Crossposted on CalWatchDog

SACRAMENTO–Setting the stage for the Legislature to pass another phony majority vote budget, Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown presented a bleak picture of the state’s finances today during his May Budget Revision conference, and then challenged the press to come up with a better plan.

Despite his repeated claims that he was increasing austerity by calling for higher taxes, cuts to health and welfare programs, as well as a 5 percent furlough cut to state employees, Brown’s budget cuts will still not spare taxpayers.

The governor reported that California’s budget deficit has grown to nearly $16 billion, shockingly higher than the apparent guesstimates of $9 billion in January.

For business people in the city of Los Angeles, the outlook for sunny Southern California got a little dimmer last week.

That’s because Austin Beutner, the hope of business types, dropped out of the mayor’s race Tuesday. That leaves us mostly with a gaggle of career politicians who don’t know a business asset from a hole in Wilshire Boulevard.

In many ways, Beutner was an ideal candidate. He’s an outsider who had a very successful private-sector career, yet he’s a bit of an insider who spent more than a year as Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s first deputy mayor. He’s a moderate Democrat with pro-business leanings. He is wealthy enough not to be too beholden to those who would bankroll him.

The first annual California Economic Summit sponsored by California Forward and the Think Long Committee saw the answers to California’s economic and political problems rising from the regions of California. At the same time, there was a strong indictment against Sacramento leadership in its efforts to improve economic and governance matters.

Former United States Secretary of State, George Schultz, conference co-chair, said that not only should the conference attendees expect no help from Sacramento, “If Sacramento people find out we’re solving problems, they’ll come in and stop us.”

Crossposted in CalWhine

Here we go again. As frenzied as the tax-hike obsessives have been in recent months and years, Jerry Brown’s weekend warning that the 2012-13 budget is $16 billion short is sure to ramp up their intensity. So get ready for the media/Dem onslaught, folks, and prepare to be reviled.

Will Jerry Brown get lots of blame for his $4-billion-in-extra-revenue fantasy that he concocted last June? It’s made a dire situation much worse.

Will anyone in the media point out that contracts with gov unions that Jerry approved this fiscal year not only continue providing “step” increases for time on the job — in other words, just for showing up — but overall pay hikes?

Will anyone in the media point out that the people with power in this state have blocked all fundamental reforms — except the one (prisoner “realignment”) that allowed them to shift costs to the state government?

Welcome to the think tank game, Sam Blakeslee.

The state senator from the Central Coast, a moderate Republican who is not running for re-election, recently announced the formation of the California Reform Institute. His think tank will have a focus: supporting California lawmakers who want to work across the aisle on reform legislation that the legislature can pass.

Talk about a narrow mandate.

Is there anyone such a think tank could serve? Is there anything it could work on? Or is this a think tank about nothing?

The highest sales-tax rate in the nation belongs to California.  That rate is officially 7.25 percent.  However, local jurisdictions can add to that base rate.  For example, in most of Contra Costa County (east of San Francisco), the sales-tax rate is 8.25 percent.  In Concord (also in Contra Costa County), the rate is 8.75 percent.

Some Californians are calling for closing “the Internet sales tax loophole” by forcing Internet sellers to collect the same sale-tax rate as a California retail store.

The California Manufacturers & Technology Association is pulling tactics from the tobacco industry playbook, grasping at straws to spread misinformation about the state’s landmark clean energy law (AB 32) in “California’s Cap-and-Trade Auction Creates Billions in Needless Costs.”

Let’s take a look back: CMTA hated AB 32 when it was first developed. They formed the so-called AB 32 Implementation Group to pushback progress each step of the way. They supported Proposition 23 to avoid the standards and kill competition. And they’re still at it, dreaming up worse case scenarios to keep California addicted to the old, dirty, dying fuels of the past.

Interested in reading a book chock full of political wit and wisdom that took 150 years to write? The Black Book consists of anecdotes, stories, maxims, and humor collected by five generations of one prominent political family finally compiled by the most recent in the line, former United States Senator Adlai Stevenson III.

From a loose-leaf binder started by Adlai Stevenson I, vice president of the United States in the second Grover Cleveland administration, through the time of Adlai II, governor of Illinois and two-time Democratic nominee for president, to Adlai III, senator from Illinois, the family has been amassing information to help guide their political outlook and prepare for important speeches. The Stevenson family tree precedes Vice-President Stevenson with Adlai III’s great, great grandfather Jesse, a patron of Abraham Lincoln.

California Senate President Pro-Tem Darrell Steinberg countered my Wall Street Journal commentary California Declares War on Suburbia in a letter to the editor (A Bold Plan for Sustainable California Communities) that could be interpreted as suggesting that all is well in the Golden State. The letter suggests that business are not being driven away to other states and that the state is “good at producing high-wage jobs,” while pointing to the state’s 10 percent growth over the last decade. Senate President Steinberg further notes that the urban planning law he authored (Senate Bill 375) is leading greater housing choices and greater access to transit.

This may be a description of the California past, but not present.

Exporting People

Cross posted on City Journal

At a recent Culver City Unified School District board meeting, dozens of parents packed the chambers to protest an outbreak of campus bullying. Valentina Garcia, the mother of a first-grader attending the National Blue Ribbon–awarded El Marino Language School, stepped to the microphone and proclaimed that if ruffians had accosted her daughter for her lunch money, “my logical response would not be to write the bullies a check.” What made Garcia’s statement unusual was that she wasn’t describing the bullying of children—she was referring to a local education union’s intimidation of parents.