Steven Greenhut
Business & Economics
What’s keeping state in sorry shape
SACRAMENTO Technically speaking, it’s not hard to figure out how to solve California’s permanent fiscal crisis if you just ignore the political mountains that would have to be moved to implement the fixes. A few good starting points: imposing a strict spending limit on legislators, reducing pension benefits ...
Business & Economics
Now You Should Be Really Fiscally Afraid in California
If you really want to be scared, you need to listen to the types of people who are now sounding the alarm bells. Im a libertarian, and its not a surprise to hear me warn about the ill effects of government spending. But listen to what former California Assembly Speaker ...
Business & Economics
Class War
How public servants became our masters In April 2008, The Orange County Register published a bombshell of an investigation about a license plate program for California government workers and their families. Drivers of nearly 1 million cars and light trucksout of a total 22 million vehicles registered statewidewere protected by ...
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 ...
What’s keeping state in sorry shape
SACRAMENTO Technically speaking, it’s not hard to figure out how to solve California’s permanent fiscal crisis if you just ignore the political mountains that would have to be moved to implement the fixes. A few good starting points: imposing a strict spending limit on legislators, reducing pension benefits ...
Now You Should Be Really Fiscally Afraid in California
If you really want to be scared, you need to listen to the types of people who are now sounding the alarm bells. Im a libertarian, and its not a surprise to hear me warn about the ill effects of government spending. But listen to what former California Assembly Speaker ...
Class War
How public servants became our masters In April 2008, The Orange County Register published a bombshell of an investigation about a license plate program for California government workers and their families. Drivers of nearly 1 million cars and light trucksout of a total 22 million vehicles registered statewidewere protected by ...
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 ...
