While our gallivanting Governor Gavin has been vacationing in forbidden states and running ads in Texas and Florida touting the excellence of California, he and his party once again have given the short straw to our state’s employers. They completely ignore the mass migration of businesses to other states thinking no matter what they do businesses will just take what is handed to them.

You might have heard that supposedly the state has a massive surplus of roughly $90-100 billion. This is caused by high-earners and their stock gains. It happens regularly during good times. The receipts in 2023 from tax returns for 2022 will most likely plummet due to the stock market downturn.

While Gov. Gavin was out crowing about the surplus, my first thought was somewhat of a novel thought – use that money to pay down debt. That amount currently stands at about $144 billion when it should be near zero. Instead of doing any of that they will reserve about $37 billion for a “rainy day fund” and spend the rest mainly on every Leftist’s primary idea of budgeting — $54 billon for climate change.

Here is where the employers of the state get taken.… Read More

Our various governments allocate money. Then the money goes into a black hole. Readers of this column know I tried to find out where Los Angeles City spent $1 billion on homelessness in a recent year and hit a brick wall. As you know our federal government has allocated amounts in the trillions and we never find out where the money goes. Remember President Obama’s “shovel ready jobs?” Where did that money go? There is now a study on the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), so I decided to dig into it.

The study is available here.

The study was performed by a team at the National Bureau of Research (NBER) headquartered in Cambridge Mass. The study was headed by David Autor who is MIT’S Ford Professor of Economics. Professor Autor was initially responsive especially after I sent him a misrepresentation of the program from a Left-wing author. Unlike the errant Leftist, I have intimate knowledge of the program as I helped some clients make applications and answered hundreds of their questions.

I found fault with the study from the beginning since it did not adequately explain the genesis of the… Read More

The Democrats are masters of misnaming the intended purpose of bills they offer up to disguise what is really happening. It is indicative of how gullible they believe we are. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 will do nothing of the such. The main reason is that revenues will not be achieved to offset the expenditures.

This column has a ban on using definitive terminology. I do not use words like Never, Always or Every. That is because those terms are rarely applicable. However here is a truism. Whenever there is a projection of revenues that will be produced from a new tax increase, they never come to fruition. Here is another truism. Whenever there is a reduction of tax rates, they always produce increased governmental revenues. I know this because I have both studied and written about it for over 40 years.

This ridiculously named bill has a few major elements of the supposed increase in revenue. Please do not believe the eventual scoring by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The CBO is rarely correct because they do their scoring based on whatever… Read More

Shockingly, Nancy Pelosi emitted something with which I agree. She was not doing her usual thing of lying to us like telling us she never speaks to her husband about public policy and their investments. Ms. Pelosi is planning a trip with a Congressional member delegation to Taiwan. Way to go, Madam Speaker, you finally got something right.

Ms. Pelosi had stated she was planning to go in April, but the plan was cancelled because she contracted COVID. Back then, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi stated the trip would be “a malicious provocation.” Really? A visit to an independent country by a United States elected representative must be approved by Chinese Communist dictators? Maybe Ms. Pelosi should be boarded up in her San Francisco home by the Chinese until she acquiesces and admits the error of her thinking.

Now that she has announced the August trip, matters have risen to even a higher level of Chinese nonsense. Then we have our president – someone who create problems nearly every time he opens his mouth without reading from the teleprompter (and these people were worried about what came out of Trump’s mouth). This time he said about the Pelosi trip… Read More

Matt Rahn is running for State Assembly in the newly-drawn hyper-conservative 71st district that straddles Orange and Riverside Counties. He’s from the Riverside end of the district, serving on the Temecula City Council there – and he’s been registered Republican since he moved into that conservative city and then successfully ran for city council. He previously ran unsuccessfully for Congress and State Senate.

Thanks to the jacked-up top-two primary system, Rahn is the top-two run off against conservative Kate Sanchez who hails from the Orange County side of the district. I’ve known… Read More

Chief Justice John Roberts has expressed that he feels compelled to protect the image of the Supreme Court since he was sworn in as the leader. That is why we have been told he conceived of the Obamacare Individual Mandate as being a tax. That is after the President and the supporters of Obamacare stated repeatedly it was not a tax, thus saving Obamacare in the ruling on National Federation of Independent Business et al vs. Sebelius. Why at this critical juncture is he not vociferously defending the court?

Let us begin by defining the fact that I am wholly in favor of the divide we currently have in this country between what has been characterized as “Red” and “Blue” states. The states are designed as incubators of public policy. In a society where we have significant choices, people make decisions which states have not only the best climate and best jobs for them, but the best public policy that aligns with their views.

There have been many discussions regarding people relocating to red states during COVID. A few years only tells part of the story. The three most populated blue states are New York, Illinois, and California. I looked at their population… Read More

What happens when you have a quandary — a predicament of your own making that you never expected to happen and exposes you to being a fool no matter which way you turn. That happened in the last week when some people latched on to the story of a 10-year-old getting an abortion.

A story spread through the MSM that a 10-year-old rape victim had left Ohio to go to Indiana to have an abortion. Supposedly, a child abuse doctor called a colleague in Indianapolis to facilitate the procedure. This was because of the Dobbs ruling, where Ohio would no longer allow abortions after six weeks. The girl was now pregnant for six weeks and three days.

The Indianapolis Star published the story with no verification and there was no reported rape that anyone could find. Yet, the story spread because it fit an agenda. It spread all the way to President Biden. Biden cited the story last week after signing an executive order on abortion access, saying the 10-year-old “was forced to travel out of state to Indiana to seek to terminate the pregnancy and maybe save her life.” Now it was a “lifesaving” procedure as the story took on greater urgency.

While the… Read More

Given how opinion is divided on this issue, the reaction to that headline will either be there are too many to count or nothing the committee does is dangerous because Trump is the real danger. There are lots of reasons to question the committee, however one stands out, but you must dig deep. I recently had lunch with a friend who is of a different political persuasion. We did not discuss politics except for him asking me two binary questions. One was whether I was watching the hearing. The simple answer was no. The answer produced a bodily reaction from him but elicited no follow-up questions.

I spoke to him the next day and told him I thought his questions were inadequate because he had not asked for further definition of my thoughts. He blamed me for not offering more information even though I answered his questions as posed. We then discussed my thoughts on both matters.

There are many reasons to have disdain for the J6 committee, but it starts with how it was conceived. We all know that Nancy Pelosi rejected Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s selections for two people to serve on the committee. This broke long standing House rules. Of course, Nancy had… Read More