Brown’s leaky bucket tax increase
The
other morning I read an article by a major columnist that said the goals of
those who oppose tax increases – or at least the result of such opposition was (1)
the privatization of public schools, (2) driving students of limited means out
of the universities and (3) eliminating tax-funded health care and social
services for the poor. The same day another major columnist claimed people
who opposed Brown’s tax increase were disingenuously denying responsibility for
soaring tuitions and the shredding of grandma’s safety net. He asserted if such policies were followed to
their logical conclusion there would be "no other
honest choice but to starve college students" and "poor grandma".
First of all, let me say something some apparently may find controversial: I like grandmothers and do not want them to starve. Second, the problem with their rhetoric is
that it distorts the problem we face. Who
pays how much in taxes is a real issue. However,
to say those of us who opposed the tax increase without other reforms (and a vast
majority of Californians did so), will oppose imposing taxes even if it means
people will starve is hateful, disingenuous and arrogant – not to mention
inaccurate.
Gov. Brown Chases Business to Vegas
Cross-posted at CalWatchdog.
Gov. Jerry Brown and the other anti-business fanatics in the Legislature and government unions just don’t get it: If you attack businesses, they leave California.
A recent departure was Pixel2Canvas, which split Lake Forest for North Las Vegas. It’s noteworthy that the company left Orange County, which has a much better business climate than the rest of California because the locals are more libertarian. But Orange County still is in Taxifornia. Reported the Orange County Register:
You coulda seen this coming. A year ago, Curt Benton moved his company, Pixel2Canvas and its 14 jobs, from Lake Forest to North Las Vegas.
The company is a fine art printer that puts digital art onto canvas, a process called gliclee.
Initially, Benton planned to keep his family in Orange County and commute. But now they have moved to Nevada too.
The Hong Kong of Los Angeles County?
Cross-posted at CityJournal.
For decades, most Angelenos have known that something was not quite right in Vernon. A 5.2-square-mile city situated in the southern shadows of downtown Los Angeles, a scant few miles from the now infamous Southland cities of Bell and Maywood, Vernon is a company town—or, rather, a companies town. At last count, 1,800 businesses had operations in Vernon, employing over 55,000 people in mostly blue-collar jobs. Yet the city has just 97 residents. A larger, more engaged populace might possibly have prevented Vernon’s public officials from committing a shocking amount of malfeasance recently. The city manager, Bruce Malkenhorst, pleaded guilty in May to illegal use of public funds after investigators for the L.A. County district attorney found that he’d received more than $60,000 in city funds for personal use and was drawing the state’s highest pension (over $500,000 per year). Malkenhorst’s plea followed the 2009 conviction of Vernon’s mayor, Leonis Malburg, for voter fraud. Donal O’Callaghan, the city’s top administrator until mid-2010, was indicted in October for illegally putting his wife’s company on the city payroll. And the city council recently voted to continue receiving salaries of around $70,000 per member per year—nearly the highest in the state.
A California Venture Capitalist Addresses the Job Market
Mr. Reid Hoffman
is one of California’s leading venture
capitalists. Based at Greylock Partners in Silicon Valley, Mr. Hoffman is a
co-founder of LinkedIn and has been a major participant in PayPal, Zynga, and
Flickr-as well as an early Facebook investor.
California’s
venture capitalists, along with the state’s staffing industry and local
Workforce Investment Boards, know California’s job markets. That’s why it was
good news last week to read in a column by Mr. Thomas Friedman that Mr. Hoffman
has a new book coming out early next year, "The Start Up of You". The book builds
on ideas of entrepreneurship within firms, among firms and throughout the
economy that Mr. Hoffman has been putting forward for some time.
America’s Burgeoning Class War Could Spell Opportunity For GOP
The recent disappointing job reports, with unemployment rising above 9%, only reinforced an emerging reality that few politicians, in either party, are ready to address. American society is becoming feudalized, with increasingly impregnable walls between the classes. This is ironic for a nation largely defined by its opportunity for upward mobility and fluid class structure.
According to the latest data, the current unemployment rate is the highest it has been so deep into a recovery since the 1940s. Even more troubling, over 6 million Americans have been unemployed for more than six months — the largest number since the feds have begun tracking this number decades ago.
That’s not the worst of it. The pool of “missing workers� — those who are unemployed but are not counted as such — has soared to over 4.4 million. And under the first African-American president the employment rate for black men now sits at a record low since the government started measuring the statistic four decades ago.