the difficult but ultimately very entertaining budget and pensions chapter. Here’s an excerpt:
Hooting and Hollering on the Budget
Californians witness the challenges of running a progressive state every year as the legislature struggles to develop a balanced budget in the face of fundamental fiscal imbalance. The resulting budget is always a work of fiction, projecting more income than will come in, and promising more savings than will ever occur. A mid-year correction is always needed to account for this, but the charade goes on in all seriousness year after year. It’s a tragedy; it’s a comedy; it’s California.
Over 50 state budgets ago, in 1966, the legislature’s top budget leaders and Governor Pat Brown fled Sacramento for Palm Springs to try to sort out yet another horrific California budget mess. Nothing was getting done in soggy, cold Sacramento to fix chronic problem of revenues not covering ever-increasing government expenses, and since Brown would face the voters in November hoping to win a third term, the Democrat was adamant that the budget would be balanced without raising taxes.
Joining the senior legislators in Palm Springs was a young legislative staffer, David Doerr, who felt very lucky to get the chance to travel with the delegation, not so much because it involved a boondoggle trip to the desert, but because he actually hungered to see how California’s budget sausage was made. And see it he did. Ultimately, the budget was balanced on a number of gimmicks, including one that was unusually elegant: a switch to accrual accounting from cash. With the change, all the money due the state could be applied against expenses, no matter how far back it was in the pipeline. With this trick and a few others on the books, Brown was able to face Ronald Reagan in November armed with a balanced budget and no tax increase.
There were plenty of other gimmicks that came out of the Palm Springs session, but one really stuck in Doerr’s mind. Showing his uncanny ability to remember financial matters from the distant past in exquisite detail, Doerr told the tale in a small conference room at the California Taxpayers Association, the wall behind him lined with shelves displaying his 811-page tome, California’s Tax Machine, A History of Taxing and Spending in the Golden State. He spoke in the light, wispy voice of a man who had heard far too many politicians argue far too loudly, and his hair was as white as snow – an expected side effect of being the single Californian who knows the most about the state’s budget-making process.
“After not really getting much of anywhere in the negotiations,” he said, “one of the suggestions that came up, casually, just sort of a throw-away was, ‘Why don’t we just delay paying the state employees by a day so one pay period will go over into the next year?’ At first everyone was quiet and I wondered if they would really do something like that, but then they began to hoot and holler, laughing like this was the craziest thing they ever heard of.”
Doerr, who ultimately spent three decades as chief consultant for the Assembly Revenue and Taxation Committee before becoming the Chief Tax Consultant of the California Taxpayers Association, continued the story: “Jumping forward over 50 years, no one in the legislature hooted or hollered one bit when the idea of shifting one pay period into the next fiscal year came back, this time as a way to balance the 2008-2009 fiscal year budget. The legislature just did it, knowing full well their action would come back to haunt them a year later, when they would have to balance a budget that had one extra payroll period in it.” The subterfuge saved $1.2 billion for the moment – that’s what it cost per payday to pay the state’s bloated payroll.
The 1966 junket to the desert ended up not doing Brown any good, as Ronald Reagan drubbed him by 16 points that November, sweeping all but three counties in the state. And the 2008 roll-over of one payday didn’t help Governor Schwarzenegger either, and he declared upon announcing the inevitable budget revise that May, “We’ve run out of Band-Aids.”
“Gimmicks and band-aids aren’t new,” Doerr said. “There have always been battles over the budget and crazy balancing tricks as long as I’ve been here, and that’s been 50 years, more than one-quarter of the time California’s been a state.”
There’s a lot more good stuff in the chapter and in the book. If you haven’t already, be sure to fill in the box in the upper right, so I can notify you when this baby rolls off the press.
That will be a while longer, since I have four dedicated editors marking up the manuscript. They’re making some really great suggestions, so I’ll be doing a fair amount of rewriting before I can claim, finally, that it’s ready for the publisher. I’m still on target for a May publishing date.
Brown Wants New Anti-Business Super-Agency
Jan 6th
Governor Brown’s proposed 2012-2013 budget – rushed out yesterday after a staffer inadvertently published it – includes what we’d expect from a liberal democrat governor … and more.
Sure, it’s got more spending (7 to 9 percent more, depending on who’s crunching) and class warfare (higher taxes on the “wealthy,” defined as $250,000 and up). But its real surprise is buried deep down: a new super-agency charged with making life even more miserable for California businesses … if such a thing can be fathomed.
The Daily Caller picked up my column on the budget and the new super-agency this a.m. It’s worth reading the whole thing – and I hope you do, because they count clicks! – but here’s the relevant material on the new super-agency:
Brown is calling for the creation of the Business and Consumer Services Agency, a new mega-agency that apparently will “service” businesses in the way male farm animals “service” female ones. The agency will combine habitually anti-business departments handling consumer affairs, “fair” employment and various business licensing and inspection functions, and into this fetid anti-business environment drop “the newly restructured Department of Business Oversight.”
Restructured from what? The department doesn’t currently exist, so it appears that Brown is creating an entirely new arm of government, surrounding it with anti-business zealots and charging it with increasing the amount of oversight of California businesses that are already suffering from too much oversight.
What lunacy is this? The five and a half companies a week that are leaving California are sending the clearest possible signal that California is death to business, but Brown still proposes to make things worse. Meanwhile, his budget barely tweaks public employee pensions and keeps the California High Speed Boondoggle Rail Commission alive and spending.
Oh … I’d better explain that picture of Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit. It’s about this, the column’s conclusion:
In reality, though, the governor’s proposed budget means virtually nothing. Even as Brown was announcing it, a judge ruled unconstitutional the health care cuts the governor had proposed in his budget last year. Then the Democratic Senate leader lined up against it, pledging to fight proposed cuts to social services. And of course, the state employee unions and their armies of lawyers and lobbyists are busy today planning their campaigns to force Brown into more spending and more taxes — which is sort of like forcing Brer Rabbit into the briar patch, where he’s right at home.
This DUI I Can Understand
Oct 28th
Sometime in the nether-hours of very late night Thursday or very early today, State Finance Director Ana Matosantos was pulled over by one of Sacramento’s finest (and I don’t mean legislators or bureaucrats here) and written up for driving under the influence.
Matosantos was appointed to the thankless Finance Director job by Schwarzenegger and retained by Brown in one of his better moves since taking office. By all accounts she has approached her impossible job of grappling with the state’s $20+ billion deficit with intelligence and aplomb, character traits that were exhibited today when she offered up a quickly rejected letter of resignation, in which she took full responsibility for her actions.
In the strictest since she does have full responsibility, and contrition and penalties are appropriate, but really, is anyone buying that “I take full responsibility for my actions” line? This is the Finance Director of California for crying out loud! Don’t you think the legislature, with its failure to come to grips with the effect its liberal/environmental agenda is having on the state’s finances, is a bit to blame for her needing a drink? And the people of California, who elect spendthrift liberal legislators and pass propositions that make the state financially untenable – didn’t they figuratively pour her another glass? And the bureaucrats, who continue to ratchet up regulations even as the economy ratchets down, shouldn’t a mea culpa be heard from them as well?
I don’t support preferential treatment for anyone who drives drunk, but if ever there was anyone who was entitled to having a very small book thrown at them very lightly, it is Ana Matosantos.
Regulatory “reform” shows how in need of reform California is
Oct 12th
Governor Brown may try to make political hay out of signing three “regulatory reform” bills into law, but the bills (AB 900, SB 292 and SB 226) really serve best to illustrate just how grossly over-regulated California has become.
The official CEQA process chart
Take AB 900 for example. Please. It specifies certain types of projects that can qualify for expedited processing under the onerous, labyrinthine California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Actually, it will be more like projects that think they qualify for regulatory relief will be free to attempt to get through CEQA easily, but the reforms themselves are complicated and, worse, they’re untested by California’s green-leaning courts.
Among projects eligible for supposedly expedited processing are infill projects that are highly energy efficient. Never mind that vacant hulks of these sorts of projects clog the California cityscape, unrented and unloved. The California dream remains a suburban one of back yards and cars, and despite what urban planners and environmental activists preach, we’re not yet ready to emulate New Yorkers and live in cramped high-rises by train stations. Does AB 900 make it easier to process suburban subdivisions? Oh, please. Do you have to ask?
The bill also gives a special blessing to wind and solar energy projects that will pump intermittent blips of high-priced power into the grid, but turns a cold shoulder on any sort of energy facility – including carbon-free hydro power – that actually can be counted on to consistently provide affordable energy. Green manufacturing also gets a pass – but California is a state that needs jobs desperately, so why should the Solyndras of the world get a break when old-school manufacturing, which actually turns out products that compete in the marketplace, does not?
SB 292 gives a CEQA break to great big projects, as long as they’re football stadiums in downtown Los Angeles. Because, heck, if we steal the Packers from Green Bay we’ll have new green jobs. At least for guys wearing jerseys.
Finally, and probably worst of all, SB 226 lets you sort-of off the CEQA hook if you’re putting solar energy cells on the roof or over the parking lot of an existing building. Or, put another way, California regulators currently can force you to do a costly, time consuming environmental impact report if you want to do what they’re harping at you to do and install solar.
By relieving solar installations from at least some CEQA grief, the bill is actually telling us that up to now, California has treated the savior of our heated-up world, solar energy, as something so nasty and dirty that it requires careful study, deep analysis and endless public comment before the state’s hyper-regulators would let you do something as potentially damaging to the Earth Mother as actually use it.
If these bills represent the best the legislature can do to streamline regulations in California, the armies of lawyers, lobbyists and consultants (myself included) who make a fine living off of trying to tame the state’s regulatory beast have nothing to worry about.
A hat-tip to three members of that army – lawyers at Allen Matkins – for their review of the three bills.
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.
CalWatchdog: Jerry & His AG Want to Run Your Life
Mar 22nd
CalWatchdog editor Steven Greenhut paid me a nice complement yesterday: “I’m always glad to run your pieces.” And run one he did:
NEW: Brown, Harris Attack Suburban Growth
MARCH 21, 2011
By LAER PEARCE
The Santa Clarita Valley, a pleasant enough suburb of 250,000 in northern Los Angeles County, has the dubious distinction of the place most often targeted by terrorists over the eight seasons of the television show “24” – including the detonation of a nuclear bomb there during the premier of the 2007 season. Last Thursday, the Brown administration dropped its own nuke on the valley, trying to undo 10 years of regional planning in the name of saving the planet.
Hat-tip to The Deep Friar
Kamala Harris, the former San Francisco DA who never saw a criminal trial she couldn’t lose (which apparently is enough to get one elected California attorney general nowadays), sent a letter last week to the Los Angeles County planning department saying the Santa Clarita Valley Area Plan violates state law. She attacked the plan, which has been in development since 2001 as a blueprint for the Santa Clarita Valley’s future growth, because it doesn’t do enough to stop global warming by reducing the valley’s miniscule sliver of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Harris didn’t just send the letter – she publicized it through a news release and made sure it was posted on the Internet for all to see. “I think it’s kind of unprofessional to address the issues with the press rather than directly with the office you’ve been working with,” sniffed Los Angeles’ principal deputy county counsel, Elaine Lemke. [Continue reading]
Please click through. There’s more good stuff, and CalWatchdog wants to know you like reading about Crazifornia.
Crazifornia a Neal Boortz Reading Assignment
Mar 17th
Crazifornia got a great plug this morning as Neal Boortz included my Daily Caller column from yesterday among this “Reading Assignments” for the day:
Here’s the latest example of how Governor Moonbeam in California Brown is not going to deal responsibly with the state’s unfunded government employee pension liabilities. In other words: he isn’t going to stand up to the unions.
The piece, also linked in the post below, shows how the new contract for California’s prison guards shows Brown’s true colors, as the union suffered no losses in the latest contract, despite the state hemorrhaging money because of ridiculously lucrative public employee union wages and pensions. Thanks, Neal!
Daily Caller: Brown’s Hand Is Union Made
Mar 16th
As California Budget Battle Sequel XXXVIII (Or is it LXXIX? I get so confused.) heats up, I actually got so ballistic I wrote a Daily Caller op/ed just one day after the one you see in the post below. Note the headline – they’ve agreed to brand my pieces with the “Crazifornia” moniker. Very cool.
CRAZIFORNIA: JERRY BROWN SHOWS HIS HAND – AND ITS UNION-MADE
California’s 32,000 prison guards and parole officers — notorious for enjoying political clout wildly exceeding their meager numbers — tried to negotiate a new contract with former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger for four years but got nowhere. After just three months of negotiations with Jerry Brown, they got their contract, and hapless Californians got the clearest signal yet that Brown is not going to deal responsibly with the state’s unfunded public employee pension liabilities of as much as $500 billion.
The details of the new California Correctional Police Officers Association contract haven’t yet been made public and haven’t yet been analyzed by people who, unlike me, can tell a POFF from a PLP. (If you’re curious, POFF II contributions are suspended for two years under the new contract and one PLP will be granted every 12 months.) Still, it’s easy to read the net result.
In a letter yesterday to his board of directors, CCPOA executive director Chuck Alexander wrote, “The majority of the rights and protections that exist in our old MOU have been carried forward in this new MOU.”
Any objective California governor would realize the state can’t afford to do that. It’s not like this is a union that needs more coddling. It has grown at a rate of almost 1,000 members a year since its formation in 1980. It has a 70-person staff that includes 20 lawyers. Even that’s apparently not enough, since Brown’s new contract with the union includes even more new positions. You’d think California was a state that’s not in a fiscal crisis. [Continue reading]
Daily Caller: Unions Sinking Brown’s Budget
Mar 16th
The good folks at The Daily Caller ran this piece by me on March 14:
In California, Unions are Sinking Brown’s Budget Proposal
Talk about crappy timing for California’s Democrats: An oversized colon was sitting on the California capitol’s north lawn Monday, even as budget talks broke down and the powerful California State Employees Association and the California Teachers Association rallied on the capitol’s south lawn for higher taxes.
The colon was a publicity stunt by a Democrat assemblywoman from San Francisco, Fiona Ma, whose cause was fine even if her timing wasn’t. She put the 20-foot-long replica intestine on the capitol lawn to promote a resolution that declares March to be Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month, but it can’t help but be seen as a symbol for the constipation that’s blocking the state’s budget process, and the colon-full of bad news that’s hit California governor Jerry Brown.
The worst news for Brown broke early Monday morning when it became public that the “Gang of Five” Republican senators who were trying to find a middle ground with the governor have ended their budget talks. Both Connie Conway, the GOP Assembly leader, and a spokesman for Bill Emmerson, a Gang of Five senator, confirm that the talks are dead, but Brown’s camp insists they are continuing. [Continue reading]
Please do click through to read the rest. Not only is it brilliant and informative, but the folks at The Daily Caller want to know you’re interested in this stuff, so every hit helps.
Catching Up
Feb 5th
It’s been a busy week, so let me catch you up quickly with a couple of my op/eds – published here first – that have hit the big time.
The Daily Caller picked up “California’s public universities are the best. No really,” detailing Berkeley’s recent designation as the world’s (yes, the world’s) greenest college campus. The award was based more on sustainability practices than on its excellence in turning normal students into raving eco-warriors, but it’s all the same game, as the key paragaph of the piece points out:
Now don’t get me wrong. Green space is great and eco-sustainability policies are as cool as it comes. Whether there’s a looming eco-catastrophe or not (I think it’s “not”), nothing feels better than whipping out that re-usable grocery bag at Safeway. No, the problem with Berkeley’s newfound glory is that it’s the outgrowth of the deeper commitment to deep green brainwashing that goes on at UC campuses. If it weren’t for regents who have bought into environmentalist doctrine, a faculty that’s bought into environmentalist extremism, and a curriculum that ensures wave after wave of freshly minted environmentalist soldiers will graduate every spring and go into battle for Mother Earth, Berkeley would not be at the top of the green university rankings.
Read the rest here.
Also last week, California Watchdog ran “A clue to Governor Brown’s pension plan.” It relays an interesting last-minute appointment by Schwarzenegger: Cameron Percy to the California State Teachers’ Retirement System board of directors. What’s interesting is that Percy was one of the student authors of Stanford’s breakthrough study into California’s real pension liability, which they pegged at a deeply disturbing half-trillion dollars, so I explain why it’s suddenly the appointment to watch:
Percy’s nomination will give us a clear insight into Brown’s thoughts as he grapples with this dilemma. The appointment must be confirmed by the Dem-dominated Senate, but Percy may not even get that far, since Brown has the power to boot him and name his own appointee. How Brown acts on the appointment will tell California voters and public employee union bosses what they can expect from the new administration. It’s routine for incoming governors to replace the nominees of out-going governors, but there’s nothing at all routine about the Percy nomination.
Read the rest here. I really appreciate it when you click through. The more hits my op/eds get, the more it supports my efforts with Crazifornia.
