Last week’s Los Angeles Times article by Patrick McGreevey titled, Lawmakers Test Brown’s No-Tax Resolve with Calls to Hike Levies, should focus the business community’s attention on considering a proposal I have suggested on this site before – an initiative constitutional amendment to allow for referendums on tax measures.

The Times article reported that 20 tax and fee measures were working their way through the legislature. True, Governor Jerry Brown has indicated he is not interested in signing any tax increases, but Brown won’t be governor forever. (Although it may seem otherwise to any Rip Van Winkle who’s been sleeping since the early 80s!)

When political consultant and pollster Steve Kinney passed away last week, the world of politics lost a well-known public opinion researcher and strategist and I lost a mentor and a friend.

If you walked into his old office at the Redondo Beach Pier, his walls were lined with pictures of dignitaries, presidents and world leaders. His clients were a who’s who of California politics, including Governor George Deukmejian, Governor Pete Wilson, State Treasurer Matt Fong, and many others.  I was 24 when I first visited his office, still naïve and idealistic, and to me, Steve Kinney was a rock star. Only rock stars could meet that many leaders, much less shake hands with them.

Apple Inc. is the world’s most profitable and admired company. It’s also the world’s biggest tax dodger. Reported the Wall Street Journal of a U.S. Senate grilling of CEO Tim Cook, “The Senate panel, in a report released Monday, said that Apple used technicalities in Irish and U.S. law to pay little or no corporate taxes on $74 billion over the past four years.”

Good for Apple. No reason to get robbed more than necessary. This also explains how Apple thrives in California’s notoriously high-tax environment: they dodge paying much of the extortion.

And who has most benefited your life in recent years? Apple, with its great inventions? Or the government, with its confiscations and abuses?

Sunshine peeks through the clouds, the cynics with all their money and power vanish to their private enclaves, double-dipping Dennis Zine roars off on his Harley to his posh desert hideaway never to be seen again — the costliest, most tediously painful, anti-climactic city election is finally over.

Happy days are here again in this wonderland called L.A.

Enjoy it while you can because come July 1 order will have been restored, Garcetti will be BFF with everyone from Bill Clinton to Brian D’Arcy, Galperin will have his marching orders from labor and the party, and Feuer will posture and preen to the same political pretenses without even being told.

California Gov. Jerry Brown and the California Chamber of Commerce shared some of the same views during their addresses to the 88th annual Sacramento Host Breakfast Wednesday.

Frederick “Fritz” Hitchcock, chairman of the board of directors of CalChamber, called for the state to reform the California Environmental Quality Act and to not spend one-time or surplus money on ongoing programs.

Brown also wants to see regulatory reform but said it will be difficult to achieve, given that it would involve revamping existing laws. “It’s a heavy lift,” he said.

The single most important issue that drove the Los Angeles mayoral election was union spending on behalf of Wendy Greuel, especially money from the public union within the Department of Water and Power. In a heavily Democratic, labor-oriented city, labor’s candidate lost. What does that portend for the long-term reforms on pension costs, tax reform, re-thinking how government services are delivered and other labor related issues?

It’s true that Greuel had solid support from the business community as well. In fact, she seemed to have many advantages going into the race. She claimed she was the candidate that could bring business and labor together for the betterment of the city. She was more closely identified with the voter rich San Fernando Valley. Some polls indicated that her plea to become the first female mayor of the city struck a chord with voters.

I’ve been on the road around the state quite a bit recently, and I keep bumping into former state legislators. With few exceptions, the former legislators talk about how much more they know now than when they were in – and say they could do better if they could go back.

So why not let them?

I’m not suggesting something so logical or reasonable – and politically unrealistic by the unreal standards of California politics – as eliminating term limits. But that doesn’t mean that former lawmakers couldn’t return and help the state legislature. Heck, many former legislators still do quasi-legislative work as lobbyists and consultants.

Mad Men is one of the few television programs, outside of the work-based reality programs, that takes employment and business seriously. Many of the storylines center on the business activities of Sterling Cooper Draper Price (SCDP), the advertising agency in New York at which Don Draper, Roger Sterling and the other main characters are employed.

The 1960s in which Mad Men is set was a different job market than the present in California and the United States. The California unemployment rate was below 5% throughout 1968, going down to 4.1% in December 1968. Our aerospace, banking, shipping and retail trade giants dominated their industries in the 1960s, and were able to offer the stable employment more widespread in the 1950s and 1960s California.

The appetizers have been cleared and it looks like the table is being set for possible reform of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). While there are a large number of issues that one can discuss when it comes to CEQA reform, I will limit my comments to how to stop abusive CEQA lawsuits.

The CEQA debate came to a head recently in the Senate Environmental Quality Committee. The debate featured a lot of legislators, a lot of bills and a lot of passion, but in the end it became clear that Senate Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg was going to control this debate with his bill, SB 731. CALA had been supporting legislation by State Senator Tom Berryhill as one possible vehicle for reform, but it was pretty clear that SB 787 was going to be grounded due to the makeup of the committee.

It has been 35 years since California voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 13, a measure that, as Governor Jerry Brown put it in 2011, “started the centralization of power” in the state. He should know because he was also governor in 1978 and helped oversee that shift.

At the time, Californians were enraged that their inflation-fueled home values were accompanied by rising local property taxes. The referendum limited those taxes to 1 percent of their property’s value.

At the time, advocates of Proposition 13 claimed it would limit government spending. They were wrong.