A Strategic Way of Spending $4.6 Billion

By Jim Mayer

The Internet was humming recently with the news that the California economy has generated $4.6 billion more in state tax revenue than budget writers had anticipated.

Now comes the big question: What to do with it?

Californians in November 2014 are scheduled to vote on a constitutional amendment, the California Rainy Day Budget Stabilization Fund Act, which would restrict what state officials can do when revenues jump above the 20-year average growth line.     Read more »

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Full Frontal Identity

California Legislators Race to Play Catch-Up with Internet Privacy Concerns—and Consumers’ Evolving Online Habits

By Greg Lucas 

Sacramento News & Review, April 18, 2013 — Big Brother has been watching since 1949 when George Orwell’s book 1984 was published. He keeps getting better at it.

Orwell’s dystopia is bereft of privacy.    Read more »

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A Fairer Way to Fund Schools

By Christopher J. Steinhauser 

Hanging on the wall just outside my office here at the Long Beach Unified School District is a framed, yellowing copy of a budget for a local grammar school from 1913.  Created with pencil and ruler, the budget is a simple ledger of revenue and expenditures. It takes up just one page.    Read more »

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Thorough and Deliberative Policy Committee Hearings?

 “California lawmakers hurriedly pass hundreds of bills with little or no discussion.”

Words like those will appear in various media reports during the week ending May 31 when Assembly bills must move to the Senate and vice versa.

Even though this feverish several-day flurry of seemingly indiscriminate bill passage occurs annually, it’s a spectacle worth spotlighting.    Read more »

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“Quality Verse”

(From the Sacramento News & Review, March 21, 2013)

If CEQA stood for “Challenge Everything, Question Authority” instead of California Environmental Quality Act, there probably wouldn’t be all this political drama. CEQA would be celebrated. Like YOLO. The Lonely Island might even follow up its “YOLO” tune with a CEQA number:

Don’t take no guff or calcified static.    Read more »

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“Armed and Legislated”

“Will the Flurry of Gun-Control Bills Even Matter?”

By Greg Lucas 

Sacramento News & Review, January 24, 2013 —The National Rifle Association is right:

People kill people. The use of firearms makes it significantly easier, however.

Put as nicely as possible, guns are facilitators. The number of California thumbtack-related deaths in 2010 pales against the 2,811 deaths involving guns the same year, a little more than half of which were suicides.    Read more »

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Tight Fists vs. Spendthrifts

“State revenues should cover expenses. But the balance will vanish if a bunch of stuff doesn’t break California’s way.” 

By Greg Lucas 

Sacramento News & Review, January 24, 2013 — Budgets bite. Mainly because spending can’t be more than money received. Budgets allow for spending on some fun stuff, but require saying no to other good stuff, which is usually the really super primo good stuff, since that’s the only stuff for which there never seems to be enough money available in the budget.     Read more »

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By Greg Lucas

Sacramento News & Review, January 10, 2013 –Perception depends on the perceiver. But also on the perceived.

Loath to buck the fact-based belief of America’s citizenry that they’re a tawdry nest of slack-jawed, self-promoting wastrels, the members of Congress piddled around for months before hurriedly cobbling together a rinky-dink hodgepodge of major tax-law changes, whose principal benefit, albeit temporary, is hastening the removal of “fiscal cliff” from what is generously called a “national dialogue.”    Read more »

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“Make ’em, Don’t Break ’em — New Year’s Resolutions for Lawmakers”

By Greg Lucas

Sacramento News & Review, December 27, 2012 — Elected officials aren’t mutants from an alternate universe sent to infect our world with madness.

They used to be regular folks anonymously striving to meet their monthly nut, not piss off partners (business or otherwise) and navigate life’s pothole-pocked path without major catastrophe.    Read more »

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“Freshman Disorientation — If the State Legislature Were a Business, Would It Get Bain Capital’d?”

By Greg Lucas 

Sacramento News & Review, December 13, 2012 — Imagine trying to run a successful business in which every two years one-third of the veteran employees leave and are replaced with green sieve heads who require training, mentoring and vigilant supervision to avoid All-World clusterfucks that feature overzealous health inspectors, class-action lawsuits, mangled co-workers—or a combination of the three.    Read more »

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