All posts by Brian Leubitz

Budget

The GOP is Scared of Their Base, Democrats Loathe Theirs

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Unlike the Democratic Party Conventions, the Republican party meets twice per year in their big shindigs.  They do tend to be a little smaller events, but just as rowdy.  Now, there is something about the Republican base that just isn’t the case on the left.  As commentators as diverse as David Frum and Glenn Greenwald will tell you, Republicans are scared of their base, Democrats hate theirs.

It’s true in DC, and it’s true in Sacramento.  Let’s just take a few samples: Democrats are busy cutting into long-term progressive programs.  Programs that work, and save us long-term money.  For example, look at Cal-Works.  In response to the seemingly endless calls for “welfare reform”, we have proven that using best practices and sociological research, you can build a strong and beneficial program.  It has helped rebuild many families, and heck, even the LA Times wants to see funding restored.  Or look at Medi-Cal, or higher education funding.  Time after time, Democrats are negotiating with themselves on how we devastate the state.

Now, look at the Republicans, where are they are terrified of their base.  Heck, Tony Strickland started the Tea Party “Taxpayer’s” caucus just to show his fealty.  Perhaps it is wise, after all, their base goes after their electeds for even putting taxes on the ballot:

The California Republican Assembly, a hard-line conservative group, has introduced a resolution for consideration at the party convention in Sacramento to censure lawmakers who vote in favor of putting additional taxes on a special election ballot.

Calling them “traitorous Republicans-in-name-only,” the resolution also calls for their resignation, would put the party’s support behind any recall effort against them and would prohibit the party from helping those lawmakers in future elections.(SF Chronicle)

And as Anthony Adams learned last year, you very well can be forced to hit the road before your time is up.  Now, perhaps this changes under Top 2 if you get two Republicans into a general election, however, given how these elections generally run, that isn’t likely to happen.  Very few Republican districts are really THAT Republican where two Republicans would meet in the general election.

And so, the Republicans continue to live in fear of their base.  On the left, Democrats can blame Prop 13 and the obstructionist Republicans for everything.  No need to cater to your base when you have a mushy middle that can win you elections.

Meanwhile, Brown seems to think a budget deal will happen this week.  I, however, am not so convinced that he can get sufficient votes in both houses.  It may take more time, and it may take another nasty item on the June ballot.

Or a majority vote measure.  Pick your poison, I suppose.

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Prop 13 and the Endless Loop

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Over the weekend, the authors of California Crackup (a worthy read, by the way), penned an op-ed in the Bee about Prop 13.  It wasn’t my traditional attack on Prop 13, but more of a “stuck in a rut” argument against it.

And here’s a final irony: Nearly every proposal to realign local-state responsibilities, with the exception of Brown’s redevelopment plan, leaves the central pillars of this system in place.

Real realignment requires a total unwinding of this system – and a return to the pre-Prop. 13 rule that local governments should themselves decide on the taxes for the programs they fund.

Ask yourself: Would county boards grant lavish retirement benefits to public workers if they had to raise the tax rate to pay for them – and then defend it to voters? Would city councils approve lavish redevelopment subsidies if they had to justify the tax increase to pay for them?

In the jargon of computer programmers, the Prop. 13 operating system is an endless loop. We are all living in the crash.(SacBee)

I suggest a read of the entire piece, but don’t worry, there are plenty of folks to stand up for the status quo.  Joel Fox responds by remembering how awful property taxes were, though he doesn’t seem to have quite as sharp of a memory for the budgetary stability back before Prop 13.

Prop 13 made the business of government just ridiculously hard.  It made representative democracy useless, and left us to the wolves of direct democracy in an era of a changing media landscape.  Great for FoxNews, not so great for good governance.

If Brown is successful in getting the budget passed, he might bring a temporary reprieve.  However, it is on the backs of those who can least afford it.  Meanwhile Prop 13 and its progenitors don’t even allow localities to decide for themselves how to run their communities.  If we are to experience another California renaissance, we must do something about Prop 13.

Budget

Tick. Tock. Time is Running Out On a Compromise

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Jerry Brown desperately wants an election for the beginning of June. However, in order to make that happen, there has to be some sort of agreement on how the Democratic majority is going to subjugate itself to the whims of the extremist Republican minority.  So, the so-called “Republican 5,” a group of 5 Republican Senators who consider themselves open to putting taxes on the ballot, spent the weekend at Jerry’s place to see if they could work something out.

Spoiler Alert: They didn’t:

Tom Harman, one of five Republicans who negotiated with Gov. Jerry Brown, said Monday that budget talks broke down this weekend over fundamental disagreements on a permanent spending cap and pension changes.

The Huntington Beach Republican said the group has no more talks scheduled with the Democratic governor. He believes talks will shift either to a “Big 5” discussion between Brown and the four legislative leaders or that Democrats will pursue a majority-vote budget solution.

Harman said the five Republicans wanted ballot measures that would impose a permanent hard cap on future state spending and reduce pension benefits for current state workers. Those issues were non-starters for Democrats.(SacBee)

Apparently it isn’t that they were willing to consider something reasonable, they were just the advance team to get Republican will like they have done for every single year during the budget process.  This way, you can have Tony Strickland, the guy who beat his Democratic opponent by a few hundred votes, can form his Teaparty group and claim that they will never even let voters vote, while still playing the same old game that they have been playing since 1978.

They are trying to go all Scott Walker on the state, but they are even bolder.  At least Walker was democratically elected.  Sure, he didn’t have a mandate to do what he did, but these guys don’t even have the benefit of even winning a statewide election.  In a year that was supposed to be a Republican sweep, they couldn’t even push one Republican across the line.  And somehow they are trying to pull off what is essentially a legislative coup.

You can’t say they don’t have some serious gumption.  You can say, however, that they lack a basic sense of fairness and right and wrong.

Back in 2009, I had the good fortune to help defeat Prop 1A, that included the spending cap.  And despite the corpse of Howard Jarvis claiming that was all about taxes, I can assure you that the Progressive base was none too enthused about it.  Prop 1A had no constituency because it was too far to the right, and too far to the, um Arnold Schwarzenegger.  By 2009, it was clear that Arnold had no constituency, and yet the Democrats, for the most part, proceeded hand in hand with him.

And while the hard spending cap was defeated, we still lost a lot in that election.  Quite possibly, we may have taken the idea of real revenue enhancements, oil severance, a revised and more progressive income tax structure, that sort of thing, and pulled right off the table.  We are now in the position that Brown is doing his best to get the best deal he can, and he’s just hoping for some extensions of the regressive taxes that we already have in place.

So now we are are down to the wire.  If we are to get an election for June, we’ll need to have something passed through the Legislature with in the next week, ten days at the latest.  A majority vote measure carries a lot of risk, and Brown knows this.  Whether we are forced to walk the line, we’ll know in a few more days.

Incidentally, Brown also announced the date of the CA-36 special election.  The primary, which will feature at least 3 candidates from the two major parties, will be May 17, and the top two vote getters will meet in a rematch on July 12.

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Little Hoover Makes Little Sense

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Back in February, OC Progressive wrote a bit about the Little Hoover Report.  Their suggestions on “reforming” the pensions system were so off-base and ill-informed, that Treasurer Lockyer said at the time that they were “long on rhetoric and short on thoughtful analysis.”  Well, he’s tried to put some of that analysis into the system, and into the commission’s suggestions about the system.  

Over the flip you’ll find the full 6-page letter about the Little Hoover reform suggestions, complete with Lockyer’s findings of flaws in the report.  I highly suggest you read it, he held no punches.

But the nub is this, the Little Hoover report is thinly sourced and poorly researched.  Its conclusions come more from the Koch Brothers handbook that is running around the mainstream media than any actual data.

LHC Pension Report Comments 03-11-11

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Once Again, We Don’t Have a Spending Problem

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And we never did.  A story by Bloomberg today complains about the long term spending increase that would be expected under Brown’s budget:

Governor Jerry Brown’s proposed $12.5 billion in budget cuts won’t prevent California’s spending from increasing 31 percent during the next five years, according to figures from his budget office.

Expenditures would rise to $111 billion by 2015 from $84.6 billion in the fiscal year that begins July 1, under Brown’s plan. A third of the increase is required by the constitution to bolster education. Much of the rest is for projected growth in health care and welfare, and to make up for lost stimulus funds, Brown’s office said.

Republican opposition threatens to derail Brown’s plan to repair the financial strains that have left California with the biggest deficit among the U.S. states and the lowest credit rating. He wants to offset even deeper cuts to schools and the poor by retaining $9.3 billion a year in higher taxes and fees that are otherwise due to expire.(Bloomberg)

First, apparently we have to take care of the credit rating ridiculousness yet again.  Put it this way, anybody laying any seeds of doubt as to whether we will pay our debt should go to Treasurer Lockyer or the Oracle of Cruickshank.  Our constitution does not allow for a default.  For better or worse, even if we have to cut back spending to only K-12 and debt, we would pay it.  We have to.

Yet, that doesn’t stop the rating agencies from spewing their nonsense.  What exactly were they doing in 2005 when their cronies were paying them for those AAA ratings on mortgage-backed securities? And yet, despite the tails of gloom, we haven’t yet defaulted, and we will not default.

The other side of this is spending, as if we should be shocked by a $111 billion budget.  Let’s put it this way, we have had budgets in that range in the past.  And we will have them in the future. Given our state’s size and growth, these are hardly shocking numbers.  These numbers would still put us solidly in the middle of state spending per capita.

It is only this rampant Austerity Fever that has taken over this nation.  Where once California and the nation grew through a philosophy of a rising tide lifts all boats, instead we have become a nation that focuses on personal wealth accumulation.  We now apparently find it so repugnant to have the government band together resources to support our fellow Americans that we freak out about a really pretty reasonable level of spending.

Perhaps those days are gone by, Reaganism and its aftereffects might just have gone ahead and done in the shared vision of prosperity that we once overwhelmingly shared.  It was the vision of Camelot and the Great Society.  So much for that.

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California Should Follow Illinois: Repeal the Death Penalty

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Just do it already. We haven’t executed anybody in years, we don’t have the chemicals to do it according to our own protocols, and it’s mind-blowingly expensive.  Oh, and there’s the fact that it is an unjust and corrupt system, where the poor are always handicapped.  I bring this up today for a specific reason of course.  It seems that the Illinois legislator that sponsored the legislation repealing the death penalty has heard some news:

Gov. Quinn plans to sign landmark legislation today that will repeal the state’s death penalty, said a key House lawmaker and sources briefed on his plans.

State Rep. Karen Yarbrough (D-Maywood), the bill’s chief House sponsor, said she received notification from a Quinn legislative aide late Tuesday afternoon that the governor would enact the death-penalty abolition bill Wednesday morning.

“For Illinois, I think we’ll be on the right side of history,” (Chicago Sun-Times)

Over the next five years, the death penalty will cost us at least a billion dollars, and frankly that estimate is probably conservative.  The expenses of the death penalty are stashed all across the budget, a bit for death row here, the death chamber there, and pretty soon you are talking real money.

At this point, we know that we have killed innocent people.  Sure, you could argue, as those in the system frequently do, that they probably did something else, but the heart of the matter is that we are allowing the state to go further than simply unjust kidnapping (wrongful convictions of non-capital offenses) straight to murder.

Looking past the morality issues, and the irony surrounding those who advocate for a culture of life being so supportive of death, there simply is no way to implement the death penalty in a way that eliminates the racial and socioeconomic biases inherent in our justice system.  Our justice system may be the best we’ve got, but it’s far from perfect. Staking lives on it seems absurd at this moment in history, after everything we’ve learned.

Sure, many will not be impressed by the moral argument, but the fact is that there are many reasons to end it, and few to keep it.  It’s deterrent effect is shaky at best and executions each cost millions of dollars.  At a time of scarce resources, we shouldn’t be wasting them on an ineffective and immoral program like the death penalty.

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How Worried is “Big Business” About the Monster They’ve Created?

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For nearly fifty years, the Corporate Right has been waging a war against government.  It makes sense actually.  The only legal duty that they owe is to their share holders. And if they can pay no taxes for years and years, then, well, that’s what they should do.  It’s a problem of the corporate form generally.

Now, on the other hand, the tech industry has always been a little bit different.  They rely heavily on a well-educated work force (and more than a few H1B visas) and infrastructure.  

Carl Guardino, the president and chief executive officer of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, gave unqualified support to Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget and tax extension plan Tuesday at the Capitol, urging legislators to quickly come to an agreement to close the $26.6 billion deficit.

Guardino, SunPower CEO Tom Werner and Varian Medical Systems CEO Tim Guertin met with Brown at his office Tuesday. Later, Brown met with leaders of the Hispanic and Black chambers of commerce and the California Small Business Association as he continues to try to rally support among business leaders.

“What we’re urging (legislators) to do is make a strong deal that’s true to your principles but calls for compromise and consensus,” Guardino said. “Silicon Valley knows the art of the deal. There is a deal here.”(MediaNews)

So, sure tech companies may be more worried about a government collapse than your, say, oil company.  However, at some level, you would think it would raise a more basic concern about a government that is able to preserve property rights, allow for a free flow of commerce, and provide for general security.  After all, we need to have a fairly large of skilled labor if we are really going to rely on an “information economy.”  

And, there are other business groups that are seeing this.  Of course, they are still aiming for “pension reform” and slicing the knees out from under public employees, but they see we can’t simply revert completely cease funding the government.

However, this all depends on a lot of “rational actors” in an area where there don’t always seem to be enough of those types.

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March 8 Open Thread

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Links:

* The Census Data came out today. I haven’t had the chance to review it, but well, there’s lots of it. The state has grown by a couple million since 2000 and has changed its composition.  More details as I analyze a bit further.

* Tomorrow, the owner and the “safety officer” of the labor company that was monitoring the conditions during the death of Maria Isabel in 2009 are expected to settle on a plea deal that will get them no jail time whatsoever.  UFW has additional details on the story as well as a contact form to send the DA an email opposing this deal.

* Yay, the Senate will pass the cuts on Thursday.  Sooo…hurting the middle and lower class, check.  Still waiting on where the “shared sacrifice” part comes in.

* We had been getting some good news on the revenue front.  Turns out it might just be that more money was withheld than in previous years, and tax refunds are bigger than expected.

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Dumbest Quote of the Day: On HSR

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Rep. Kevin McCarthy:

If you can’t prove it’s viable from a business plan, it’s not a (project) the government should be funding (SacBee)

I’m not sure it is worth going any further than that, but I will. Rep. McCarthy said that about HSR, while at the same time his central Valley Congressional cohorts are saying that the money approved for HSR should be put towards widening Highway 99.

Can we think about this for a while? He’s criticizing rail for not making enough money back.  When exactly have roads ever paid for themselves?  When we do toll up roads, people are outraged (occasionally justifiably).

With gas prices at or above $4, can we just finally quit the ridiculous canard that roads are a good long-term solution?  Either we work on making HSR happen, or you need to present an actual solution that both addresses the needs of a state of over 40 million people as well as climate change.

Sticking your head in the ground and hoping for the 1980s to come back doesn’t actually help California.