California’s state government squandered $18.9 billion over the past 10 years due to government waste, fraud and mismanagement, and this abuse of tax dollars will continue unless our elected officials get serious about their oversight of our tax dollars.

The $18.9 billion figure comes from a new California Taxpayers’ Association Research Bulletin, “A Decade of Waste, Fraud and Mismanagement,” which is based on the media’s investigative reporting, government audits, court documents and other sources of information.

Some examples:

Will someone please send Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa a gift subscription to the Wall Street Journal? Or maybe Investor’s Business Daily? (I wouldn’t object if you sent him the Los Angeles Business Journal instead.)

You see, there’s a recession going on. It’s a nasty one. It’s not a secret; it’s been in all the papers. But Villaraigosa apparently hasn’t read about it.

How else can you explain his proposal last week to assess a shocking surcharge on electricity customers of the city’s Department of Water & Power?

Hey, this is a time of deflation. Prices are going down, not up. Wages are being cut. Rents are being chopped, even before leases expire.

The only reason anyone should think – even for a moment – about raising prices now is if they absolutely, positively can’t avoid it. And the reason for raising DWP rates?

America’s economy is in serious trouble — and glitz and glitter can’t heal it. To turn things around, we need leaders of substance, people we can trust, and that’s why I’m supporting Tom Campbell for U.S. Senate. These are dangerous economic times, and we need our very best people in public service.

I’ve known Tom Campbell for over 20 years. I’m impressed with the depth of his knowledge and the strength of his opposition to federal spending, taxes and debt. Tom’s experience in government makes him extraordinarily well equipped to make a difference for taxpayers once elected.

Tom Campbell is a true and tested deficit hawk. When he served in Congress, he consistently earned high marks from the National Taxpayers Union Foundation, which twice named him “the most frugal” with tax monies.

Ignoring reams of material that suggest dangerous taxpayer liabilities have been created by public employee benefit programs, Jerry Brown appealed to the public unions to back his campaign for governor declaring California’s fiscal problems are not the unions’ fault but that of Wall Street and corporations.

As governor his first time around, Brown created the strength of the modern public labor union in the state by signing into law collective bargaining. He did not shy away from that action this past weekend. As reported by Jack Chang in the Sacramento Bee, Brown said, “I’m very proud to have created this system that gave workers a choice.”

That statement is in contrast to the regret Brown has supposedly expressed in private over the years for his previous action. True or not, he made it clear that it’s his intention to escort the public unions to the big election dance this year. Brown needs the political power of the unions to battle his wealthy GOP opponents and he is embracing his deal with the unions dearly.

With our state’s unemployment rate now 12.5 percent – and 2.26 million people out of work – there is no priority more pressing for the Legislature today than putting California Jobs First again.

As a former small business owner myself, I know first hand just how difficult it is to create and retain jobs in our state. According to Forbes magazine, California’s job creators are forced to pay the highest business costs in the country and bear the third-costliest business tax climate nationwide, while enduring the constant threat of junk lawsuits in a state that is ranked the 7th worst for lawsuit abuse.

In recent months, my Assembly Republican colleagues and I have heard from business owners across the state as to the challenges they face in keeping their doors open in California. We even traveled across state lines to Reno, Nevada, to hear why businesses relocated out of our state.
Their answer was the same – expensive mandates, burdensome regulations, high taxes and fees, and downright hostility from state government drove them away.

Last week I testified at a hearing of the Fair Political
Practices Commission where I outlined my concerns with the ever-growing
prospect of new regulations on political communications. Over the past several
years we have all witnessed the Internet evolve significantly with the rise of
influential bloggers, the birth of YouTube and the invention of online social
networks. The growth of the Internet has changed nearly every aspect of
peoples’ lives and with that has come the inevitable questions about whether
the government should regulate political activity on the Internet.

The Internet by its very nature is highly democratic,
especially compared to traditional broadcast mediums, and I am deeply concerned
that regulatory actions taken today could have a chilling effect on a vast,
untapped opportunity for civic engagement that the Internet provides. Unlike
advertising on TV and radio which requires a high level of funding available
only to a select few, there are many producers of online content. While it is
possible for political campaigns to "buy" a certain level of presence on the
Internet, anyone with nothing more than a creative message can have an impact
on millions of others in that same medium.

As the wisest and most powerful actors in California’s
journalistic and political words, Calbuzz did me a great favor by putting me in
my place today.

In
fact, what they said is an honor. It is especially gratifying to get such a
knuckle-rap from bloggers who – in these times of great challenge – focus their
reporting on important public service topics, such as Jerry Brown’s eyebrows.

One
strong bit of evidence that the Calbuzzers are right about my not having done
enough reporting is that I have never been able to confirm the factual claims
that Calbuzz makes in their attack on me. My meager reporting for example
failed to turn up the fact that:

-the Whitman campaign bowed to
Calbuzz in deciding to become accessible to the press corps.

With San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom running for lieutenant governor, the race is getting way more attention than it probably deserves. It’s also opened the way for a hazy bit of Democratic historical revisionism.

In a story that’s spread all over the liberal blogosphere, Paul Hogarth of Beyond Chron asks whether Newsom could become “the Angelides of 2010.”

Hogarth argues that state Democratic Treasurer Phil Angelides lost to Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger four years ago because a grueling primary with Steve Westly and his campaign consultant Garry South “left (Angelides) so bloodied that he went on to lose the general election by a landslide.”

Without the nasty attacks South orchestrated against Angelides, California might now have a Democratic governor, Hogarth suggested.

One of the concerns of the business community and taxpayers is that the legislature is calling taxes “fees” to get around the constitutional two-thirds vote requirement to pass a tax.

This deceptive practice has caused an initiative to be launched in an effort to put a check on this procedure, which is adding to the economic burden of California businesses and citizens. The California Taxpayers Association and the California Chamber of Commerce head up the Stop Hidden Taxes Coalition. The Small Business Action Committee is a member.

The coalition expects to qualify the initiative for the November ballot. For more information on the initiative and the effort to stop hidden taxes, visit www.nomorehiddentaxes.com.

Cal Tax recently highlighted four such “fees.”