As Governor Brown searches the State budget for programs to cut, I would like to suggest an area that merits a hard look.

The State Senate took advantage of a Friday “check-in session” prior to the 3-day holiday weekend. Most folks in Sacramento know that a “check-in session” occurs on days when the Legislature doesn’t normally meet (such as Tuesdays and Wednesdays), and on a rare occasion such as a critical budget vote when Legislators may need to stick around in case they are needed. Fair enough.

The problem is, “check-in sessions” today have become nothing more than another gimmick through which politicians line their pockets at the taxpayers’ expense.

Case in point: Legislators weren’t needed last Friday, but they “checked in” anyway. Members of the State Senate signed in with a clerk, met for less than 10 minutes, and pocketed nearly $600 in per diem – money that covered their living expenses, meals, and incidentals for Saturday, Sunday, and Monday’s Martin Luther King holiday – days they weren’t even working.

It really can be a simple equation.

When businesses leave California, California loses jobs.

If California isn’t competitive, then businesses leave California.

Therefore, forgoing competitiveness costs Californians jobs.

A simple premise perhaps, but the nuances of this equation are lost in the Governor’s budget proposal. Eliminating Enterprise Zones and Redevelopment Agencies will greatly reduce California’s ability to attract or retain businesses, and further weaken our job market and economy.

Case in point is the recent announcement by Solopower, a San Jose-based green technology company. The company has decided to open its $340 million production facility in neighboring Oregon. While the firm has taken a tight-lipped approach to their process that led them to Oregon, it is easy to glean what factors may have played in their decision.

I have spent the last 20 years monitoring county government on the Central Coast. I have watched, first-hand, the destruction of our local and state economy, and indicate without reservation that the primary cause is malfeasance by elected officials and the special interests that put them and keep them in power.

During my career, the Board of Supervisors in each of the three counties was alternatively governed by board majorities deemed conservative and progressive.

The conservatives, when they comprised the board majorities, did no harm for the most part, but neither did they accomplish much good. When in the minority, their record could best be summed up as going along to get along.

The progressive majorities did much damage to our economy and also served to set us up for near bankruptcy as they gave away the store to government unions, while they crippled the private-sector economy as they carried out the legislative whims of extreme environmental activists.

The holiday season has just ended and it has been reported that retailers overall experienced an uptick in sales from the previous year. This would be good news for California’s small businesses.

Unfortunately, California’s outdated e-commerce laws allow for out-of-state, online-only retailers to thwart the law and deliberately refuse to collect the sales tax so that they can gain an unfair advantage over California small businesses. This has resulted in a less than sweet holiday season for the small businesses in our state.

The practical impact of this loophole is vast. Job creators are harmed as they are treated more and more like showrooms where customers determine what they want to buy and then purchase it online to avoid the sales tax. This translates to approximately a 10 percent advantage over small businesses located in our state.

If you have a taste for hypocrisy, the controversy over the
parent trigger law is delicious.

Particularly
when considered in light of a running controversy over a similar principle in a
different context, the so-called "card check" power for union organizing.

What are
these two things?

The parent
trigger is a new California law that allows anyone who gathers signatures from
a majority of parents at a school to demand big changes in the school, including
the takeover of the school by a charter company. While the regulations remain
to be worked out, the parent trigger is at this point mostly unregulated. The
petitions are not secret, not are the signatures. Parent organizers don’t have
to inform the school district or anyone like that. (And in the first test case,
in Compton, the organizers worked secretly).

"Card check" refers to the
legislation, pursued by the labor movement, to permit the organizing of
workplaces via the signing of cards by a majority of employees in the
workplace. This would be a change from the current federal system requiring
secret ballot elections.

The state Employment Development Department (EDD) periodically issues 10-year projections of fastest growing occupations in California and occupations with highest number of job openings. The most recent projections show some of the “knowledge” jobs among the fastest growing jobs in California. But the jobs with the greatest job openings remain the low tech, largely unglamorous jobs as personal and home aides, customer service representatives, waiters and waitresses, and retail salespersons.

Below is the chart of the 10 fastest growing occupations in California. Though issued in 2010, the projections cover the period 2008-2018.

Cross-posted at RonKayeLA.

It doesn’t take a brilliant sleuth like Sherlock Holmes to solve the Case of the Bankrupt City.

It’s not a mystery. You just have to look at the record of City Hall’s artless deals, its giveaways public moneydow to unions, billionaires, developers, Hollywood, contractors and a lot of other special interests with few, if any, benefits to the general public.

One argument made to persuade Republicans to provide the votes to put the tax extensions contained in Governor Jerry Brown’s budget on the ballot is that legislators should not prevent the people from deciding if they want to raise their own taxes.

Grover Norquist of the Americans for Tax Reform, the creator of the Taxpayer Protection Pledge signed by all Republicans save two, has said that even voting to place a tax on the ballot is tantamount to breaking the anti-tax pledge.

Others counter that if constituents want to express themselves on the tax increases and extensions then the people’s representatives should not stand in their way.

Would that argument also apply to other long-term budget fixes like a spending cap or pension reform? Shouldn’t the voters have their say on those as well?

So, here’s a solution to end the gridlock: Put it all on the ballot.