Author: Joel Fox

The White House is attempting to build bridges to the business community in a model that would well serve California.

President Barack Obama has invited corporate leaders to a meeting today to encourage corporations to start hiring and investing to perk up the economy. The Federal Reserve estimates American companies have nearly $2-trillion in cash reserves. Spending that money on new hires will cut into the unemployment rate as would investing in new equipment.

Another avenue I have suggested on this site is for corporations to loan to small businesses, which would boost the small business section of the economy in desperate need of capital. Small businesses can be job-creating machines if they have the available resources.

California companies will be represented at the White House meeting with the president, including Google Inc. and Cisco Systems.

Governor-elect Jerry Brown holds his second budget summit tomorrow at UCLA focusing on the budget challenges for education, the largest portion of the state budget. One place the summit must look at is why more of the current dollars spent on K-12 education are not getting into the classroom.

Last summer, the Davenport Institute at Pepperdine University’s Graduate School of Public Policy prepared a study for the California Chamber of Commerce, which reveled that over a five-year period from 2003-4 to 2008-9, K-12 overall education expenditures increased. However, money going into the classroom declined.

The researchers at the Davenport Institute continue their research (sponsored by the Small Business Action Committee) and will issue a more complete report next month. Dr. Steven Frates, one of the study’s authors, said the updated report would be more comprehensive in detail and scope because it will provide precise expenditure data for every one of the state’s thousand-plus school districts. Frates indicated the comprehensive study would support the earlier findings of a growing education bureaucracy at the expense of classrooms.

That’s Abraham Lincoln, the country’s 16th president, who has been receiving a lot of attention lately in popular culture. Which of course leads me to another shameless promotion of my mystery novel, Lincoln’s Hand.

You’ll forgive me, I hope, but its Friday, the political season is winding down, the Governor-elect is taking a pause between his budget meetings, and I know people are looking for presents to add joy to the holidays, so I thought I’d remind you of Lincoln’s Hand.

My mystery is in good company. Recently, Steven Spielberg announced hiring Daniel Day Lewis to play Lincoln in a big screen adaption of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s best selling book, “A Team of Rivals.”

Is it time for a big deal to solve California’s budget problems? Yes. But is there time to put a big deal – in this case meaning a restructuring of the California’s budget and tax system — in place for a potential special election in the Spring or Summer? That is much more problematic.

The Los Angeles Times reports this morning that Governor-elect Jerry Brown is considering a plan to offer to the state’s voters that will give them a choice of supporting more revenues or fewer government services so that we will live within our means, as candidate Brown promised. The article states that Republican Senate leader Bob Dutton said that revenue hikes accompanied by complete structural reforms could be the basis for a discussion.

There are many reforms out there offered by numerous commissions over the years – I sat on a number of commissions in the last two decades selected by Republican Governors and Democratic Assembly Speakers. There is much to choose from.

This may be a stretch, but has anyone else seen a possible analogy between NASA’s astounding discovery of arsenic gulping microbes and a solution to California’s budget problems? On the eve of Jerry Brown’s budget summit, I read up on the discovery made in California’s own Mono Lake.

Here was something no one expected: life did not contain the assumed six essential elements of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur, carbon and phosphorus. In place of phosphorus was the toxic substance arsenic. Yet, life existed with this new array of elements.

The analogy that jumped to mind: Can California redo the way it budgets changing the assumed rules that have governed the debate for so many years? Can lawmakers take elements that one interest group or another sees as toxic and turn those elements into part of a solution to solve the state’s problems?

On the wall of the Cerrell Associates office in the Larchmont District of Los Angeles, among the many pictures of Joe Cerrell with political dignitaries, one picture always stood out to me. A young, baby-faced Joe Cerrell is leaning over the shoulder of John F. Kennedy who is seated at a dinner table. The presidential candidate is speaking instructions or asking a question of Cerrell as the two look off in the same direction.

The picture captures Joe’s eagerness to help and his closeness to power and influence.

Joe Cerrell, who passed away Friday, spent a happy and engaged lifetime in the political world as a Democratic consultant and advisor to presidents and governors, to judges and business executives. However, he helped not only the powerful and influential, but also a whole array of people from those who reached the heights of the political world to those who were just setting out.

As the legislature prepares to convene a special
session on the budget, there is an effort to cloud what was a very clear
message from voters in the November election.

Voters
came down firmly against new and higher taxes. That is the strong conclusion
when you look at how voters selected the winners among the propositions on the
ballot.

Voter
attitudes on taxes played a leading role for candidates as well. In his
successful race to return to the governor’s office, Jerry Brown had to promise
there would be no new taxes without voter approval and stated on many occasions
that California "had to live within its means."

My friend Peter Schrag, former editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee, has received much attention on the idea that California is shortchanging itself by adopting Mississippi-like tax policies and creating Mississippi level public services. Peter coined the term “Mississippification” in his oft-cited work, Paradise Lost, titling Part Three of his tome with his new word.

However, when he used the attack again Monday in his California Progress Report column, it was well past time to set the record straight.

In discussing the missed potential of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s term as governor, Schrag wrote: “Of anyone elected to the office in the past generation, he could have forced the state to confront the hard choices between generous, high-quality pubic services – good roads, great schools, perks and universities, quality health care, a clean environment – and Mississippi-level tax rates.”

California has Mississippi level tax rates? Hardly!

Kamala Harris’s upset victory in the attorney general’s race not only completed a sweep of statewide offices for the Democrats, it also put an exclamation point to the political change in California over the last generation.

In the California of a quarter century ago, no candidate for attorney general opposed to the death penalty, criticized by police in her hometown, with hardly any endorsements from the police or district attorneys around the state, would have a prayer of winning.

Yet, Harris won and will be California’s next attorney general. Part of her victory can be attributed to the solid wave of Democratic support that engulfed all the California political races. And, that Democratic wave can, in part, be attributed to a different California electorate that created “Reagan Country” of three decades ago.

One of the ubiquitous political posters during Ronald Reagan’s run for the presidency had a portrait of the former California governor superimposed over an outline of the Golden State with the phrase, “Reagan Country” printed on the poster.