LA Kills ‘Gold Cards.’ Why Not Sell Them Instead?

The city of Los Angeles last week shut down a "gold card"
program that allowed certain officials to expedite challenges to parking
tickets.

The
decision was understandable as public relations, given the spectacle of favored
people getting special service and privileges. But it might not have been the
right move for a city desperately in need of new revenues.

A better
solution: let any Angeleno who wants this kind of service purchase a "gold
card" instead. You pony up extra to the city treasury, you get better service.

Yes, it’s
not ideal. It’s not egalitarian. But it recognizes fiscal and political
realities. The wealthy and well connected are going to get special help any
way. So make them pay for it.

The state
and other local governments might consider doing the same thing.

U.S. Supreme Court to California: You’re Ungovernable

In ordering the release of tens
of thousands of California prisoners, a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court sent
an unmistakable message to this state and its citizens: you are unable to
govern yourselves.

At a couple of points in the
decision, the opinion, by Anthony Kennedy, a Californian, departs from the
subject of prisons to comment on the bleak political and fiscal reality of the
state.

The prisons, he writes, are the
product of a state where governance is broken: "In addition to overcrowding the
failure of California’s prisons to provide adequate medical
and mental health care may be ascribed to chronic and worsening budget
shortfalls, a lack of political will in

favor of reform, inadequate facilities,
and systemic administrative failures."

Don’t Outlaw My Penis, San Francisco. Tax It.

In case you missed it, a group of San Franciscans has
qualified a ballot initiative to outlaw the circumcision of infants in that
city. They say that infants are being coerced into participating in a procedure
that carries health risks and is akin to female genital mutilation in Africa.
With activists in Santa Monica poised to follow suit, one can safely presume
that a local ban is just a first step in a campaign for a statewide
prohibition.

Now you can pinch yourself. Yes, you’re not dreaming.
Although I sometimes make jokes and use techniques of fiction in this space,
the San Francisco anti-circumcision initiative is real and is headed to the
ballot.

So where does one come down on this topic? Please pardon me
if I don’t get into an in-depth discussion of the health debates. I’m not a
doctor, nurse or health expert. And I’m no religious scholar, so I can’t
comment with any authority on religious objections to a circumcision ban.

One Way to Help Signature Gathering and Ourselves

The state legislature is full of proposals to make the
onerous and expensive process of signature gathering more onerous and
expensive. One bill would mandate special badges for gatherers. Another would
change how they are paid – from per signature to hourly – in a way that would
add to costs and reduce the number of measures.

Such
proposals are divorced from the realities of signature gathering. And that
central reality is that it’s getting more difficult to gather signatures.
Because there are fewer places to gather.

That’s
because private companies and public agencies alike have worked to restrict the
use of public space. Signature gatherers now find it harder than ever to
circulate petitions outside of grocery stores and big chains. The post office,
which should be a place for signature gathering, has fought for years to limit
petition circulators. And while old court decisions protect the right to gather
at traditional malls, those traditional malls are dying, and their
replacements, town square-style places like the Grove, bar signature gathering.
So do big-box stores like Costco (except, of course, when Costco is behind an
initiative, like Gov. Schwarzenegger’s 2004 workers compensation reform.
Hypocrisy, it seems, also comes in family-size packages).

Brown Boxes In Own Party

For all the headlines about how Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget
gave a funding boost to schools, the real news of his May revise press
conference was his full-throated, unqualified endorsement of a spending cap.

Brown
didn’t get into any details, but he said clearly that a cap was needed to give
voters reassurance that if they were to raise taxes, the extra money would be
spent prudently. "We need a spending limit. We definitely should put a cap in,"
he said, adding: "That would give voters assurance."

This
statement puts Democrats in a box. They’ve pushed for temporary tax extensions
that are clean, without a spending limit attached. In 2009, when presented with
a rainy day fund that might limit spending in combination with temporary tax
extensions, many Democrats and unions voted against the whole package. They
hated spending restriction more than they liked the taxes.

Cancel This Election

The sample ballot from the city of Los Angeles came in the
mail about 10 days ago. Today, I opened it, but something was missing.

Oh, yeah.
An election.

Only after
my third time through did I notice there is something for me to vote on next
Tuesday, May 17-a run-off contest for a Los Angeles Community College Board
seat between Lydia Gutierrez and Scott Svonkin. I follow California politics
for a living but could not pick either one out of a police line-up.

All the
other city contests were settled in the first election back in March. There are
no ballot measures. So this is community college race is all that is left for
those of us in the mid-City area.

The Pension Debate Is Small and Boring

People in Sacramento have a real talent for turning what
could be big, interesting debates into narrow, tit-for-tat snooze fests. The
latest example of this capital city myopia is the pension debate.

Each day,
that debate gets narrower, with very little discussion of the nature of
pensions themselves. On one side, those skeptical of pension benefits and their
costs accuse public workers and their unions of selfishness and trying to
bankrupt the state. The union side responds with its own ad hominem attacks,
questioning the financing and political ties of the groups that support the
pension skeptics.

This is
frustrating to watch, because the pension debate should be big. It touches on
virtually every significant economic debate in the world today, among them the
challenges of longer life spans, the nature of innovation and job creation, the
structure of the public sector, the regulation and performance of the financial
services business, and the welfare state.

Are Harris and Newsom Really the Democratic Future?

Who will emerge as California’s most important Democratic
politicians over the next generation? I don’t know. But I’d be willing to bet
good money that Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris are not the answers to that
question.

A Los
Angeles Times story
this weekend suggested the opposite: that Newsom and
Harris are leading a new generation of California politicians who will take
over from the trio of septuagenarians (people in their 70s)  – Jerry Brown, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara
Boxer – who preside over the state’s hardest political offices.

It isn’t hard to divine why such a
story was written. Each was just elected to statewide office. Both Newsom and
Harris are attractive and charismatic. Each is great at grabbing attention.
Both can lay claim to some policy innovations during their tenure as San
Francisco elected officials.

Me, The Radical

The Sacramento Bee called
me a "radical"
this past weekend. Or more precisely, a Bee writer described
my book California Crackup, co-authored with Mark Paul, as "a radical but well-
argued repair manual for state governance."

I was
delighted to be called a radical. Because it’s sort of sexy and interesting.
But as I chewed it over, I began to feel bad about it, because I’m not sure I
deserve such a compliment. (Though that doesn’t mean I’m not sexy, dammit).

That’s
because there’s nothing radical about what we suggest in the book. In fact, the
thesis of our book is that California needs reform because it is perversely and
radically governed. This state has a government unlike any other state.
Bizarrely, Californians have combined majoritarian elections, a consensus
governing system of so many fiscal rules that almost any minority or interest
can block any significant budget change, and the world’s most inflexible system
of initiative and referendum. The resulting governing system is unlike nothing
else on planet earth.

Get Well Soon, Jerry Brown

One benefit of having a political system as stuck as
California’s is that Gov. Jerry Brown should be able to think of his health
first and take as much time as he needs to rest up and recover from the removal
of a cancerous growth – the very common basal cell carcinoma — on his nose.
Get well soon, governor. Though your office says you’re still working — but
not going out in public for a few days – you should feel no shame about getting
whatever rest you need.  Everyone, from your
allies to Republican legislators, will be in the very same place that you left
them when you get back.

That said,
I am a little bit curious how much attention will be paid to the way the
administration handled this announcement.

A couple
Thursdays ago, on April 21, Brown made an appearance in Santa Clarita with a
small bandage on his nose. This was the first Brown event I’d been to in a
couple weeks, and I asked reporters if this was new. It was. When a Sacramento
Bee reporter asked about the bandage, Anne Gust Brown said the governor had had
something removed but it wasn’t cancerous.