To the links:
• San Francisco district attorney, and Attorney General candidate, Kamala Harris was in DC today to talk about gangs and gang violence protection.
• More from Carla Marinucci: Ron Nehring is doing his level best to attack McCain-Feingold. Because corporations need to express themselves too, and ol’ Ron hates to see a monolithic corporation pseudo-person held down.
• CalPERS says that it won’t start taking big gambles to recover losses from the recession.
• Dan Walters has a good column on the devestating appellate decision that gives even more teeth to the already odious Costa-Hawkins Act. Costa-Hawkins says that new rental units cannot have rent control. The latest decision says that cities cannot require developers to include a certain number of below market units. This is a huge blow to affordable housing activists, and really to the state in a time of a housing crisis. Costa-Hawkins should be reformed under a more progressive Legislature and a Democratic Governor come 2011. However, it is hard to be confident that it will happen given the balance of political power between developers and renters. And by the way, Jim Costa is still a Democratic Congressman from the Central Valley.
• California students are leaving high schools and entering universities unprepared to face the rigors of the coursework there. And should they get to college, the fees keep rising, multiple times in the same school year, even. That’s why some CSU students are suing the state, claiming that the second fee hike in the same school year amounts to a breach of contract. This bears watching.
• California finds itself off of Moody’s bond-rating watch list, but that’s hardly a ringing vote of confidence for our economic future. Meanwhile, the bond ratings themselves have not upgraded, showing how Wall Street eked out more interest payments from California even though the odds of getting paid back were never in doubt.
• Lots of empty office space in San Jose and across the state.
to find a decent set of economists who believe
D
RENT CONTROL is a GOOD IDEA?!
Here is a poll of economists showing what there is general agreement and disagreement about.
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com…
1. A ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available. (93%)
2. Tariffs and import quotas usually reduce general economic welfare. (93%)
3. Flexible and floating exchange rates offer an effective international monetary arrangement. (90%)
4. Fiscal policy (e.g., tax cut and/or government expenditure increase) has a significant stimulative impact on a less than fully employed economy. (90%)
5. The United States should not restrict employers from outsourcing work to foreign countries. (90%)
6. The United States should eliminate agricultural subsidies. (85%)
7. Local and state governments should eliminate subsidies to professional sports franchises. (85%)
8. If the federal budget is to be balanced, it should be done over the business cycle rather than yearly. (85%)
9. The gap between Social Security funds and expenditures will become unsustainably large within the next fifty years if current policies remain unchanged. (85%)
10. Cash payments increase the welfare of recipients to a greater degree than do transfers-in-kind of equal cash value. (84%)
11. A large federal budget deficit has an adverse effect on the economy. (83%)
12. A minimum wage increases unemployment among young and unskilled workers. (79%)
13. The government should restructure the welfare system along the lines of a “negative income tax.” (79%)
14. Effluent taxes and marketable pollution permits represent a better approach to pollution control than imposition of pollution ceilings. (78%)
_______
Ironically, if those CSU students should manage to win their legal battle over fees, they could well find themselves without a slot at the campus of their choice. Without those extra fees, the CSU will have to make even deeper cuts in the number of students it can accept. Right now, 40,000 applicants for the 2010 year won’t be admitted because the state is not providing sufficient funding to pay for them. Disallow the fee increases and that figure rises still more.
Remember too, that one third of that fee increase goes directly back to students as financial aid to help assure the the most needy of them can stay in school.
And don’t forget….even with a 30% fee increase this year, employees are taking 10% pay cuts in the form of furloughs.
And after all of that the Universities will have to make up tens of millions of dollars on their own in the form of hiring and salary freezes, sharp limits on travel and purchases, and figuring out how to pay for such unpaid mandates as health care and energy costs…which the state will not cover.
So go ahead….file that lawsuit and save yourself maybe $300 bucks. It will be a hollow victory at best.
i got the refund for the double-hike just last quarter, 6 years later.
i wonder when they’re going to finally make the overpaid administration types take a paycut (or, failing that, stop giving the raises while they screw everyone else on campus).
It is easy for politicans and administrators to extract more money from student, because they are preceived as “easy” targets with little political muscle. That’s why it is important for students to unite and fight for their rights. Therefore, I fully support the students’ suit against the state for breach of contract.
However, even more troubling is how we got here in the first place. Californian colleges and universities took a huge cut from the recent budget deficit. Of course, everyone has to share in the suffering, but should California throw away its future by making deep cuts in the educational budget? Well trained and well educated young people are the future of this state. Doesn’t the future of this state deserve a higher priority in the state budget?