MEANINGFUL PENSION REFORM NOT LIKELY FROM UNDER THE DOME

The Sacramento Bee Capitol Alert Blog reports that tomorrow Governor Brown is going to announce some sort of public employee pension reform plan. The presumption is that Brown is going to formalize what he referred to last March as his “no loggerheads” faux pension reform — the folly of which I wrote about at the time. This is where you throw out some common sense ideas to curb some egregious abuses of the system, maybe combined with some changes for new hires. The problem, of course, is that there is only one real yardstick to measure a public employee pension reform proposal…

Last year a study out of Stanford University pegged the state’s unfunded pension liability at a 500 billion… Read More

The San Diego Unified School District is in big trouble financially, and the district now faces the prospect of a state takeover amid a deteriorating financial situation for one of the largest school districts in the state.

While recent changes in state education funding are being blamed for the districts poor financial condition, reports have emerged that there have been discussions within the district for at least two years concerning the potential for insolvency.

The time frame for these discussions is noteworthy because it turns out that at roughly the same time there were internal warnings about the possibility of the district becoming insolvent, the union-backed board majority voted to impose a Project Labor Agreement on $2.1 billion in new construction approved under Proposition S, passed in 2008.

As a former school board trustee, I’ve seen first-hand how powerful interests line up to pass school bonds. Unfortunately, many districts rack up big maintenance backlogs as a result of political pressure to dump all available resources into… Read More

OK – not really a blog, just something I wrote; but pertinent just the same. Feel free to share – others have been.… Read More

The 2012 San Diego mayor’s race began like other love affairs – lots of hope and promise for the future. Then, the sparkle and shine of courtship faded quickly into the same old dull routine.

No more flowers. No more moonlight and love songs.

Seems I’m not the only one who noticed our romance is fading.

Even the candidates can’t muster the enthusiasm. Both Councilman Carl DeMaio and District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis skipped a second, high-profile debate last week and the fall out has been notable.

One Rostra blogger called the no-show candidates “disappointing” while a San Diego Union-Tribune columnist floated the sweat-inducing idea of forcing all the candidates to participate in at least one debate.

[I witnessed what came close … Read More

It will take a college degree to understand the Secretary of State’s voter information pamphlet for the November, 2012 election, given the partisan, pro-union move by the Legislature and the Governor to force measures off the ballot next June, and lump them all together in November. But history demonstrates the crowded ballot really helps Republicans, whom demographics demonstrate are better educated and more prepared to comprehend the information and actually vote than voters registered in other parties in California.

The Democrats changed the balloting on propositions because they were afraid an “anti-union”… Read More

Sing again: The last laptop report, entitled “Song of the Shopkeeper”, engendered more positive responses than anything I have written in a couple of years. It wound up being published as a front section editorial in The Washington Times, and received some radio coverage as well. It seems that almost everyone has a “shopkeeper” in their family’s past or present or knows of one. I thank you all for your comments and stories. I am honored to give voice to all you shopkeepers out there. One regular reader of these missives suggested a quote that I should have put in the original tome. Napoleon Bonaparte is said to have once derisively described England as, “a nation of shopkeepers”. It was meant as an insult. I wonder if Napoleon remembered these words when his army was later defeated by those very same “shopkeepers” at the Battle of Waterloo?

The Numbers are In: The federal deficit for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2012 was $1.298 trillion. That is the second highest deficit ever. Here is a chart of the deficits for the last 5 years, in billions of dollars:… Read More

In the midst of struggling economy, California should not miss the devastating lesson the agriculture industry in Georgia is experiencing as a result of the E-Verify program.

Earlier this year, Georgia passed E-Verify legislation without considering a solution for agriculture. Since the law went into effect, farm labor workers have been fleeing the state, leaving crops literally rotting on the vine.

A report released earlier this month by the University of Georgia Center for Agribusiness and Economic Development showed the state experienced a $75 million loss directly attributable to harvest or packing labor shortages.

California should take note: agricultural accounts for $1.2 trillion a year in exports, the potential effect of a federally mandated E-Verify program without a solution for agriculture could cripple our economy. Productivity will plummet and food prices will skyrocket – something California needs to avoid.

The argument that any vacated labor positions would alleviate the unemployment burden California suffers has been tested and the results were disappointing:

In conversations with local voters over the last few weeks, I’ve discussed several abusive practices the Democrats used recently to ram bad policy ideas through the legislature. These practices draw virtually uniform condemnation, regardless of whether the voters are registered as Republicans or Democrats. That’s no surprise. They threaten representative democracy, something every citizen of any party has an interest in, and are so manifestly unfair that they cannot be defended even along party lines.

What is a surprise, however, is that these abuses are so bad that even the usual Democratic cheerleaders in the mainstream press are beginning to complain.

One of these abuses practices – cooking the books to hide the amount of public money spent by the Legislature – exploded in the press when Democratic Assemblyman Anthony Portantino complained that his own party’s leadership cut his office budget in retaliation for his vote against the state budget. The mainstream press, represented by the Los Angeles Times and a few other papers, actually filed suit against the Democrat controlled Legislature to get timely, honest accountings.

The Republicans have… Read More