A wrapup of pre-election day links:
• Meg Whitman was on CNN today, talking about budgeting. Mostly she just talked about how she’s going to fire 30,000 state employees. That’ll show the fires who’s boss.
• Over at CalBuzz, political consultant Richie Ross has some interesting ideas for how to balance the budget. It’s a real doozy of an electoral process where both parties present a budget to be voted on every other year. The winning budget gets implemented. It’s a bit too much democracy for me, but on the other hand the voters would really have to own up to the problems facing the state. (h/t back to Carla Marinucci)
• More from Marinucci: her take on the GOP proposition debate between Poizner and Campbell.
• Pacific Ethanol just filed for bankruptcy, and based on the tone of this article I’m supposed to feel sorry for them getting shoved out of business due to low fuel prices. But prices are now rising again, and the governmet just made a major long-term investment in alternative fuels. The problem for Pacific Ethanol has always been the corn used to make it, which takes more energy than it saves. As the industry moves into lower energy-intensive fuels, fossilized companies like Pacific Ethanol bet on the wrong horse.
• Just a couple examples from last week on the state of the California economy. LA area port traffic remains way down year over year, and suburbs experiencing mass foreclosure are becoming ghost towns.
• The VLF goes up tomorrow for all cars with a registration date of 5/19 or later.
• Translink will finally go live on BART this summer… hopefully. The system cost $87 million to implement, but it really is quite important. It provides an interoperable ticket between BART, MUNI, AC Transit and Golden Gate Transit. BART Board member James Fang wants to use cell phone technology instead. Look, Translink has been something of the boondoggle, but let’s just get this system up and running finally before we mess with the next big thing.
• Brian Joseph at the OC Register finds some cuts are penny-wise and pound foolish.
Of course he’d be supportive of such a budget by ballot – it would line his pockets and countless other California consultants, Democratic and Republican.
Such a joke – but then again Ross was the consultant in 2006 that had an Assembly candidate client of his in a Bay Area district run against being a Democrat. Brilliant!
Fang’s “proposal” for cell phones is nothing more than a campaign lie he told in 2006, that he’s now using to drain hundreds of thousands of BART dollars , going on junkets to push this bullshit idea.
I detailed it at my site : gregdewar.com
Dueling budgets is idiotic, but, a suggested in California Progress Report (and also by me) passing the budget with majority vote and then having this being approved by the voters (or disapproved) is something that, if combined in an initiative, might pass the voters. The approval would take place every two years but budgets would continue to be on a yearly basis.
Really, we need to think about what we would give up to get back to majority rule. Giving the people a vote seems like one way this might take place.