Brown Makes Environmental Justice Pitch to Get Two-Thirds Vote for Cap-n-Trade
At the budget revision press conference last week, Gov. Jerry Brown tried to assuage Democratic lawmakers over costs on his cap-and-trade extension by arguing for environmental justice so as to assure a two-thirds vote for the plan. Brown is aware that some Democrats in low-income areas are wary of supporting legislation that will increase costs […]
A State Takeover of Housing
All the debate about how to address California’s massive housing shortage is obscuring the big picture: a state takeover of local housing policy has begun. That’s the real import of the more than 100 bills that have been introduced in the legislature to change housing policy in various ways. None of the current proposals is […]
State budget more vulnerable than ever to stock market decline
Take a look at California’s General Fund revenues over the last twenty years: Schedule 2, 2017–18 Governor’s Revised Budget Zero in on 2000-03. Notice how revenues peaked at $76 billion in 2000 and then fell below that level for three years. Aggregate revenues over those three years fell $30 billion short of the revenues the state would’ve collected had they continued […]
How California Business Leaders can solve the Mental Illness Crisis
In spite of spending over $1.5 billion a year in Mental Health Services Act (MHSA) funds, mentally ill homeless camps are taking over downtowns, four times as many Californians with mental illness are incarcerated as hospitalized, and even educated and caring moms can’t get care for seriously mentally ill loved ones. Why is that? Wasn’t […]