Brown’s Budget Revise Didn’t Go Far Enough
Governor Jerry Brown put up a new budget plan that contained an eye-opening $6.6 billion in new revenues, a reduction in his previous income tax proposal, boosts to job creation, and an argument that California still needed a five-year tax extension to whittle down a “wall of debt.” Brown moved in the right direction but he should have gone further.
The governor should have embraced the unanticipated revenue as a hopeful sign and offered not only the pro-business measures he did, but also other provisions to spur the economy.
With the economy delivering new revenues, the five-year tax plan is hard to justify. The governor might have shortened the time he was asking for all the taxes contained within his proposal. He could even have suggested a trigger mechanism to capture new revenues only if the economic growth and tax revenue surge flattened instead of seeking the five-year extension.
He offered no such creative approaches but chose to hold tight to the five-year tax increase plan minus the one-year he removed from the income tax.
One Way to Help Signature Gathering and Ourselves
The state legislature is full of proposals to make the
onerous and expensive process of signature gathering more onerous and
expensive. One bill would mandate special badges for gatherers. Another would
change how they are paid – from per signature to hourly – in a way that would
add to costs and reduce the number of measures.
Such
proposals are divorced from the realities of signature gathering. And that
central reality is that it’s getting more difficult to gather signatures.
Because there are fewer places to gather.
That’s
because private companies and public agencies alike have worked to restrict the
use of public space. Signature gatherers now find it harder than ever to
circulate petitions outside of grocery stores and big chains. The post office,
which should be a place for signature gathering, has fought for years to limit
petition circulators. And while old court decisions protect the right to gather
at traditional malls, those traditional malls are dying, and their
replacements, town square-style places like the Grove, bar signature gathering.
So do big-box stores like Costco (except, of course, when Costco is behind an
initiative, like Gov. Schwarzenegger’s 2004 workers compensation reform.
Hypocrisy, it seems, also comes in family-size packages).
California’s cover story
The
following op-ed appeared in the San Francisco Examiner on May
15, 2011:
Last month The Economist, prestigious British journal, ran a cover story: "Where
it all went wrong: A special report on California’s dysfunctional democracy."
The report blames "direct democracy," the initiative process, for the state’s
woes. The ruling class loves the report, but Californians have good reason to
be wary.The initiative process lets ordinary
Californians become policymakers. For example, in 1996, the first time they had
any say in the matter, Californians passed Proposition 209, which ended racial,
ethnic and gender preferences in state government, employment and contracting.
That policy of institutional discrimination had been imposed by legislators and
unelected bureaucrats.
Card Check Bill Boosts Union Punch
Cross-posted at CalWatchdog.
California’s agriculture workers can expect to be unionized very soon. A bill that would allow labor unions to organize farm workers passed the Assembly Monday.
SB 104 is authored by Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, and is sponsored by the United Farm Workers union. It has been sold as a bill that would “allow” farm workers to decide on unionization, and as an option to the secret ballot, the current system of determining whether a workplace is unionized.
Steinberg is a Sacramento Democrat and a former union lawyer for the California State Employees Association. SB 104 is his third attempt at legalizing card-check elections for agriculture workers.
I recently described how card check works:
In card check elections, workers can be intimidated and coerced into signing a card saying that they want union representation. The election is not held using the secret ballot — workers must sign the cards publicly. After a majority of the cards are signed and the employee’s vote has been made known to the union, if more than 50 percent of the cards are signed, employees are then required to join the union.