Environment
Blog
Infrastructure Should Be Budget Priority – Here’s 2 Smart Ways to Make It So
Repairing California’s crumbling roads and highways, and investing in our other infrastructure needs should be at the top of the agenda in Sacramento. Often, it falls victim to other budget priorities. There’s no question that setting aside a secure and stable annual funding stream to fix our roads, bridges, and ...
California
California, Poverty Capital
California—not Mississippi, New Mexico, or West Virginia—has the highest poverty rate in the United States. According to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure—which accounts for the cost of housing, food, utilities, and clothing, and which includes noncash government assistance as a form of income—nearly one out of four Californians is ...
Blog
Higher Prices During Crises – Is It Really Price Gouging?
On New Year’s Day, months after wildfires had started their deadly march through California, the Los Angeles Times published an article headlined “After the flames, allegations of rent-gouging fly in devastated wine country communities.” It did not include a single defense of higher prices, which indicates bias, or economic ignorance ...
Blog
California Can Expect More of the Same from Sacramento in 2018
There are no fortune tellers at PRI, but it isn’t hard to foresee what is likely to happen in California in 2018. First, it’s a sure bet that the Legislature will pass a boxcar load of unneeded, heavy-handed and odious policies when lawmakers reconvene on Jan. 3. One that will ...
California
What California Should Do To Ease Housing Crisis
In September, Sacramento lawmakers passed more than a dozen bills aiming to begin healing the state’s housing sore. It was, to their thinking, “Housing Day” in California. Two weeks later, legislators joined Gov. Jerry Brown in San Francisco as he signed what he called “15 good bills.” “Today, California begins ...
Blog
More Red, White … or Blue
In 2017, PRI launched its first podcast, and because we are headquartered near Wine Country, and because no other think tank does wine better than PRI (okay, I may be biased), we made it our tradition to ask each guest for a wine or cocktail recommendation at the end of ...
California
CAPITAL IDEAS: Court Should Pave Way for State to Plan for Next Drought
Download the PDF Things became so heated during the state’s painful six-year man-made drought that government agencies asked some Californians to snitch on neighbors they thought used too much water. Things are calmer now, but just as surely as clear skies follow rain, there’ll be another drought. It would be ...
Blog
Should We Fear the Government Knowing How Much We Drive?
Earlier this year, when discussing a laughable proposal to ban the sale of gasoline-powered cars in California, my colleague Kerry Jackson asked a critical question – “What happens to the $52 billion in revenue the state is expecting from tax hikes on gasoline and diesel sales for road repair over ...
Commentary
Single-Payer Would Sicken, Not Cure, Massachusetts
Progressives in Massachusetts believe they’ve taken the first step toward a government-run, single-payer health care, thanks to a bill that passed the state Senate in November. The measure would, among other things, commission a study to analyze the cost of a statewide single-payer system. If the tab is less expensive ...
Blog
Political Investment Decisions Hurt Taxpayers, State Retirees
The most recent estimate says that California Public Employees Retirement System, the largest public employee pension fund in the nation with about 1.8 million beneficiaries, has an unfunded liability of roughly $138 billion with total obligations of around $435 billion. While part of that gap is due to the government ...
Infrastructure Should Be Budget Priority – Here’s 2 Smart Ways to Make It So
Repairing California’s crumbling roads and highways, and investing in our other infrastructure needs should be at the top of the agenda in Sacramento. Often, it falls victim to other budget priorities. There’s no question that setting aside a secure and stable annual funding stream to fix our roads, bridges, and ...
California, Poverty Capital
California—not Mississippi, New Mexico, or West Virginia—has the highest poverty rate in the United States. According to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure—which accounts for the cost of housing, food, utilities, and clothing, and which includes noncash government assistance as a form of income—nearly one out of four Californians is ...
Higher Prices During Crises – Is It Really Price Gouging?
On New Year’s Day, months after wildfires had started their deadly march through California, the Los Angeles Times published an article headlined “After the flames, allegations of rent-gouging fly in devastated wine country communities.” It did not include a single defense of higher prices, which indicates bias, or economic ignorance ...
California Can Expect More of the Same from Sacramento in 2018
There are no fortune tellers at PRI, but it isn’t hard to foresee what is likely to happen in California in 2018. First, it’s a sure bet that the Legislature will pass a boxcar load of unneeded, heavy-handed and odious policies when lawmakers reconvene on Jan. 3. One that will ...
What California Should Do To Ease Housing Crisis
In September, Sacramento lawmakers passed more than a dozen bills aiming to begin healing the state’s housing sore. It was, to their thinking, “Housing Day” in California. Two weeks later, legislators joined Gov. Jerry Brown in San Francisco as he signed what he called “15 good bills.” “Today, California begins ...
More Red, White … or Blue
In 2017, PRI launched its first podcast, and because we are headquartered near Wine Country, and because no other think tank does wine better than PRI (okay, I may be biased), we made it our tradition to ask each guest for a wine or cocktail recommendation at the end of ...
CAPITAL IDEAS: Court Should Pave Way for State to Plan for Next Drought
Download the PDF Things became so heated during the state’s painful six-year man-made drought that government agencies asked some Californians to snitch on neighbors they thought used too much water. Things are calmer now, but just as surely as clear skies follow rain, there’ll be another drought. It would be ...
Should We Fear the Government Knowing How Much We Drive?
Earlier this year, when discussing a laughable proposal to ban the sale of gasoline-powered cars in California, my colleague Kerry Jackson asked a critical question – “What happens to the $52 billion in revenue the state is expecting from tax hikes on gasoline and diesel sales for road repair over ...
Single-Payer Would Sicken, Not Cure, Massachusetts
Progressives in Massachusetts believe they’ve taken the first step toward a government-run, single-payer health care, thanks to a bill that passed the state Senate in November. The measure would, among other things, commission a study to analyze the cost of a statewide single-payer system. If the tab is less expensive ...
Political Investment Decisions Hurt Taxpayers, State Retirees
The most recent estimate says that California Public Employees Retirement System, the largest public employee pension fund in the nation with about 1.8 million beneficiaries, has an unfunded liability of roughly $138 billion with total obligations of around $435 billion. While part of that gap is due to the government ...
