The Senate will go into session at4 PM Friday and the Assembly will thenmeet at 5 PM to vote on the fixes that were hammered out this afternoon with the Governor and the other Big 4 leaders, avoiding the veto and the veto override threats.… Read More

Someone asked me this morning if there was any kind "budget deal" that contained a good enough spending/budget reform that would allow me to support a tax increase.

I thought about this for a while, and came to the conclusion that the answer is actually yes. But the spending/budget reform that would get me to that point is hardly something that the liberals who run the legislature would be open to supporting. I would need to have a true "Gann" style cap that places a hard limit on the size of state government — where state income is not allowed to expand beyond a specific formula factoring in population growth and inflation.

Of course this reform requires a vote of the people, so I guess it would have to be tied to the tax increase so that we either got both or nothing.

What is really needed, of course, is the limit, and tax cuts, as we really need to reduce the size of state government. But recognizing politics involves some give and take — this is the limit of my "generosity" on the tax issue.

Today the Governor is meeting with legislative leaders to discuss the budget. Of course, the… Read More

A legislative override of the governor’s budget veto is looking likely. And if the governor follows through on his threat to veto all the bills sent to him in retaliation, Californians will be saved from lots of onerous, dangerous new laws. One of those new laws is AB 1945.

This bill expands opportunities for trial attorneys to sue health insurers and creates a strong incentive for the unscrupulous to defraud health insurance companies. The end result would be higher premiums for everyone, pricing more Californians out of the market and eliciting calls by the Left to "reduce rising costs" by moving toward a single-payer system—e.g., government-run health care.

Unsurprisingly, AB 1945 is a Democratic bill. But nine Assembly Republicans actually voted for this step towards socialized medicine: Todd Spitzer, Tom Berryhill, Greg Aghazarian, Paul Cook, Bonnie Garcia, Shirley Horton, Guy Houston, George Plescia and Jim Silva.

AB 1945 started as a reasonable health insurance bill before being hijacked by the Consumer Attorneys of California… Read More

Your friends at Wal-Mart have embarked on an ambitious plan to register "Wal-Mart women" to vote.

Even Wal-Mart with their 200-plus California locations can’t make CA a red state but Democrats nationally should worry about this effort. Research conducted by my firm shows that Wal-Mart shoppers are not Obama voters. McCain-Palin will benefit in a big way from these new registrations across the country.

The effort by Wal-Mart is a noble one, they have a large audience, 130+ million US visitors a week and 1.4 million associates. It is hard to criticize the retail giant for trying to increase civic participation. Although someone will.

Wal-Mart’s in-house TV network will feature a public service announcement on voter registration and urge shoppers and workers alike to visit a Wal-Mart sponsored web page that guides wannabe voters to the appropriate forms to fill out.

Wal-Mart… Read More

I won’t go into the irony of Governor Schwarzenegger’s office pushing out a quote from Senator Tom McClintock. But I think it is worthwhile for FR readers to see (and hear) what McClintock has to say about this budget proposal, and whether the Governor’s veto should be upheld.

Apparently McClintock appeared on the John & Ken Show yesterday… The exchange on this issue went this way…

QUESTION: “What did you think of the Governor’s Veto?” SENATOR MCCLINTOCK: “I think he’s absolutely right. The budget that was adopted this morning makes the problem significantly worse. It defies the first law of holes, which is, when you’re in one; stop digging. We dug an eleven billion dollar hole this past year. That is, we spent $11 billion more than we took in during the past year. This… Read More

We can dither about California politics all we want here, but Wall Street is imploding on the watch of Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox (pictured right, Cox was a long-time Californai Congressman before being appointed to his SEC post by President Bush in 2006), and he needs to be fired or resign immediately. There are many components feeding the crisis in banking and equity markets, but the SEC has failed in its oversite responsiblities under Cox.

The "regulations" set to go into effect tomorrow are merely enforcement actions of laws on the books already. Christopher Cox needs to exit the stage – now. His lack of proactive leadership has cost Americans trillions of dollars of net worth already.… Read More

[Publisher’s Note – This particular opinion piece rambles on a bit. Somewhere in this is a point to be made. Discerning readers will have to figure it out… Flash]

There is definitely no road map for a conservative legislator when dealing with the state budget debacle, which is why if you look at the vote’s on the state budget in the Senate and Assembly, Republicans are split – many reliably conservative legislators voted for the bill, while still many others voted against it.

Welcome to the intersection of policy and politics. I mean, let’s be clear. The budget that sits on Governor Schwarzenegger’s desk, that he has vowed to veto on Friday (presumably Friday to maximize inconvenience to legislators who would have to come up on the weekend for a potential over-ride vote, with one Assemblyman, Lloyd Levine, having to choose between a budget vote in Sacramento, and his own wedding in Seattle), is riddled with reasons for a conservative to vote no. Frankly, it doesn’t contain nearly enough… Read More

The Governor’s petulance over the budget vote is just the latest in his exercise of ego as an element of government policy. It is now clear that he cares little about anything other than getting his own way. Policy has long ago left any discussion. In his mind, it is now all about the Governor.

While it is true the budget is flawed, it has one major benefit. Recessions do not last forever, revenues will recover and will recover soon. Spending that extra money on current bills, rather than program expansions prevents even worse spending crises in the future. The only time this Governor exercised any spending restraint was when he was paying off the bills incurred by Gray Davis. Maybe if we force him to pay off the bills he incurred yesterday from future revenues, we can prevent this spendthrift from sending the state into another budget crisis.

And that is why his criticism today is so hypocritical. It was his spending policies that created this mess. It was his deals with the Democrats that cause the collapse of the current budget. For him to criticize this budget, which is attempting to fix his mess, on the grounds that it doesn’t… Read More