Prioritizing Small Business

“Taxes on capital, taxes on labor, inflation, bureaucratic regulation, minimum wage laws, are all – to different degrees – unnecessary slices of the wedge that stand between an individual’s effort and reward for that effort.” – Jack Kemp During Governor Newsom’s November 16th press conference, where he announced that he would pull the “emergency brake” […]

Killing the Golden Goose

“I’m a business person. I don’t need folks to start lecturing me on regulations and costs of doing business.” – Governor Gavin Newsom while addressing the Bay Area Council in 2019 The California economy is a sick patient, having been infected with Covid-19 back in March. While currently recovering from its recession, the economy is […]

A Brief Note on Being the Envy of the World

Ninety-nine percent of all statistics only tell forty-nine percent of the story.” – Ron DeLegge, Financial Author Having a high rate of economic growth solves a lot of problems. From government’s perspective, as businesses invest more and consumers spend more, there is ample tax revenue to fund ongoing priorities like education as well as short-term initiatives. […]

Are Climate Policies Really an Economic Boon to the San Joaquin Valley?

“Time has a wonderful way of showing us what really matters.” – Margaret Peters State climate policies are boosting the San Joaquin Valley’s economy. At least that’s the basic message that the authors of a recent study are trying to convey. On January 19 the Bay Area organization Next 10 released a commissioned report entitled […]

“California Can’t Go Back”: Why Proposition 55 Will Increase Sales Taxes

“The best things in life are free, but sooner or later the government will find a way to tax them.” – Anonymous The most recent Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) poll shows that a majority of likely voters backs Proposition 55 on the November 8th ballot. Proposition 55, the “Tax Extension to Fund Education […]

Wishful Thinking about California’s Business Friendliness

“One swallow does not a summer make, nor one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.” – Aristotle Consider the following scenario: You’re having a discussion with an acquaintance on the quality of California’s roads and highways. You point out that California is below average […]

Morality and the Minimum Wage

Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing. – Teddy Roosevelt Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature took the politically expedient approach to solving California’s income inequality when they enacted SB 3 (the minimum wage bill) into law on April 4th. Rather […]

Placing Sales Taxes on Services Creates Upward Mobility for Few

Some have called Senate Bill (SB) 8, Senator Robert Hertzberg’s proposal to impose sales taxes on most services in California, needed tax reform. The basic argument made is that while California’s economy has shifted over the past 50 years from being based on agriculture and manufacturing to information and services, the state’s tax policy remains […]

Keep Off California’s Recovery

But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade? – Alan Greenspan California has struggled the past six years to recover from the Great Recession. But recent economic statistics suggest that the Golden […]

The Economics of Plastic Bags: Too Late for California to Hop Off the Ban-Wagon?

In late February we learned that opponents of SB 270 (Padillia), the ban on single-use plastic bags in grocery stores, gathered enough signatures to qualify a referendum on the law. This means that SB 270’s scheduled July 1 start date will be put on hold. And it means that California voters will determine the law’s […]