Fire The State Board of Education
After three years of work, the California Department of Education has produced its new dashboard. Put simply, it’s a deceptive and useless joke. What’s wrong with it? Where to begin? Academic measures are buried and misleading. (The LA Times noted that schools where most students don’t test as proficient in math can end up with […]
SB 567 Represents a Massive Tax Increase and a Potential International Trade War
Despite multiple tax increases being adopted by voters just last November, SB 567 (Lara) was introduced that, if enacted, will result in another multi-billion dollar tax increase on businesses and individuals. And, the bill could once again raise the ire of major international trading partners, including Great Britain and Japan. With the newly-acquired super-majority status […]
California Legislature Rolls Out Wave of Good, Bad, and Ugly Bills for Small Business
The California Legislature never ceases to amaze with some of their most creative, imaginative schemes to tax, regulate, and mandate small businesses and taxpayers in new ways. It’s a dangerous game—one minute, we might joke in passing about how California would love to figure out a way to assess property taxes on a satellite orbiting […]
Gov. Brown won’t give up on the future — of his 1970s youth
Gov. Jerry Brown will not take no for an answer. His administration is pushing ahead to issue $2.6 billion in bonds to keep up work on the bullet train, even though the funding for the $64 billion project is drying up everywhere else. The federal government’s initial $3.3 billion, part of the 2009 stimulus bill, […]
Federal Budget Could Rattle California Taxation
With the threat of far less money coming out of Washington for California under the Trump Administration budget, California officials and advocates are starting to talk about the need to raise more local and state taxes as a cushion against revenue loss. This in a state in which a new Tax Foundation report states that California […]
The Health Care Fiasco
With thousands showing up at California town halls to discuss the unravelling of the Affordable Health Care Act and other issues it’s a sign all is not so well in Trump Land. Nothing trumps (pun intended) the agenda—not even Russian meddling and intelligence compromises — so much as the future of our healthcare and what […]
Common Sense on Immigration
No issue divides the United States more than immigration. Many Americans are resentful of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants, worry about their own job security, and fear the arrival of more refugees from Islamic countries could pose the greatest terrorist threat. At the other end of the spectrum are those who believe the welcoming words on […]
The LA County “Most Wanted List” and AB 109
Controversy swirls around AB 109, with the recent murder of Whittier Officer Keith Boyer by a parolee whose multiple parole violations resulted in nothing more than 10-day “flash incarcerations” being the most recent and tragic example of AB 109’s failures. No definitive study has been done on the fallout from AB 109, but anecdotal evidence […]
I’m Too Young for the AARP
Like any good Gen Xer, I resent the old – the Baby Boomers are always busy ruining the world, after all – and the young – darn those millennials – in part because those two generations vastly outnumber our counterparts. The only news Gen X has been making lately has been for dying young—of suicide […]