Author: Joel Fox

President Barack Obama proposes to freeze spending on discretionary budget items. Does California fall into that category as a “discretionary item”? No sooner had Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and state legislative leaders returned from a Washington fundraising trip hoping to convince the president and congress to send more money our way than the president says there is no more.

This freeze idea is one that has been suggested to deal with California’s budget crisis in the past. Freeze the budget to the dollars that come in and reduce spending across the board accordingly. Perhaps, with the president’s example this approach will resurface in the Golden State as the governor and legislature try to figure out how to handle the current $20-billion deficit.

The clock is ticking on the special session called for closing the deficit hole and nary a word of how it will be accomplished.

In an effort to undercut the two-thirds vote requirement to pass a state budget and to raise taxes, opponents are attempting to change the language of the debate. Instead of the two-thirds vote being called a “supermajority” the opponents want to emphasize that “minority rule” runs California’s government.

Minority rule it is not. The rule to pass the budget and raise taxes was established by a majority vote of the people and can be changed by a majority vote of the people.

UC Berkeley linguistics professor George Lakoff filed an initiative to reduce the two-thirds legislative vote on the budget and taxes to a majority vote. In declaring that California is run by “minority rule,” he told the New York Times “It’s not about raising or lowering taxes; it’s about democracy and letting the people decide.”

I grew up in Massachusetts and I live in California. Two pretty blue states on the political map. The Scott Brown election focused attention on a Republican winning a big race in a blue state. Many reasons have been given for this upset, but I wonder if something subtle was at work in this election. While both states are considered solidly blue with dominate Democratic legislatures for most of half-a-century, approximately two-thirds of that time each state has had Republican governors.

Do the voters in these two coastal states consciously want to restrict the power of a dominate party? Do the citizens vote their own check and balance system in place?

I once asked this question of Claremont McKenna College political science professor John Pitney. He said he was not aware of any studies to test the theory. Is it coincidence or is something at work here?

Reading Daniel Borenstein’s article in the Contra Costa Times on pension spiking earlier in the week brought back a memory of a fight against pension spiking in a different part of the state.

Los Angeles County had a bout with pension spiking in the early 1990s. Top county officials – not the average employee – worked under a relatively new salary structure in which they received both bonuses that were not considered part of the salary, and lucrative benefits. The value of the benefits was then included in calculating retirement pensions.

This pension spiking scheme was roundly criticized from the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association to the editorial page of the Los Angeles Times. In fact, when the Jarvis Association called a press conference to announce a lawsuit against the pension spiking, the Times reporter assigned to the press conference told Jon Coupal, then Jarvis attorney, and me, then the association’s president, that his editor already set aside a portion of the front page for the article.

Tom Campbell launched his campaign for United States Senate arguing that the fiscal deficit is the number one issue in Washington and that his background of fiscal conservatism makes him the perfect candidate to deal with the problem. One of Campbell’s rivals for the nomination, Carly Fiorina, immediately challenged Campbell’s fiscal credentials.

The Fiorina campaign put out a broadside declaring Campbell’s fiscally conservative credentials expired long ago. In his recent run for governor Campbell supported a temporary gas tax increase to help balance the state budget.

I asked Campbell about that at his Friday news conference.

Campbell said his proposal for a temporary tax increase was a pragmatic, responsible approach to California’s budget problem. He said his overall proposal for the state budget was to cut three dollars of spending for every dollar of tax increase.

Everyone is expecting a big initiative election year—and it still could happen. But where are the petition signature gatherers?

There were none in front of a Sacramento Wal-Mart yesterday. There were none in front of a Los Angeles Wal-Mart on Saturday. In fact, I have not run into one person carrying a petition seeking signatures for a ballot measure.

By rights the signature gatherers should be everywhere pulling a cart full of different petitions. They could not carry all the measures that have passed through the Attorney General’s office for title and summary.

All who follow such things know that about 90 or so initiatives have been filed as citizens try to compete with legislators to see who can write the most laws. With so many initiatives on record you would expect signature gatherers to be hard at work. Many of the major initiatives that have big money backers are ready to go but so far no major push.

Checking Rough and Tumble in the early afternoon yesterday to catch up on the latest California news, the first two headlines made me think I had fallen through a time warp. The first said Tom Campbell was running for the U.S. Senate. The second said the Schwarzenegger Budget was overly optimistic. I’ve read those stories before. Must have come from the archives.

Then I came upon the third story: Assembly committee okays recreational marijuana use and proposes to tax it.

Now, here is something new. I figured that the legislature was going to try a new way to solve the budget problem. By a 4 to 3 vote the Assembly Public Safety Committee moved forward AB 390 by Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco).

With the announcement that Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley is exploring a run for Attorney General, the Republican field is starting to look more like the Democratic field as an interesting, wide-open race.

For the longest time only State Senator Tom Harman announced for the seat on the Republican side. In the last couple of weeks, legal scholar John Eastman, Dean of the Chapman University Law School, and now Cooley said they are looking at the office.

Harman’s campaign immediately attacked Cooley with a press release from Harman supporter Mike Reynolds, chief proponent of the three-strikes-go-to-jail-for-life law. The release called Cooley “the most prominent opponent” of the law. Cooley backed a 2006 measure to add flexibility to the three-strikes law by giving judges more discretion in sentencing three-timers depending on the seriousness of the third offense.

The chorus is growing louder that an oil severance tax must be part of the budget solution. Proponents of the tax on extracting oil from the ground or from under the sea echo the same refrain that California is the only oil producing state that does not levy such a tax. What supporters of the tax fail to mention is that oil production is already heavily taxed in California. Adding an oil severance tax would zoom California oil producers to the top of the tax chart by a significant degree and that has consequences.

Oil companies in the Golden State pay corporate income taxes, property taxes and sales taxes on their business. Not all oil producing states assess all these taxes, nor are the tax rates the same as high income, high sales and high corporate tax California.