SACRAMENTO — The horrific Boston bombings have led to irrational calls for more security cameras and more police officers, with some Democrats absurdly using this tragedy to argue for halting the slight sequester-mandated cuts in federal spending growth. Never mind that police spending primarily is a local function. The bigger questions that Americans have rarely [...]

SACRAMENTO — California’s modern-day progressive Democrats keep crowing about the huge success they’ve had in taming the state’s budget deficit, thanks to Proposition 30‘s tax increases and other “reforms,” and now are championing the Jerry Brown model as a blueprint for the nation. Is that realistic? It’s one thing that other states have to deal [...]

SACRAMENTO — California’ Democratic leaders are giddy about the future now that they have gained everything they wanted in the last election — voter-approved tax increases and a two-thirds supermajority in both houses of the Legislature, thus rendering Republicans little more than an annoying irrelevancy that can no longer block tax hikes. Will Democrats just ramp up the [...]

SACRAMENTO — For advocates of less-intrusive government, finding the good news in the recent election is like looking on the bright side after your house has been wiped out by a hurricane: You never did like that floor plan, anyway, and this seems like a great opportunity to rethink your lifestyle. The political storm was [...]

Crossposted on CalWatchdog SACRAMENTO — Psychiatrists talk about the progressive stages of grief people experience after suffering a devastating loss in their personal lives, moving from denial to anger to bargaining (i.e., trying to strike a “deal” with a higher power) to depression and, finally, to acceptance. Political scientists ought to come up with a [...]

Crossposted Bloomberg News Efforts to rein in the power of California’s public-employee unions, and to reform out-of- control compensation costs that are eroding services and busting public budgets, came to a crashing halt on Tuesday in California. The idealistic hope that California voters would keep a firm grasp on their wallets, thus forcing the state [...]

Crossposted on CalWatchDog Gov. Jerry Brown has fiddled while Sacramento has burned, squandering his entire governorship on a pointless campaign to massively raise income taxes on the poor, middle class and wealthy Californians through the Prop. 30 sales and income tax hike. Now that the initiative’s support is failing — it’s below 50 percent according [...]

Crossposted CalWatchDog California taxpayers can hardly get a break. The Democrats who have ironclad control of the state government are constantly looking for ways to hike taxes and the state’s business leaders epitomize the crony capitalist model, as they throw average taxpayers under the bus and seek out special privileges for themselves. The California Chamber [...]

Crossposted on Bloomberg.com If you listen to the union-financed advertising campaigns, you would think that corporate interests control California’s capital and are bulldozing the interests of “working-class” taxpayers to promote conservative causes. In the minds of union activists, billionaires are conspiring to turn deep-blue California into a red zone. In particular, opponents of a state [...]

Crossposted on CalWatchDog California residents are depressed about the economy and see little hope for change in the near future, yet they seem more reluctant than ever to change the current high-tax, union-dominated political course that has led to the struggling economy. As the Field Poll revealed in July, “Californians have had an extremely gloomy [...]