While marking time as lieutenant governor, Gavin Newsom wrote a book about how technology could transform government. “I want to make government as smart as Google,” Newsom told an interviewer after the book, “Citizenville: How to Take the Town Square and Reinvent Government,” was published in 2013. While technology “is flattening major institutions” and transforming […]

A year ago, the California Department of Education released a draft of guidelines for implementing “ethnic studies” in public high schools. It unleashed a torrent of controversy — for good reason. The 303-page document was ersatz Marxist agitprop that, if adopted, would have drummed into young minds the notion that in America, anyone not a […]

The March primary election was rough on advocates of new taxes. Hundreds of tax hikes — sales and parcel taxes, mostly — were placed on the ballot by cities, counties and school districts whose finances were being squeezed. However, voters rejected roughly half of them, reversing what had been a recent trend. The election occurred […]

There’s no question that the COVID-19 pandemic and the severe recession it spawned are widening California’s economic divide. California already had the nation’s highest rate of functional poverty before this year began, as calculated by the Census Bureau using cost-of-living as well as income data, with nearly 20% of the state’s 40 million people impoverished. […]

Just a few weeks ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom was boasting about California’s apparent success in suppressing COVID-19 infections in implicit contrast to other states, such as New York, that were being clobbered by the pandemic. He called it “bending the curve” of the infection rate and decided to reopen vast sections of the economy that […]

The tsunami of righteous indignation over the suffocation death of a black man, George Floyd, by a Minneapolis policeman, like all crises, creates both opportunity and peril for political figures. It will certainly impact President Donald Trump’s already iffy chances for re-election, given his tone-deaf response to Floyd’s death and the subsequent protests. It’s an […]

Someday, the COVID-19 pandemic will have subsided, probably when effective biologic treatments and vaccines emerge. Someday, California’s economy will begin recovery from the sudden and very painful recession that followed business shutdown and stay-at-home orders to fight the pandemic. Someday, too, the tumultuous reaction to a Minneapolis policeman’s brutal suffocation of George Floyd, a black […]

The first step to effectively deal with any problem is defining it accurately — and the recession-battered state budget is a case in point. There’s no doubt that the pandemic-induced recession is one of the worst in California history and that its negative fiscal effects — both increased spending and reduced revenues — are many […]

A bit of fiscal history is in order. The Great Recession that hit California 13 years ago had a devastating effect on the state budget. General fund revenues — principally personal income taxes paid by affluent Californians — dropped by about 20% and to maintain basic services, the Legislature and then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ran up […]

The COVID-19 pandemic and the severe economic recession it induced are disasters unparalleled in recent generations and it will take years to fully recover from their human and financial tolls. Already, however, they are spawning legal and political conflicts, over whom, if anyone, should be accountable for their impacts. There is, for instance, a flurry […]