Steinberg Suit Won’t Make Much Difference
Democrats couldn’t ask for a better title than “Steinberg vs. Schwarzenegger” for the lawsuit challenging the governor’s right to blue-pencil nearly $500 million in health and welfare spending from last month’s budget revision deal.
It’s short, snappy and leaves no doubt that Darrell Steinberg, the Democratic leader in the state Senate, is willing to stand up to California’s movie star governor to protect the safety net for the state’s most vulnerable residents.
That’s stirring stuff that will likely show up in plenty of Democratic Party fund-raising pleas this year. But, win or lose, the suit’s not going to make much difference to a tapped-out state.
Even if the case is decided quickly and even if a judge rules that the line-item vetoes were illegal, where’s the $489 million to restore that funding going to come from?
Of Icebergs and Healthcare
In 1912, aiming for speed and ignoring iceberg warnings was a poor strategy for the Titanic. In 2009, aiming for universal health insurance and ignoring cost warnings is equally dangerous. The Congressional Budget Office has frigid warnings on some reform efforts: estimates of as much as $1.6 trillion in new costs over 10 years, perhaps without even covering everyone.
At $2.6 trillion per year and rising, healthcare spending is a threat to federal and state budgets, and big business. It’s already a nightmare for small business. We all want broader and better coverage, but reformers must ask: How can we first contain costs?
Members of Congress will come home to California in the next week or two. Your wallets and your health depend on what Congress does when they go back to Washington in September. Congress could take your money or leave more for you to spend. They can finance healthcare reform with taxes that crush small businesses, or they can adopt responsible reform that allows small businesses to survive and create new jobs. They can empower patients and providers to make life-and-death decisions themselves, or they can hand that power over to unelected bureaucrats.
A Window Into State spending
This article was co-authored by Pedro Morillas
Readers of this column may do a double take to see CALPIRG and the
Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association advocating an identical
position. But when it comes to government transparency, we are
surely reading off the same sheet of music.
There is little debate that confidence in California government is
at a historic low. But even though a budget resolution has been
reached, a big challenge for Sacramento in the months ahead will be
to restore the trust that has been squandered.
Amid the dark fiscal news, one ray of hope coming from the budget
fiasco was the governor’s executive order to put government
contracts online and make them searchable by the public. Budget
transparency, while not a new idea, can be revolutionary. Public
oversight of the state’s purse is a cornerstone of democratic
government and provides an added incentive for those in government
to spend tax dollars as efficiently as possible. Transparency is an
important part of any real budget reform.
Another day in California, another senseless regulation
California is viewed as a leader in energy efficiency, but are all regulations created equal? In 2007, the California Energy Commission (CEC) proposed giving public utilities the ability to change the temperature in homes and businesses statewide via remote control to prevent strains on the state’s power supply. Thankfully, Californians recognized the obvious privacy implications of this regulation, not to mention the fact that it was economically counterproductive. Public outrage was swift, causing the CEC to drop the proposal.
But it seems like history is already repeating itself. The CEC is now proposing an arbitrary regulation on television electricity usage that would take 25 percent of LCD and plasma big screen televisions – and 100 percent of plasma TV’s over 60 inches – off the market entirely. According to a recent Resolution Economics, LLC study, if enacted, this proposal could destroy 4,600 jobs and cost California $50 million a year in lost tax revenues.