Visionaries on Demand
Crossposted on City Journal In the divisive world of California politics, only one belief produces unanimous agreement: state government is irredeemably flawed. Beyond that agreement, however, the conversation returns to the usual polarized positions. Depending on whom you ask, California’s ongoing fiscal woes either owe to runaway public spending or to an insufficient tax burden on […]
Field of Schemes
Crossposted City Journal California, a state whose greatest innovation in recent years has been finding creative ways to inhibit economic growth, stepped out of character in late September: it went easy on a developer. Seated at a table outside the Los Angeles Convention Center, Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill expediting the resolution of legal […]
The Enduring Proposition 13
Cross-posted at CityJournal. Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is a man in search of a new résumé entry. A former city councilman and Speaker of the California Assembly, Villaraigosa—who in 2005 became the City of Angels’ first Hispanic mayor in modern history—has less than two years left before he’s term-limited out as chief executive of […]
A Permanent Fix For the Budget Crisis
Friday’s revelation that California has developed an eight billion dollar deficit only three weeks after the legislature supposedly produced a balanced budget ought to be a wake-up call for every citizen of the Golden State. Our fiscal problems can’t be fixed at the margins. Our elected representatives are trying to treat a cancer patient by occasionally trimming his fingernails.
There is a solution, however, and the state’s current economic crisis may provide a once in a lifetime opportunity to enact it. We need to entirely eliminate the spending mandates that virtually ensure that California will never be able to put together a coherent budget.
If this seems like strong medicine, consider the following: the California Budget Project’s conservative estimate is that about 66 percent of the state budget is completely out of the hands of legislators and the governor. In his masterful book “The Future of Freedom”, Fareed Zakaria puts the figure as high as 85 percent.