The Texas versus California job creation comparison continues
to make noise during these tough economic times, and while Texas takes its
lumps over state issues on occasion (see Greg Lucas’ recent piece
in Capitol Weekly) there seems little doubt that purely on a jobs creation
front Texas is doing much better.

Adding to that view were numbers on very small, non-employee
businesses released by the U.S. Census Bureau as described by Dan Walters in
the Sacramento Bee Capitol
Alert yesterday:

"The number of California’s non-employee businesses hit a
high mark of 2.76 million in 2007 but by 2009 had dropped by 82,878, the Census
Bureau report, based on Internal Revenue Service data, found. Business receipts
declined from $145 billion to $121 billion during the two-year period."

Meanwhile, the report noted Texas added
8,260 small firms between 2008 and 2009.

The City of Los Angeles has the highest gross receipts tax rate of all 88 cities in L.A. County — a distinction that also puts it among the highest of any major city in the United States. This, coupled with the fact that technology now allows businesses to locate almost anywhere, has left the City struggling to attract and retain businesses, jobs and tax revenue.

In 2009, at the urging of the L.A. Area Chamber and other business organizations, the City convened a Business Tax Advisory Committee (BTAC), similar to the one created in 2001 which recommended a 15 percent business tax reduction that resulted in job growth and more money for the City’s coffers.

Comprised of nine citizens, including several tax experts, BTAC was charged with making recommendations to reform the City’s tax code, and doing so in a way that is revenue neutral. The Committee went to work studying immediate and long term solutions to fixing the City’s draconian tax practices and changing the often complained about review processes used by the Office of Finance. Recognizing the stakes and implications for the City, BTAC and the independent economist selected by the City to assist the committee, researched many scenarios for reducing the gross receipts tax, including complete elimination.

Let me apologize in advance for using the name of a recently deceased
young woman as a descriptor of our economic problems. But I mean no disrespect
for Amy Winehouse. On the contrary, my disrespect is aimed at those responsible
for wrecking our economic system to the point that the only options remaining
are rehab or premature death.

Beautiful, talented, wealthy Amy Winehouse was found dead at age 27,
joining such music personalities as Janis Joplin,
Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, and Jim Morrison – all members of the "27 Club."
Autopsy is pending, though the cause of death is hardly obscure. For years, the
multiple award-winning singer and songwriter had been in and out of rehab for
alcohol and drug abuse. The night before her death, reportedly she bought
cocaine, heroin, ecstasy, and ketamine. Prophetically, her last album was
titled "Back to Black."

Books, articles, and films have attempted to explain why
talented, successful people in the music business so often descend into a death
spiral of alcohol and drugs. One can speculate that their fans almost expect it.
One can moralize that the music business and the drug business are intimately
related. But that is not our subject here.

Much has been written about the so-called pro-business
policies of "Business Tax Holidays" and "incentive packages" (including steep
discounts in DWP rates) – all in order to attract business to Los Angeles.  When a politician holds a press conference
with business owners, standing behind a glossy logo, clamoring on about how his
or her pro-business policies are attracting business to the city (with glowing
headlines to follow), re-election seems like a certainty. 

Lately, LA’s officials have been touting some high-profile
acquisitions and relocations in their attempts to claim that LA is a
business-friendly city.  For example, the
BYD electric car company, Gensler architecture firm, and Balqon Corp.  Yet, the city’s unemployment rate continues
its steady, steep climb to intolerable levels. 

In March 2010, when Newsweek reported on the hiring of city
"jobs czar" Austin Beutner, Newsweek
noted that the city’s unemployment was at a staggering 11.3%.

Dante condemned those who betray a public trust to the hottest place in hell. My candidate for Dante’ inferno this week is State Auditor Elaine Howle, who created the poll of candidates that formed the Citizens Redistricting Commission, now thankfully in its final weeks of existence.

Howle’s primary criterion was “racial diversity” in the pool, and not surprisingly the commissioners who emerged from her process made racial districting their primary goal. And now we have the final plans developed by this commission, and the product further Balkanizes California into racial enclaves. These lines will contribute to continued political polarization of this state, and will give us a legislature in the next decade less able to craft compromises and function as a deliberative body than the one we have now.

Race and ethnicity are difficult in California, a state with no racial/ethnic majority – far from it. And Latinos, who suffered from the 2001 gerrymander that denied them fair representation, deserved additional seats as this commission has created. But over the last month the commission has made race and ethnicity almost the only factors in its line drawing, and the final product can be accurately called a racial gerrymander.

Here’s a reminder, courtesy of the Rolling Stones, to the
various Californians already camped out on the courthouse steps in advance of
Friday’s presentation of the final redistricting maps:

Cue the music: "You can’t always get what you want."

Republicans, Democrats, blacks, Latinos, mayors, county
supervisors and local activists across the state already have complained that
the lines drawn by the new California Citizens Redistricting Commission, all
boiling down to a single beef: They just aren’t fair.

And the way to fix that problem, naturally, is to redraw the
lines so that my political party/ethnic group/city/county/neighborhood gets
what it wants, even if the other political party/ethnic group, etc., gets
screwed.

The Los Angeles City Council voted yesterday to end the
red-light camera program, which apparently came with "voluntary" fines for traffic
violations. That’s right, "voluntary
fines."

It was revealed this week that violators do not have to pay
the tickets that arrived in the mail if a camera caught them making a traffic
light infraction. As the Los
Angeles Times put it:

"For a variety of reasons, including the way the law was
written, Los Angeles officials said the fines were essentially
"voluntary" and that there are virtually no tangible consequences for
those who refuse to pay."

Heck, you didn’t even need the services of the notorious
"Gold Card Desk," recently
revealed where politicians and others with connections at city hall could
get parking tickets dismissed quietly and cleanly.

Ever since the people of California, back in 1990, passed Proposition 140 and imposed term limits on California’s Constitutional officers and the State Legislature, there have been efforts promoted by political insiders to do away with those limits, or at least to weaken them. Many politicians and the people engaged directly with them find term limits to be an inconvenient insertion of the people’s will into what they prefer to be a Patrician process.

There has been an increased level of "chatter" amongst California’s elites as they have expressed their pleasure (especially newspaper editorial boards) at a new research paper released by the Center for Government Studies (CGS) that is critical of term limits for, among other reasons, not achieving the desired goal of proponents of creating a "citizen legislature" where ex-pols go back home to live under the laws they helped create, and also for causing a "dearth" of experience within the legislature.

The CGS study asserts that because many termed-out legislators tend to find other positions within government, that in doing so they do not actually return back to private life. With all due respect to CGS, I can name dozens of former legislators that I know of who actually have reached their term limits and are back home.

If you are not aware of AB 1062 by
Assemblyman Roger Dickinson, you should be. Mr. Dickinson has a long history in
public service, describes
himself as the leading progressive voice in Sacramento County,
and is a former personal injury lawyer. These facts make it unsurprising that
he authored AB 1062, which is sponsored by the Consumer Attorneys of
California (CAOC) and would eliminate arbitration agreements in nursing home
agreements.

Personal injury lawyers have long been opposed to
arbitration agreements and it is no surprise that they are trying to peel them
away industry by industry. While the California Supreme Court and the
Legislature have typically viewed arbitration as a very desirable alternative
to litigation because if its efficiency and fairness, personal injury lawyers
despise arbitration because it cuts them (and their ludicrously high fees) out
of the process. Nursing homes are one of the prime targets of personal injury lawyers,
and they want the ability to sue.