Posts tagged Progressivism
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.
Bureaucrats Censoring Sea Level Rise
Dec 1st
In Crazifornia, I make the point that the state is no longer a democracy, having been converted – without the people’s consent – into a technocracy. Here’s a bit of that from the manuscript:
Perhaps most to blame for the demise of California is the legislature’s determination to dodge accountability for its Progressive actions. To do this, it has turned California into a technocracy, transferring the real power from the people and the electeds to technical experts – well, supposedly expert – in the state’s many large and powerful regulatory agencies, commissions and boards.
It is these technocrats who go about imposing the will of the Legislature through obtrusive and costly regulations and fines that were never approved by any elected body. It is they who have the power and authority to force California to meet the lofty, idealistic goals of AB 32, the state’s quixotic cure-all for global warming. Not wanting to be blamed for all the dirty work that necessarily would follow passage of such an unrealistic and idealist bill, the legislature simply followed tradition and assigned the task to unelected technocrats further down the state government hierarchy, resulting in, among other things, California’s recent imposition of the nation’s first state-run carbon cap and trade system, without so much as a motion and second out of the legislature.
Of course, technocrats live pretty much unaccountable lives, so they’re free to choose whatever “techno” suits their fancy. And in California, that means we’re run by technicians in global warming orthodoxy, radical environmentalism and engineered social change. If facts get in the way, they can censor them – as they do with anything that runs counter to the Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming and all the AB 32 protocols that it spawns.
Case in point: SLR. No, silly, not a single-lens reflex camera – it’s sea level rise. If the sea isn’t rising, then the planet isn’t warming, so of course the sea level has to be rising. So state agencies endlessly document sea level rise and project it to go up and up and up – which means they can exert more and more control over the coast. (By “coast,” we really mean “California,” because that’s where you’ll find most of the state’s people, power and money.)
Here’s an example, courtesy of the California Ocean Protection Council (which is lambasted in Crazifornia) purportedly showing what sea level rise will be in Crescent City:
As you can see, the Ocean Protection Council wants you to believe the sea level on California’s north coast is surging up, and will be as much as two feet higher by the end of the century. The trouble is, it won’t be. It will be lower.
It’s got nothing to do with global warming and everything to do with plate techtonics. The plate Crescent City sits on is rising, so effective sea level is dropping. This is no secret, as the feds let us know in this counterpoint provided by the National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration:
Yup. Sea level is definitely dropping in Crescent City. But that doesn’t follow the AB 32 dogma and undercuts the technocrats’ grip on power, so in Crazifornia, Crescent City isn’t rising, the ocean is, and the facts are censored so the people can remain blissfully ignorant as the technocrats seize more power and authority.
It’s all just more Progressivism because, you know, the elite technocrats are so much smarter than us and so much better qualified to run our lives, and our government, than we are. Welcome to Crazifornia.
A tip of the Crazifornia hat to Neil Jordan, who provided the charts.
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.
