California Voices

California’s top politicians and interest groups celebrated a few months ago when the Legislature passed a package of taxes and fees to pay for long-neglected improvements to the state’s transportation systems. The heart of the $5-plus billion per year revenue package is a 12-cent-a-gallon hike in gasoline taxes that took effect this month, just as […]

Jerry Brown, like most of humankind, is a mixture of positive and negative tendencies, and sometimes they run together. The governor is a very smart man with a remarkable and admirable ability to soak up information and synthesize it into political policy, but sometimes it morphs into an air of intellectual and moral superiority and […]

Three recent and seemingly discrete events neatly frame California’s political and legal war over whether the state’s six million K-12 students are being adequately educated. The conflict pits the state’s education establishment against a coalition of civil rights groups, education reformers and charter school advocates over the “achievement gap” that separates poor children, particularly Latinos […]

Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 novel “Ecotopia” described a mythical nation carved out of the Pacific Northwest region of the United States – Washington, Oregon and Northern California – on the premise of environmental stewardship. As summarized in Wikipedia, “The book is set in 1999…and consists of diary entries and reports of journalist William Weston, who is […]

It’s doubtful whether more than a relative handful of Californians have heard of the Unemployment Insurance Fund. It is, however, one of state government’s largest activities – and a case study in political mismanagement. Currently, California employers pay about $6 billion in payroll taxes into the UIF each year. And currently, the state Employment Development […]

Eric Bauman, the state Democratic Party’s newly elected chairman, made an appearance before the Sacramento Press Club last week and, of course, the blowup over sexual harassment in and around the Capitol was a hot topic for questioning journalists. Bauman made some news during the joint event with his Republican counterpart, Jim Brulte, by suggesting […]

Tax policy has become another conflict between Democrat-dominated California and the Republican-dominated federal government.

Some may have believed – or hoped – that the furor over sexual harassment in and around the state Capitol would soon fade away. Nope. The initial letter complaining about harassment, signed by 140 women, has exploded with many more names and a spate of personal accounts. The Los Angeles Times, which broke the initial […]

California's new gas taxes will do little, if anything, to relieve traffic jams. Most of the proposed improvements won’t be obvious.

That sigh you hear is Antonio Villaraigosa’s relief that Eric Garcetti won’t be running for governor next year. Garcetti, the current mayor of Los Angeles, would have been a strong contender vis-à-vis Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, the frontrunner in all polls. But the most immediate beneficiary of Garcetti’s weekend announcement of non-candicacy is Villaraigosa, his […]