Is CTA Too Reasonable?

Journalist and Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation, Fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University and co-author of California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It (UC Press, 2010).

Wednesday, March 28th, 2012

The California Federation of Teachers came in for heavy criticism in recent months for shooting for the moon. Its Millionaire’s Tax ballot initiative, now dropped in a compromise with Gov. Jerry Brown, was seen as being too bold and ambitious in raising taxes on the rich, so much so that it would have imperiled the [...]

Can We Get the Money Upfront, Molly?

By Joe Mathews

Journalist and Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation, Fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University and co-author of California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It (UC Press, 2010).

Tuesday, March 27th, 2012

Molly Munger is 100 percent right when she calls out Gov. Jerry Brown for his dishonesty in selling his tax-hike ballot initiative as a measure that is 100 percent about schools. Brown’s measure is really about figuring out ways to raise money to reduce the budget deficit and to fund his peculiar effort to give [...]

Thanks, Kamala! A New Time Standard for Ballot Initiative Review!

By Joe Mathews

Journalist and Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation, Fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University and co-author of California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It (UC Press, 2010).

Monday, March 19th, 2012

Isn’t it glorious when our elected officials move faster than we expect in the name of innovation and efficiency? Yes, glorious and too rare. So let’s celebrate the wizardry of Attorney General Kamala Harris. Before last week, ballot initiative sponsors had to wait nearly six weeks after filing before they could circulate petitions. That time [...]

If This Is a War Against Teachers, Would Someone Declare War on Me?

By Joe Mathews

Journalist and Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation, Fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University and co-author of California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It (UC Press, 2010).

Friday, March 16th, 2012

The question of how teachers are evaluated is a big one these days, with changes to the evaluation process being put in place in California and across the country. The debate is accompanied by rhetoric about “a war against teachers,” in which they’re supposedly being scapegoated for the problems of schools. I’ve listened to this [...]

Could Circulators Take Their Revenge on Compromise Measure?

By Joe Mathews

Journalist and Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation, Fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University and co-author of California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It (UC Press, 2010).

Thursday, March 15th, 2012

Jerry Brown and the Democrats are about to need California’s petition circulators to pull out all the stops for him. The compromise tax initiative from Brown and a teachers’ union has come so late that circulators may need to produce an inhuman 1 million-plus signatures in three short weeks in late April and early May. [...]

The Five Worst Arguments in the Tax Initiative Battle

By Joe Mathews

Journalist and Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation, Fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University and co-author of California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It (UC Press, 2010).

Tuesday, March 13th, 2012

There’s violence, and then there’s the violence being done to reason during the fight over the three tax-hiking ballot initiatives. At this rate, the safest political bet in California is that all logic will be dead well before November. Which is why it’s so hard to pick out the worst arguments being made in the [...]

Stuck in the 2009 Time Machine

By Joe Mathews

Journalist and Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation, Fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University and co-author of California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It (UC Press, 2010).

Thursday, March 8th, 2012

People say you can’t get Republicans to agree to tax increases, and they’re right. But the same is true of Democrats. They can’t agree to tax increases either, at least not in California. For the second time in three years, an opportunity to raise more state revenues could be missed – and it will be [...]

If Proportional Representation Is Good Enough for GOP Presidential Race, Why Not California?

By Joe Mathews

Journalist and Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation, Fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University and co-author of California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It (UC Press, 2010).

Tuesday, March 6th, 2012

I’ve made the argument again and again here that the California Republican Party should embrace election reform that includes proportional representation. And I’ve got no takers – only a lot of polite criticism. Some think proportional representation is weird and European. Some Republicans seem to think election reform is a trick. Maybe they’re feeling burned [...]

The Wandering Wolf Speaks

By Joe Mathews

Journalist and Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation, Fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University and co-author of California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It (UC Press, 2010).

Friday, March 2nd, 2012

A lone gray wolf made headlines in recent weeks by wandering from Oregon into California’s Siskiyou County, making it the first gray wolf in the state in the wild since 1924. The movements of the wolf, known as OR7, had been tracked on the Internet – although the display of the wolf’s exact location was [...]

California Needs More Subsidies for Initiative Process, Not Less

By Joe Mathews

Journalist and Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation, Fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University and co-author of California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It (UC Press, 2010).

Thursday, March 1st, 2012

Among the many wrong-headed changes to the initiative process that are championed as “reform,” the persistent attack by Democrats on the filing fee for initiatives may be the most peculiar. Loni Hancock and others have been pushing legislation to raise that $200 fee on the basis that it doesn’t cover the cost of legal and [...]

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