“The best things in life are free, but sooner or later the government will find a way to tax them.” – Anonymous The most recent Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) poll shows that a majority of likely voters backs Proposition 55 on the November 8th ballot. Proposition 55, the “Tax Extension to Fund Education […]

“One swallow does not a summer make, nor one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.” – Aristotle Consider the following scenario: You’re having a discussion with an acquaintance on the quality of California’s roads and highways. You point out that California is below average […]

Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing. – Teddy Roosevelt Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature took the politically expedient approach to solving California’s income inequality when they enacted SB 3 (the minimum wage bill) into law on April 4th. Rather […]

Some have called Senate Bill (SB) 8, Senator Robert Hertzberg’s proposal to impose sales taxes on most services in California, needed tax reform. The basic argument made is that while California’s economy has shifted over the past 50 years from being based on agriculture and manufacturing to information and services, the state’s tax policy remains […]

But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade? – Alan Greenspan California has struggled the past six years to recover from the Great Recession. But recent economic statistics suggest that the Golden […]

I’ll admit it, I was more than a little dismayed to read last week’s Los Angeles Times article explaining away Toyota’s decision to move its Torrance headquarters to Texas. The Times turned what seemed to be a teachable moment on the excesses of California regulation into little more than a business school case study: “The […]