Governor Jerry Brown did the right thing yesterday when he vetoed SB 168 by Sen. Ellen Corbett. The bill would have changed payment for helping to gather signature petitions from a per signature basis to a flat hourly rate. The change in the process would have made it more expensive to pay for signature gatherers, something Brown recognized would favor the wealthiest interests.
 
More importantly, Brown noted that the bill offered “a dramatic change” in California’s long established democratic process of direct democracy, which the governor knows the people respect and defend.
 
Some have conjectured that Brown, himself, is looking to the initiative process to raise taxes that the legislative process denied him and if SB 168 became law it would be more expensive for him to succeed. Perhaps. However, Brown’s time serving as California Secretary of State long ago also may have helped create the foundation for this veto.

If you follow sports, this is the season of trades. The
baseball non-waiver trading deadline just passed with a flurry of deals. And
the National Football League has seen a week full of trades, with more to come.

If only we
could make trades in California governance. But you know how that goes –
gridlock, supermajorities, legal realities.

But it’s summer, so let’s leave
reality aside. Here are five deals that would be worth swinging, if we could.

1. Trade Gov. Jerry Brown to Texas
for cash, and a jobs strategy.

Texas has
money in its reserve fund it doesn’t want to use because Gov. Rick Perry
prefers to cut schools and health programs first. And, as it happens, Jerry
Brown still has political capital that he apparently doesn’t want to use on any
of the big changes the state needs. So let’s make an exchange of underutilized
assets.

Lawyers who appear regularly in California’s various county Superior Courts, our trial courts, and who have enough grey hair, may remember the days in LA Superior Court (“LASC”) when we were issued ‘Beepers’ in Department 1 (the second floor courtroom which is large enough to play Arena Football) of the Central District Moss Courthouse.   We then waited for the buzzer to get called to trial.  Woe unto you if you had two beepers for two different cases waiting for trial, got beeped on one and appeared with your boxes of documents and witnesses, only to find that you had been beeped on the other case.  

You could only get beeper status after the case was approaching the hard, 5-year mandatory dismissal time limit, leaving the court system basically with no choice but to grudgingly find a courtroom to let the case go to trial.  Despite a smile and nod to the expression “justice delayed is justice denied,” the reality of overcrowded courts was what it was, and there was nothing we could do about it but ‘grin and bear it.’

If you have a business in the city of Los Angeles, you probably have two big complaints with City Hall.

One is the absurdly long time it takes – 18 months, in some cases – to get routine permits to start and operate your business. The other is the city’s gross receipts tax.

On the first complaint, the city has made some moves to pare back the permit-waiting time. Granted, they are grudging moves and have spotty results so far, but at least there’s been some effort.

As for the second complaint, the city this week could take a big step toward resolving it.

That’s because a report that analyzes reform options put forward by the city-appointed Business Tax Advisory Committee is to go to the council this week. And a preliminary draft of that report all but concludes what business operators have known for years: The city would be better off without the gross receipts tax.

By now you probably have heard the deceitful radio
ad funded by a group called Californians Against Identity Theft that is
attempting to discourage people from signing initiative and referendum
petitions by scaring them into believing their signatures on the petitions
could lead to identity theft. The dishonesty of the pitch has brought
rebuke from across the political spectrum and by groups that battle
identity theft.

The goal of the Californians Against Identity
Theft is to limit the use of direct democracy. That can clearly be detected on
the group’s
website which highlights not problems with identity theft but accusations
against the initiative process.

At least one California public employee union
has admitted being behind the ad. The public unions are opposed to some
initiatives and referendums that are currently in circulation.

Friday Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom released a California economic development and job growth plan as his first major policy move since he was elected.

Congratulations are in order for Newsom and his report. He is showing he is serious about growing our job base by making the state attractive to manufacturing and other high wage sectors.

California’s economy needs large scale job creation in every sector.  Our state must catch up and once again outpace the country’s economic growth. This will require aggressive action not seen in California for over a decade. It will also depend on developing the state’s existing job base and employers as a means to California’s expansion. In the past, Newsom has said many times, that "95 percent of growth is organic," meaning it’s easier to grow an existing California company than start a new one.  We could not agree more.

For the past few years, economic development in California has comprised of picking and providing for one winning sector, but consequentially leaving many other losers, often times existing industries, such as manufacturing and other sectors. Every job should count in California.

For the past several years, Sacramento
has been focused almost exclusively on the state budget crisis.  Ignored
for the most part has been how to deal with California’s unemployment rate,
currently second highest in the nation.  Except in isolated instances,
policymakers have failed to address the issue of job creation and
expansion.  That’s what makes Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom’s recently issued
"Economic Growth and Competitiveness Agenda for California" a sober assessment of the challenges facing
California and worthy of discussion.  

From an international trade
perspective, imports and exports through our ports generate hundreds of
thousands of trade related jobs in California.  International trade is a
critical component of the overall economic health of California.  However, because of California’s inability to build major
infrastructure projects, California’s role as a gateway for trade is
threatened as alternative gateways are being developed throughout North
America.

The Lt. Governor was right when he
stated "Onerous and inconsistent regulations, slow bureaucracies, and
misaligned policies at the federal, state and local levels present real
barriers to the speed and agility needed to compete in the global economy…
California must also bring its cumbersome licensing and regulatory processes
into the 21^st century."  

Cross-posted at NewGeography.

Los Angeles today is a city in secular decline. Its current political leadership seems determined to turn the sprawling capitalist dynamo into a faux New York. But they are more likely to leave behind a dense, government-dominated, bankrupt, dysfunctional, Athens by the Pacific.

The greatness of Los Angeles stemmed from its willingness to be different. Unlike Chicago or Denver or New York, the Los Angeles metro area was designed not around a central core but on a series of centers, connected first by railcars and later by the freeways. The result was a dispersed metropolis where most people occupied single-family houses in middle-class neighborhoods.

Lured by the pleasant climate and a business-dominated political economy, industries and entrepreneurs flocked to the region. Initially, the growth came largely from oil and agriculture, followed by the movie industry. Defense and aerospace during World War II and the postwar era fostered a vast industrial base, and by the 1980s Los Angeles had surpassed New York as the nation’s largest port, and Chicago as the nation’s leading industrial center.

You couldn’t come up with a better time than right now if
you wanted to remake the California tax system.

It won’t be
easy, but many of the stars are aligned. And no one has more incentive to make
such a change happen now than Gov. Jerry Brown.

Brown has a
number of needs that could be met by a big push for comprehensive tax reform.
First, he needs more revenues for the budget if he wants to avoid making more
cuts to important public services. Second, he needs to find a way to talk about
jobs and the economy, and taxes are an obvious way there. Third, he needs to
breathe some life into his stale governorship by taking on game-changing
reform; if he doesn’t go on offense, and show himself to be a force for fixing
a broken system, the California public is likely to turn on him.