After New York City’s close call with bankruptcy in 1975. the state required the city to balance its budget in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles rather than continuing to use “creative-accounting practices.” According to Richard Ravitch, writing in the Wall Street Journal last week, the city has not had a fiscal crisis since.

The city’s new mayor,Bill de Blasio, released his first budget last week, beginning the slippery slide back into questionable accounting: Many are questioning whether the deferral of payments contractually due city employees was properly accounted for.

Ravitch’s article describesexactly what most California cities are doing: usingdeceptive cash-basisaccounting to hide real costs and… Read More

With the 2012 passage of Proposition 30, voters were assured the significant tax increase would go entirely to education. However, less than 50 percent actually does.

Now, a new bill is moving through the Legislature, claiming to tax oil and gas production for – ahem, you guessed it — education.

SB 1017, an urgency measure, would impose a severance tax on the extraction of oil and natural gas, effective immediately after being signed into law.

Pay attention to the taxman behind the curtain who wants to add more taxes onto oil and gas production.

However, if the California legislature doesn’t pass an oil severance tax this year, billionaire hedge fund manager, Tom Steyer, is preparing a ballot initiative for 2016.

Because Gov. Jerry Brown vowed that all new tax increase proposals would go before the voters, there are reports which say he’s largely rejected the oil tax this year. But NextGenClimate Action, Steyer’s political action committee, can do it for Brown instead, with the… Read More

California Governor Jerry Brown told a group of scientists in a speech on Monday that California is at the “epicenter” of global warming.

Only a few days prior, Brown blamed climate change for the rash of major wildfires in San Diego County.

Last week, Brown said that within a couple hundred years the seas could rise up to four feet, and put the Los Angeles International Airport under water. Brown’s statements brought back to mind George Kastanza from the Jerry Seinfeld show who famously said,“It’s not a lie if… Read More

Remember when plastic bags were foisted on the shopping public because cutting trees down for paper was bad? Introduced in the 1950’s, popular in the U.S. by the 1980’s, plastic bags were sold to the public as 100 percent reusable and recyclable. All types of plastic shopping bag can be recycled into new bags where effective collection schemes exist; some are even biodegradable.

Despite the fact that trees are a renewable resource, many stores and retail outlets accepted the plastic bags. “Paper or plastic?” became one of the most recognizable questions in America.

Flash forward to 2007, when the plastic bag began to smell like the… Read More

The Governor is on the right track in proposing a budget that has no new taxes, contains ongoing expenses, pays down debt and begins to address the state’s growing pension costs.

I just wish the Governor would repeal the fire tax and stop the bullet train.

In addition, California continues to rank as the worst state to do business in an annual survey of business leaders.

The next test for the Governor will be how he deals with legislators who want to raise taxes and spend billions more. Will he hold the line?… Read More

Ethics, even in politics, is based on adherence to moral principles. Honesty, integrity, loyalty, fairness, respect for others, lawfulness, pursuit of excellence and accountability, are principles.

G. K. Chesterton explained why: “Morality is always terribly complicated – to a man who has lost all his principles.”

The fundamental purpose of the American project was and still is individual freedom.

While many American freedoms have been eroded, we still hold the sanctity of the individual sacred in America. Americans believe that man is inherently free, whether a gift from God, or a fact of nature.

However, with freedoms and individual liberties increasingly plundered, many ask what the proper role of government is, as well as the proper role of the politician.

Especially in California, suffering under the cloud of recent scandals in the… Read More

As I walked out of the Capitol Thursday, May 1 at just after 5:00 pm, I noticed a fledgling labor rally beginning.

It was May Day, the date chosen by the Socialists and Communists for International Workers’ Day.

But there weren’t any of the usual purple shirt-wearing protestors – this crowd was a real potpourri of odd people, including a group of leathered, old hippies, acting as if their brains had been fried years ago by drugs.

As I was walked past, guest speaker Assemblyman Roger Dickinson, was introduced.

Dickinson, a Democrat from Sacramento, is known as a good friend to labor. Dickinson took the microphone and began to speak as if there were thousands of purple-shirt SEIU members in the crowd.

“The direction we are going is putting the wealth of this country in the hands of fewer and fewer, at the expense of everyone!” Assemblyman Roger Dickinson said.

So compelling was his statement, I stopped to write it down. But that was about as much as I could take; I didn’t stick around for the rest of the speech. I knew where it was going.

Income “inequality”

Democrats across the country… Read More

The list of businesses leaving California for greener pastures is long and growing. And now we can add Toyota to it.

The word ‘leakage’ is the new politically correct term used by legislators, the Governor, bureaucrats and the California Air Resources Board, to describe what happens when California businesses leave the state because of tax increases and stupendous regulations… as if any of them really know what it means for a business to make the difficult decision to close a location, terminate hundreds of employees, and physically move equipment, machinery, offices and records. And, the CEOmust figure in the cost of business interruption, as a business’s productivity will be undoubtedly be reduced after a move.

Who is “leaking?”

Apparently California is ‘leaking’ businesses… as if businesses and middle class families are dribbling away, or… Read More