SB 562 Will Kill Jobs and Bankrupt California
(Editor’s Note: Rob Lapsley, president of the California Business Roundtable, issued the following statement today regarding the State Senate’s passage of SB 562 (Lara / Atkins), the single-payer healthcare bill, which will cost $400 billion per year to implement) “There is no realistic funding mechanism to support SB562, especially given all the existing spending obligations […]
PAGA: Funny Name, Dire Results
If you do business in the San Fernando Valley area, you don’t have to look far to see some of the horror stories created by PAGA. PAGA is the California law that stands for the Private Attorney General Act. It allows private citizens to sue companies for labor code violations – the kinds of suits […]
California Carpet Recycling Efforts Continue To Grow
Even as California’s beverage recycling rates plummet, a relatively new carpet industry stewardship program is continuing to trend in a positive direction aimed at keeping more old carpets out of state landfills. Launched just five years ago as a result of California law AB 2398, the carpet industry created the California Carpet Stewardship Program to […]
The Unserious Left Reveals Itself on Single-Payer
Health care is a serious subject. Single-payer health systems provide a serious model for how to get the public the health care it needs. If only single payer health had more serious champions in California. The ongoing effort to pass legislation that purports to establish single payer in the state has revealed how scarily unserious […]
Single-payer, Many Taxes
Working through all the numbers, complications and uncertainties of a single payer plan will take time—more time than the legislature has before making a final vote on the single-payer health care proposal in this legislative session. That means that Gov. Jerry Brown, not concerned with facing the avid single-payer supporters in his party in another […]
Driving Californians Out of Their Cars
In a state whose voters are obsessed not only with curbing waste but trimming their waistlines, it should come as no surprise that state officials want to put California on a “road diet.” Not to be confused with South Beach or Jenny Craig, a road diet basically is tough love. Halting road and highway expansion […]
In California Battles over Product Labels, Industry Usually Wins
Nail polish and hair dye. Cleaning products. Plants and flowers for the garden. All of these could get new labels under proposals being considered by California lawmakers, triggering an annual conflict in the state Capitol over how much to tell people about what they buy at the store or use at work. The bills reflect […]
War Games
“We have met the enemy and he is us,” opined Pogo, that sage possum of the Sunday comics. That could have been the theme of the recent California Democratic Party Convention in Sacramento. There is a pertinent rule of political thumb: “A party is never more united when it’s out of power, struggling to get […]
Obscure State Fund Takes Center Stage…Again
An obscure state fund, the Pooled Money Investment Fund, has taken center stage in California’s political theater with a proposal by Gov. Jerry Brown to borrow from the fund to help pay down the state’s massive public employee health care and pension debt. This is not the first time that this fund found its way […]