From today’s Wall Street Journal Political Diary E-mail… FR friend John Fund recounts his dinner with newly minted MA Republican Senator Scott Brown, but you’ll be most interested in who they saw, but didn’t disturb, after dinner…

Senator Scott Brown and Fred Thompson have a fair bit in common so it’s no surprise they’ve become friends. In 1994, Mr. Thompson won a come-from-behind Senate victory in Tennessee driving an old pickup truck between campaign stops. Mr. Brown drove a 2005 GMC Canyon truck and solidified his "everyman" appeal to score an upset Senate win last month in Massachusetts.

Mr. Thompson, now a successful radio talk show host whose memoirs will come out this spring, was so tickled by Mr. Brown’s victory that he offered to rent him his Washington D.C. apartment, which is a convenient short drive from the… Read More

Meg Whitman has launched her second television advertisement which you can watch below. Her campaign also released a new radio spot that features Jon Coupal of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. The radio spot is under the tv spot below.

… Read More

On Thursday the California Senate passed a bill, ABX8 8 that will make internet retailers with affiliates in California collect sales tax on behalf of the state. The bill is now in the Assembly for a vote on concurrence. Many good points were raised in the debate. I completely agree with the Democrats that there is a great inequity between internet retailers who sell without collecting sales tax and California retailers who have to collect the tax. However, this is a fight that cannot be won because of the nature of the internet.

When Jeff Bezos was thinking about establishing Amazon back in the ’90s, his first thought was to set up on an Indian reservation. Bezos is a wonderful, mad genius, and his sophistication has only increased. When New York passed this same mandate on Amazon last year, Amazon immediately fired all of its affiliates in New York and signed up new ones in a neighboring state. You can call it radical, but it is a great business decision that is in the best interest of Amazon shareholders. Some say the answer is a national sales tax program, but that misses the mark as well. Consider that Google is rumored to be designing… Read More

It has been well over thirty years since the landmark Proposition 13 was passed by voters on June 6, 1978, creating a “shot heard around the world” as the California measure not only implemented significant taxpayer protections here in California, but it spread like wildfire around the entire country, ushering in a wave of new policies favorable to taxpayers from sea to shining sea. Of course this measure was the brainchild of Howard Jarvis, whose passion for limiting government and preserving liberty for the people lives on today through the efforts of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association (HJTA).

You would have to go back an awfully long way to find a time when HJTA was more powerful and important than it is today. There are a lot of reasons for this – including the immense fiscal challenges facing our nation, state and local… Read More

It has been well over thirty years since the landmark Proposition 13 was passed by voters on June 6, 1978, creating a “shot heard around the world” as the California measure not only implemented significant taxpayer protections here in California, but it spread like wildfire around the entire country, ushering in a wave of new policies favorable to taxpayers from sea to shining sea. Of course this measure was the brainchild of Howard Jarvis, whose passion for limiting government and preserving liberty for the people lives on today through the efforts of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association (HJTA).

You would have to go back an awfully long way to find a time when HJTA was more powerful and important than it is today. There are a lot of reasons for this – including the immense fiscal challenges facing our nation, state and local… Read More

Over the weekend there was an article in the Orange County Register talking about how some legislators have managed to make big bucks by investing their per diem payments (for expenses associated with having to maintain two households) into real estate which then increased in value.

To this I would say… bravo! It seems to me that if we want legislators to be smart with OPM (other people’s money), we need them to be smart with their own.

We can haggle over appropriateness of per diem payments, the amount, and whether or not some of the fine lines that are walked in terms of taking the payments if you really only have one household, in Sacramento, and such.

But it should be obvious on the face of it that making prudent financial decisions with their own money is a good quality for legislators to have — since they are making important decisions about the finances of the state. I’d go back and re-read the article — and congratulate every one of those legislators who has figured… Read More

We can debate exactly what caused the near economic collapse in the fall of 2008, but clearly over leveraging and excessive risk taking by consumers, banks, and “non-banks” was a major contributor. The economy continues to have a drag caused by deleveraging and fallout from the losses incurred during that period. The U.S. Federal government prevented that collapse by putting the imprimatur of the United States Treasury on a lot of private debt in order to stop the run. It worked because the world markets had a tremendous level of trust in the full faith and credit of the United States government.

But the shoe may soon be on the other foot. Federal spending as a percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is now over 25%. The last time the government represented that much of the economy, we were building B-29 bombers to drop their payloads on Japan and Germany. As a result of the economic downturn, taxes collected are only about 15% of GDP (whereas 19% has roughly been the average for the last 40 years) hence the huge deficits.

And that’s only the federal government. State and local governments now comprise (roughly) an additional 10% of GDP. So combined,… Read More

This morning I read the Governor’s Weekly Address and decided that it needed a conservative response. The whole address was a “celebration” of the one-year anniversary of the federal stimulus plan. It’s hardly an anniversary worth celebrating, but considering California’s recent proclivity to beg the feds for more aid, I guess the influx of cash would excite government bureaucrats.

Throughout the speech the Governor praises the virtues of massive government spending, taking credit for putting “40,000 young people into summer jobs,” and delivering “650,000 warm meals to seniors.” Since when is the government responsible for employing young people and doing the work performed much better by private charities? Sounds a little too much like “cradle to grave” government.

The Governor also touts the $12.8 billion “being put to work in programs to both train and fund jobs,” and $13.8 billion in “programs like MediCal and unemployment.” Again, when government “creates” jobs, it is not really a productive job because it doesn’t produce prosperity, it requires private sector jobs to fund it. And with the growing government bureaucracy,… Read More