Searching for Dollars
Two lawsuits have been filed challenging the governor’s vetoes of nearly $500-million in spending when he signed the budget. If either lawsuit succeeds, where will the replacement money come from to keep the budget whole (at least on paper)? Even though the lawsuits are recently filed, and the governor’s lawyers say they will fail, legislators and staff are already at work searching for dollars.
Legislators, who argue the vetoes hurt the poor, are focusing on a regressive tax that studies show fall mostly on the poor – a tobacco tax. In fact, the argument that the poor suffer most from the tobacco tax goes back to the beginning of the country. The future president, James Madison, led the opposition to a general tobacco tax as reported in the Annals of Congress on May 2, 1794:
More Fights Ahead for the Legislature
The Legislature swings back into action today with a lineup of issues that promises to be just as divisive as the budget battle that tied up the Assembly and state Senate for weeks before last month’s summer recess.
Back then, the fight was all about the budget. This time, it’s about water, prison reform, energy, jobs, political reform and taxes. And, yeah, the state budget.
With the clock ticking on his time in office, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is desperate to put the budget in the rear-view mirror and move on to something else. But Republicans and Democrats already are scuffling over the agreement that purportedly solved – or at least papered over – the problems in California’s financial plan.
Why the People Should Rewrite the Constitution
There’s been a lot of talk recently about how delegates might be selected to a constitutional convention.
The state constitution provides a method: elections. "Delegates to a constitutional convention shall be voters elected from districts as nearly equal in population as may be practicable."
The last constitutional convention, in 1878 and 1879, offered elections with a twist. 120 of the 152 delegates were elected from districts (representing counties). The other 32 were elected at large. When the then-governor showed up, several delegates yelled at him, claiming that they had a popular mandate to be there and he had none. (The governor quickly left his post as chair).
Recently, several folks (including Steve Hill of the New America Foundation, which employs me) have suggested that the constitutional convention delegates be selected, wholly or in part, randomly from the citizenry.
States starting to eat CA’s cleantech lunch
Joel Makower, founder of cleantech research and publishing firm Clean Edge, recently remarked that other states are starting to "eat California’s lunch" when it comes to attracting and retaining clean technology companies. This point was called out on page 25 of the CALSTART Industry report on the state’s barriers and opportunities for economic and environmental leadership.
In the same report, venture investor, Vinod Khosla warned that high costs and slow permitting processes were threatening to drive many advanced biofuels companies out of California.
In another study recently released, the Milken institute took a look at high tech manufacturing growth. Of course many of the cleantech industries come out of this particular sector. The results were stunning when it came to California’s major competitor, Texas. Their high tech manufacturing as a percentage of GSP grew by 86 percent in 7 years. California’s grew by only 7 percent.