California Voices

Earlier this year, the Public Policy Institute of California issued a warning about a looming collision between California’s demographic and economic trends. Baby boomers, a huge proportion of the state’s workforce, are retiring in droves. The oldest are at least 70, the youngest in their early 50s. By 2030, the vast majority will not be […]

Voice of San Diego, a journalistic website that covers local politics, published a remarkable article late last month about financial shenanigans in the San Diego Association of Governments, a regional planning and transportation agency. Twelve years ago, the article said, SANDAG, as it’s known, decided to invest – or wager – millions of dollars from […]

The Wall Street Journal often features stories about multimillion-dollar homes and estates as they change ownership. One recent article should disturb California politicians, particularly Gov. Jerry Brown and legislators who recently enacted a new state budget. Here’s why. About 70 percent of the revenue for the $125 billion “general fund” portion of the budget – […]

For months, California’s Republican leaders had, with fingers crossed, hoped that the state’s top GOP officeholder, San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, would change his mind. They wanted him to run for governor in 2018, contending that with Democrats drifting leftward in reaction to President Donald Trump, a centrist Republican would have a chance to win. […]

California’s Capitol is under perpetual siege by lobbyists for hundreds of specific interest groups, each with an agenda of bills it wants enacted or killed. After each legislative session, many of those groups produce scorecards for their members, not only reporting how well their agendas fared, but how the 120 legislators voted on those agendas. […]

Notwithstanding his penchant for obscure philosophical aphorisms, sometimes delivered in Latin, at his core Jerry Brown is a largely conventional politician. Therefore, while he repeatedly denies it, as political protocol dictates, he certainly is concerned with the legacy he’ll leave when his record-long, bifurcated governorship ends 18 months hence. Of course, there will be the […]

The California Nurses Association made its political bones, so to speak, in 1999 when it persuaded the Legislature and a newly inaugurated, union-allied Democratic governor, Gray Davis, to impose strict nurse-to-patient ratios on hospitals. The organization, hoping to become a nationwide union, wanted to prove that its aggressive political tactics could deliver with a staffing […]

This letter to the editor is in response to Is California’s investment in needy students paying off? Few signs yet that achievement gap is closing CALmatters reporter Jessica Calefati relies on faulty research, narrow metrics and insufficient data to make sweeping generalizations and unsubstantiated conclusions about the effectiveness of California’s landmark Local Control Funding Formula. Calefati’s […]

Except for one year, two-plus decades ago, Democrats have controlled both houses of the California Legislature for nearly a half-century. Moreover, most members of the Senate are former members of the Assembly, so one might assume that the two houses are in synch and so duplicative that it might as well be a one-house Legislature. […]

Knowledge, it’s been said, is power. And that explains, in a nutshell, why those in public office fundamentally dislike, and often resist, revealing information to the voting and taxpaying public. That’s especially evident in Washington, where information is a commodity to be acquired, hoarded and traded – and only reluctantly shared with the larger public. […]