Steven Greenhut
Business & Economics
PRI’s CalWatchdog Seeks to Expose Waste, Fraud and Abuse in the State
Sixteen years ago, as a building and remodeling editor for Better Homes and Gardens magazine in Des Moines, I desperately wanted to get my opinions heard not the ones about the latest kitchen remodeling or home addition, but about the hot political debates of the day. I had little ...
Business & Economics
Califailure: Steven Greenhut on the governor
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s final State of the State Address, delivered Wednesday in the Capitol, was a microcosm of his entire failed administration. It was a reminder that those who govern the nation’s most populous state have no clue how to solve the fiscal mess they have created, are drunk on ...
Business & Economics
2010 initiatives: good, bad and silly
Any reform that will actually help fix the ongoing California government’s fiscal mess (serious spending limits, pension reform, limits on union power, cutbacks in the size of state government, educational privatization, etc.) cannot possibly pass, given political realities. Anything that can actually pass will not fix anything or might ...
Business & Economics
Misguided move to the middle
As a believer in limited government, free markets and low taxes, I rarely find myself in agreement with the state’s liberal Democrats, and my libertarian bent sometimes puts me at odds with conservative Republicans, at least when it comes to their approach to law-and-order and social issues. But both factions ...
Business & Economics
We’re increasingly ruled by rules
To the extent that anyone still thinks about the former Soviet Union and its satellite communist states, they understandably think about the suffocating oppression – the Berlin Wall, the gulags, the KGB, the political prisoners, the persecution of religious people and minorities. Yet, in talking to refugees from that nightmarish ...
Business & Economics
Frosting on an already-sweet pension deal
When people have an entitlement mentality, enough is never enough. Even though government employees enjoy absurdly generous defined-benefit pensions that often allow them to retire with 80 percent to 90 percent of their final year’s pay guaranteed forever, employees game the system by taking advantage of various pension-spiking schemes. A ...
Business & Economics
Derailing public pension gravy train
Orange County Register (CA), November 22, 2009 Defenders of government employees’ current retirement system depict critics as haters of government workers who want public “servants” to spend their retirement years eating cat food and living in dire poverty. That’s the response I always get when I point to the absurdity ...
Business & Economics
Sheriff Joe no role model
Former Orange County Sheriff’s Lt. Bill Hunt should know a thing or two about the dangers of an abusive law enforcement culture. He was a victim of now-disgraced Sheriff Mike Carona, who demoted him to deputy after Hunt ran for sheriff against Carona in 2006. Hunt even made First Amendment ...
Agriculture
Pork, water policy don’t mix
SACRAMENTO – Advocates for government “solutions” for everything from health care to education argue that some aspects of life are just so darn complicated that only a centralized authority with taxing and spending power can handle such matters. Yet whenever we look at those areas of life dominated by the ...
Business & Economics
Sneaky way to murder Prop. 13
Easier tax increases and budget approvals seems to be the primary goals of a proposed state constitutional convention. SACRAMENTO — There ain’t no such thing as bipartisan, nondivisive reform. Any real change to California’s dysfunctional political structure and culture must gore somebody’s ox, stir up contentious battles and draw vicious ...
PRI’s CalWatchdog Seeks to Expose Waste, Fraud and Abuse in the State
Sixteen years ago, as a building and remodeling editor for Better Homes and Gardens magazine in Des Moines, I desperately wanted to get my opinions heard not the ones about the latest kitchen remodeling or home addition, but about the hot political debates of the day. I had little ...
Califailure: Steven Greenhut on the governor
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s final State of the State Address, delivered Wednesday in the Capitol, was a microcosm of his entire failed administration. It was a reminder that those who govern the nation’s most populous state have no clue how to solve the fiscal mess they have created, are drunk on ...
2010 initiatives: good, bad and silly
Any reform that will actually help fix the ongoing California government’s fiscal mess (serious spending limits, pension reform, limits on union power, cutbacks in the size of state government, educational privatization, etc.) cannot possibly pass, given political realities. Anything that can actually pass will not fix anything or might ...
Misguided move to the middle
As a believer in limited government, free markets and low taxes, I rarely find myself in agreement with the state’s liberal Democrats, and my libertarian bent sometimes puts me at odds with conservative Republicans, at least when it comes to their approach to law-and-order and social issues. But both factions ...
We’re increasingly ruled by rules
To the extent that anyone still thinks about the former Soviet Union and its satellite communist states, they understandably think about the suffocating oppression – the Berlin Wall, the gulags, the KGB, the political prisoners, the persecution of religious people and minorities. Yet, in talking to refugees from that nightmarish ...
Frosting on an already-sweet pension deal
When people have an entitlement mentality, enough is never enough. Even though government employees enjoy absurdly generous defined-benefit pensions that often allow them to retire with 80 percent to 90 percent of their final year’s pay guaranteed forever, employees game the system by taking advantage of various pension-spiking schemes. A ...
Derailing public pension gravy train
Orange County Register (CA), November 22, 2009 Defenders of government employees’ current retirement system depict critics as haters of government workers who want public “servants” to spend their retirement years eating cat food and living in dire poverty. That’s the response I always get when I point to the absurdity ...
Sheriff Joe no role model
Former Orange County Sheriff’s Lt. Bill Hunt should know a thing or two about the dangers of an abusive law enforcement culture. He was a victim of now-disgraced Sheriff Mike Carona, who demoted him to deputy after Hunt ran for sheriff against Carona in 2006. Hunt even made First Amendment ...
Pork, water policy don’t mix
SACRAMENTO – Advocates for government “solutions” for everything from health care to education argue that some aspects of life are just so darn complicated that only a centralized authority with taxing and spending power can handle such matters. Yet whenever we look at those areas of life dominated by the ...
Sneaky way to murder Prop. 13
Easier tax increases and budget approvals seems to be the primary goals of a proposed state constitutional convention. SACRAMENTO — There ain’t no such thing as bipartisan, nondivisive reform. Any real change to California’s dysfunctional political structure and culture must gore somebody’s ox, stir up contentious battles and draw vicious ...
