Steven Greenhut
Business & Economics
Democrats picking on oil companies
SACRAMENTO – Legislators are more than six weeks past the constitutional deadline for passing a state budget, yet the state’s majority Democrats last week weren’t even holding budget hearings. Why bother? The state is $19 billion in the red, but the two sides aren’t even close to coming to terms. ...
Commentary
How to make shopping more annoying
SACRAMENTO – While walking though the supermarket the other day, my wife and I began playing a game I call Unintended Consequences. We tried to guess how things will really work after some new law is put in place. Our governments continually pass legislation that promises to fix every problem ...
Business & Economics
Drop the starfish, you criminal
SACRAMENTO – Advocates for big government can always be expected to stoke our fears to justify higher taxes, more regulations and the hiring of additional government workers. One of the most sensational examples of this phenomenon was provided last week as the Sacramento Bee published a front-page investigation warning about ...
Commentary
Student DNA tests could go wild
SACRAMENTO – The University of California, Berkeley, has inadvertently stepped into a brewing ethical debate over genetic testing and medical privacy after it asked the incoming freshman class to submit to the campus cotton swabs with DNA samples from their saliva. The unusual experiment is part of Berkeley’s annual “On ...
California
Pensions are S.F.’s other golden gate
SACRAMENTO – I’d been starting to wonder about whether there are any true progressives left in California, until I heard about Jeff Adachi, San Francisco’s public defender. Many people describe themselves as progressive, mind you, but few seem to embody the core principles of a movement that is supposed to ...
Business & Economics
Can GOP quit weed whacking?
Sacramento – If the California Republican Party were serious about its oft-stated calls for limiting government, then it should be championing an initiative on the November ballot that would reduce government interference in our lives, increase the efficiency of law-enforcement, protect property rights and help fill the gaping hole in ...
Business & Economics
Police budget cuts won’t spike crime
SACRAMENTO – “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary,” observed the journalist, critic and satirist H.L. Mencken. Mencken perhaps would not have envisioned the ...
California
Boxer, Fiorina mostly MIA on war
SACRAMENTO – As usual, American policy-makers, the media and California’s political candidates avoid the big issues while they make a huge deal out of the small stuff. The latest example is Afghanistan, where Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. and coalition commander, got booted from his post by the president Wednesday ...
Business & Economics
It’s not easy being nonunion green
SACRAMENTO – The state’s Democratic legislators have an inordinate hostility to the free marketplace, as evidenced by their endless push for new business regulations and for higher taxes for corporations and wealthy Californians. Yet there is one form of business development that the California Left has embraced with particular gusto ...
Business & Economics
Public Employee Unions: On the Defensive?
Public Employee Unions: On the Defensive? Four big California public employee unions — including firefighters and highway patrol officers — would roll back their pensions under a deal struck this week with the governor. The compromise comes at a time when public sector unions are increasingly under pressure to make ...
Democrats picking on oil companies
SACRAMENTO – Legislators are more than six weeks past the constitutional deadline for passing a state budget, yet the state’s majority Democrats last week weren’t even holding budget hearings. Why bother? The state is $19 billion in the red, but the two sides aren’t even close to coming to terms. ...
How to make shopping more annoying
SACRAMENTO – While walking though the supermarket the other day, my wife and I began playing a game I call Unintended Consequences. We tried to guess how things will really work after some new law is put in place. Our governments continually pass legislation that promises to fix every problem ...
Drop the starfish, you criminal
SACRAMENTO – Advocates for big government can always be expected to stoke our fears to justify higher taxes, more regulations and the hiring of additional government workers. One of the most sensational examples of this phenomenon was provided last week as the Sacramento Bee published a front-page investigation warning about ...
Student DNA tests could go wild
SACRAMENTO – The University of California, Berkeley, has inadvertently stepped into a brewing ethical debate over genetic testing and medical privacy after it asked the incoming freshman class to submit to the campus cotton swabs with DNA samples from their saliva. The unusual experiment is part of Berkeley’s annual “On ...
Pensions are S.F.’s other golden gate
SACRAMENTO – I’d been starting to wonder about whether there are any true progressives left in California, until I heard about Jeff Adachi, San Francisco’s public defender. Many people describe themselves as progressive, mind you, but few seem to embody the core principles of a movement that is supposed to ...
Can GOP quit weed whacking?
Sacramento – If the California Republican Party were serious about its oft-stated calls for limiting government, then it should be championing an initiative on the November ballot that would reduce government interference in our lives, increase the efficiency of law-enforcement, protect property rights and help fill the gaping hole in ...
Police budget cuts won’t spike crime
SACRAMENTO – “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary,” observed the journalist, critic and satirist H.L. Mencken. Mencken perhaps would not have envisioned the ...
Boxer, Fiorina mostly MIA on war
SACRAMENTO – As usual, American policy-makers, the media and California’s political candidates avoid the big issues while they make a huge deal out of the small stuff. The latest example is Afghanistan, where Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. and coalition commander, got booted from his post by the president Wednesday ...
It’s not easy being nonunion green
SACRAMENTO – The state’s Democratic legislators have an inordinate hostility to the free marketplace, as evidenced by their endless push for new business regulations and for higher taxes for corporations and wealthy Californians. Yet there is one form of business development that the California Left has embraced with particular gusto ...
Public Employee Unions: On the Defensive?
Public Employee Unions: On the Defensive? Four big California public employee unions — including firefighters and highway patrol officers — would roll back their pensions under a deal struck this week with the governor. The compromise comes at a time when public sector unions are increasingly under pressure to make ...
