Back in the early 1990’s, I was a political science student and active in the student government at San Jose State University. While there, I lived in a suburb of San Jose called Cupertino, whose largest employer was and still is today Apple Computer. In fact, in order to pay my bills, I actually worked part time at Apple. So, my interest was profoundly piqued when it was announced by Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs that the company he founded had been buying up swaths of property in Cupertino and announced plans to build a massive new campus with a new building that will have a larger footprint than the Pentagon, and serve as a home to over 12,000 employees. The single, four-story circular building is shaped in a vast ring — that looks like a giant spaceship. Check out this ABC news clip – pretty amazing stuff:

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Even as Governor Jerry Brown lifted his pen today to sign the so-called “Amazon Tax” into law, thousands of affiliates across California were losing their jobs.

Major out-of-state retailers like Amazon.com and Overstock.com are terminating their California affiliate advertising programs in response to this legislation. I’ve been warning for months that this would happen, but apparently these warnings fell on deaf ears.

The so-called ‘Amazon tax’ is truly a lose-lose proposition for California. Not only won’t we see the promised revenues, we’ll actually lose income tax revenue as affiliates move to other states.… Read More

Republican legislators achieved two great victories this week. The newly adopted budget has cut some spending so it is closer to being balanced and even more importantly taxes on working families and businesses are going down. Political battles are rarely clear cut victories and I am sure that our legislators are exhausted and perhaps wondering if all of this effort was worth the outcome. Most definitely.

Despite the best efforts to trade a tax election vote for reforms it was never going to be a clean deal. Getting liberals to vote for real reforms on pensions, CEQA, regulations or any of the other messes they created is like asking them to invite Sarah Palin out to dinner. It is not going to happen. And if the Reps did get 6 Dem Senators and 13 Dem Assemblymembers to vote with them (assuming all the reforms could be done with majority votes) there would be nothing stopping the others and their allies from sponsoring a referendum to repeal all reforms even before they take effect. The reforms proposed also are quite common sense. Nothing radical like abolishing CEQA or abolishing pensions for government workers. Therefore the impacts of these modest reforms… Read More

I’m in London en route to Monaco for this weekend. The Royal Wedding will occur while we are in Monte Carlo, with a two hour fireworks show. Do I have a wedding invitation? Well, I assure you, I will indeed see the fireworks.

However, an article in The Times of London intrigued me today. The British Government has an official policy to promote a more-greener United Kingdom by authorizing the chopping down of an additional two million trees a year in English forests. The idea is that clearing denser woods out a little will encourage the growth of bluebells and entice back endangered bird species. After all the trees are chopped down, the government will then guarantee payments to people and businesses to burn the wood for heat, to save on electricity and gas usage, and reduce carbon, which the government says is reduced using burning wood compared to a utility even though burning wood emits smoke. What a novel approach to reducing pollution. I still recall when California’s air resources board thought that the Boudin Sourdough Bread bakery in San Francisco needed to be fined because people had to put up with the smell of baking bread… Read More

This in from Assemblywoman Diane Harkey… So true…

The Democrat majority in the Legislature just passed another unbalanced budget that includes deferrals to education, early release of state prisoners to our counties, phantom revenue projections and legal challenges waiting in the wings. By any calculation, it also adds to our state’s wall of debt, that the Governor claims to want to reduce.

Unless of course the Governor and the Democrats are relying on the decrease in taxes that Republicans fought for, to pump up the economy another $4B this year? Have they turned into supply-siders? If so, the anticipated projected revenues are certainly beyond any multiplier effect ever seen. Unfortunately without structural reforms, the Governor and his cohorts in the Legislature appear to be setting the stage to punish the people until they agree to pass taxes which we expect to appear on the ballot in 2012.

Will the controller deem this budget balanced? Probably so, but… Read More

A great, succinct recap on the new California budget from the Wall Street Journal’s Allysia Finley…

California Dems Pass Budget California Democrats have asserted for the past six months that it wasn’t possible to close the state’s $9.6 billion budget gap without raising taxes. Yet the budget deal that Gov. Jerry Brown and Democrat lawmakers struck this week does just that.

The budget agreement, which passed without Republican support, cuts $450 million from higher education and the courts and defers $2.8 billion in payments to K-12 education. It also takes $1.7 billion from local redevelopment agencies that use property taxes to subsidize private developers.

The deal assumes an additional $200 million in extra tax revenue from the collection of sales tax on online purchases, which is likely on the high side since Amazon has threatened to sever its relationships with its California affiliates if the state starts collecting online sales taxes. Democrats also want to increase fees on vehicles and rural homeowners by another $450 million, but they will need the support of at… Read More

Yesterday Capitol Democrats pushed through a majority vote budget that is bad for California. On the short term, it makes a lot of poor decisions on how to spend available resources. On the long term, there are no fixes such as a spending cap or pension reform. Not one Republican voted for this bad budget.

Senate Republican Leader Bob Dutton had this to say…

Let’s get one thing clear about the budget the Democrats passed without Republican input or support – we will never fix this state’s chronic budget crisis until we get Californians back to work.

We need to focus on job creation, which must include regulatory and CEQA reform. We cannot continue to be the worst place in the nation to do business. Regulatory relief is critical for creating job opportunities in this state.

This budget not only lacks regulatory relief that is critical for creating job opportunities, it lacks the other reforms that Californians are demanding and deserve. Californians want a hard spending cap and they want reforms to fix the… Read More

If I were to tell you things were chaotic in Washington last week, you might correctly exclaim, “So, what else is new?”. But, things seem to be even more chaotic than normal right now. I submit the following rundown for your consideration:

The President announced his latest strategy for Afghanistan in which he tries to thread the policy needle by giving a timetable for some withdrawal, but at the same time keeps more troops there throughout his term than at any time during the Bush presidency. I don’t think he succeeded in pleasing anyone with this plan – certainly not this Member of Congress. He also still has not indicated what it is we are now fighting for and what the desired end-state looks like. Bin Laden is dead and al-Qaeda is largely out of Afghanistan. Are we nation building? I think we are and I don’t think that is worth $2 billion a week and more American lives. I also believe you either fight wars with all you’ve got, or don’t fight them at all. Vietnam taught us that. The President seems to want to fight half a war. Speaker Boehner criticized the President’s speech and basically called … Read More