To Grow California’s Economy, Legislature Must Act to Stop Junk Lawsuits
California’s business climate is more predictable than its weather. It’s always one storm after the other. Companies relocate to states where they are welcomed rather than vilified and preyed upon. Capital is moved to more jobs-friendly states. Productive workers just get out, or are left behind with few good opportunities to prosper in their field. […]
Adequate Cal State Funding Can Ease Teacher Shortage
Dick Ackerman and Mel Levine co-chair the California Coalition for Public Higher Education. Ackerman is a former California State Senator and Assemblyman, and Levine is a former U.S. Congressman and State Assemblyman. California has a severe shortage of teachers and one of the reasons we aren’t producing more instructors is the failure to adequately fund […]
Small Business Will Benefit with Changes to Health Care Law
As I announced last week, the House will vote on the American Health Care Act this week to repeal and replace Obamacare. But as you know, reconciliation does not allow us to put everything we need into the bill. So we’re actually starting on separate legislation. As we said, this is three phases. We’ll start with phase […]
San Francisco Officials Are Chasing Rabbits
San Francisco’s pension costs are expected to rise three times faster than revenues over the next five years (see “Even San Francisco, Flush With Tech Wealth, Has Pension Problems,” Bloomberg) but another disclosure in the city’s latest Five-Year Financial Plan is equally troublesome: Pension costs, which had already increased 5x in the ten years to FY2015, were […]
SB 54 Makes California a Sanctuary for Dangerous Criminals
California’s Sanctuary State legislation was noticeably absent from the Senate floor Monday. Last week it passed in the Senate Appropriations Committee after some deceptive changes were made in a cynical move to fool people into thinking it would keep dangerous criminals off the streets. Sacramento’s dance of deceit is in full view here. They don’t […]
Gorsuch on Direct Democracy
While partisan wrangling kicked off the hearings for Judge Neil Gorsuch’s Supreme Court nomination, an interesting sidebar is Gorsuch’s take in a case followed closely on this site that ultimately could affect California’s oft-used initiative power. A little refresher: A case out of Colorado has been kicking around for years that challenges a successful initiative […]
PAGA Lawsuits Crush Small Business
In 1971, the Day family opened their business, Timely Prefinished Steel Door Frames, in Pacoima, California. Since then, they have employed thousands and had generations of families and friends grow up with thecompany. Together, we have seen the good times, the difficult times, and the bad times. And like a family, we have always stuck […]
LAUSD and Detroit Have This In Common: Pension costs will be higher than projected
Last month Detroit mayor Mike Duggan claimed he had been kept in the dark about calculations used during Detroit’s 2014 bankruptcy proceedings to predict future pension payments. Realizing now that payments will be much higher than projected, the mayor is considering a lawsuit because “we did not know that [the projections] were based on optimistic […]
If There’s Money for a Wall, There’s Money for High-Speed Rail
President Trump and the Republicans wants to spend more than $20 billion building a border wall even though there’s always plenty of physical barriers at the border. Even though a border will stop nobody and accomplish nothing, other than poisoning relations with our country’s vital ally and southern neighbor, Mexico. The determination to build the […]