Housing
Blog
Coronavirus Chronicles: States Want Bailout for Past Profligate Spending
Even as House members consider themselves non-essential workers (they’ve decided to vote from home), it hasn’t stopped some lawmakers from coming up with bad ideas for the next stimulus package, including relief for states and municipalities with pre-existing economic conditions. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced last week at his ...
Blog
Can Taxpayers Afford a Big Spending Sacramento “Economic Recovery Plan”?
Speaker Pelosi and her allies in Congress received significant pollical pushback for using the COVID-19 crisis to enact their budget wish list in the $2 billion “phase 3” stimulus. Recently, Rowena Itchon wrote on Right by the Bay about tens of millions being spent on priorities for Democrats like propping ...
California
The left-wing agenda of Newsom’s reopening task force
With huddled masses of Californians yearning to be free, Gov. Gavin Newsom has announced the launch of a task force to oversee the reopening of the economy by fostering business and job recovery. Yet it more closely resembles a central committee charged with installing some variant of Cold War-era Bulgarian ...
Agriculture
Earth Day in the Time of Coronavirus
In case anyone has forgotten (and many long have), April 22 is Earth Day. And while the coronavirus pandemic has put a chill on this year’s worldwide 50th jubilee celebration, it hasn’t caused its demise. If anything, progressive climate change advocates have attempted to leverage the pandemic to further spread ...
Blog
Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should
Public banks, it seems, are the next wrongheaded progressive movement in state overrun with them. The Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors voted last month “to reach out to nearby jurisdictions proposing a viability study, the first step in the creation of a public bank” the Monterey County Weekly has ...
California
Gov. Newsom would rather take gas-tax money for bike lanes than fix California’s roads
When Senate Bill 1 was passed and signed into law in 2017, Californians were told the tax hikes it authorized were good for them. The revenues were to be dedicated to repairing the state’s lousy roads. Yet there have been numerous accountability and transparency questions about the law, enough that ...
California
California must do a better job of helping homeless children
By Lance Izumi and Michele Steeb As Gov. Gavin Newsom noted in his 2020 State of the State address, California had the second highest increase in state homelessness in 2019. But a newly released report by State Auditor Elaine Howle found that California public schools undercounted homeless students by at ...
Blog
Leave the Toy Aisle Alone, Please
As a former legislative staffer in the California State Assembly, I often asked myself when reviewing legislation, “do we really need this bill?” I asked myself the same question when I came across the introduction of a bill mandating gender-neutral toy sections in department stores. Assembly Bill 2826 by Asm. ...
Blog
Forced to Ride Those Dirty BART Trains
It’s not uncommon to find people who think San Francisco is one of the most beautiful cities, if not the most beautiful city, in the world. Neither would it be shocking to learn that people are finding it to be one of the most unlivable cities in the world. The ...
Blog
How Many Billionaires Would It Take to Fund Bernie’s Agenda?
Our colleague Wayne Winegarden wrote a marvelous piece for his Forbes column on “Bernie’s Math Problem.” To fund free health care, free housing, free college and so on, the Democrat frontrunner plans to make “billionaires pay their fair share of taxes.” Why not cut to the chase, thought Winegarden, “Instead ...
Coronavirus Chronicles: States Want Bailout for Past Profligate Spending
Even as House members consider themselves non-essential workers (they’ve decided to vote from home), it hasn’t stopped some lawmakers from coming up with bad ideas for the next stimulus package, including relief for states and municipalities with pre-existing economic conditions. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced last week at his ...
Can Taxpayers Afford a Big Spending Sacramento “Economic Recovery Plan”?
Speaker Pelosi and her allies in Congress received significant pollical pushback for using the COVID-19 crisis to enact their budget wish list in the $2 billion “phase 3” stimulus. Recently, Rowena Itchon wrote on Right by the Bay about tens of millions being spent on priorities for Democrats like propping ...
The left-wing agenda of Newsom’s reopening task force
With huddled masses of Californians yearning to be free, Gov. Gavin Newsom has announced the launch of a task force to oversee the reopening of the economy by fostering business and job recovery. Yet it more closely resembles a central committee charged with installing some variant of Cold War-era Bulgarian ...
Earth Day in the Time of Coronavirus
In case anyone has forgotten (and many long have), April 22 is Earth Day. And while the coronavirus pandemic has put a chill on this year’s worldwide 50th jubilee celebration, it hasn’t caused its demise. If anything, progressive climate change advocates have attempted to leverage the pandemic to further spread ...
Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should
Public banks, it seems, are the next wrongheaded progressive movement in state overrun with them. The Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors voted last month “to reach out to nearby jurisdictions proposing a viability study, the first step in the creation of a public bank” the Monterey County Weekly has ...
Gov. Newsom would rather take gas-tax money for bike lanes than fix California’s roads
When Senate Bill 1 was passed and signed into law in 2017, Californians were told the tax hikes it authorized were good for them. The revenues were to be dedicated to repairing the state’s lousy roads. Yet there have been numerous accountability and transparency questions about the law, enough that ...
California must do a better job of helping homeless children
By Lance Izumi and Michele Steeb As Gov. Gavin Newsom noted in his 2020 State of the State address, California had the second highest increase in state homelessness in 2019. But a newly released report by State Auditor Elaine Howle found that California public schools undercounted homeless students by at ...
Leave the Toy Aisle Alone, Please
As a former legislative staffer in the California State Assembly, I often asked myself when reviewing legislation, “do we really need this bill?” I asked myself the same question when I came across the introduction of a bill mandating gender-neutral toy sections in department stores. Assembly Bill 2826 by Asm. ...
Forced to Ride Those Dirty BART Trains
It’s not uncommon to find people who think San Francisco is one of the most beautiful cities, if not the most beautiful city, in the world. Neither would it be shocking to learn that people are finding it to be one of the most unlivable cities in the world. The ...
How Many Billionaires Would It Take to Fund Bernie’s Agenda?
Our colleague Wayne Winegarden wrote a marvelous piece for his Forbes column on “Bernie’s Math Problem.” To fund free health care, free housing, free college and so on, the Democrat frontrunner plans to make “billionaires pay their fair share of taxes.” Why not cut to the chase, thought Winegarden, “Instead ...
