DOES THE STATE REALLY KNOW BEST ON ALMOST EVERYTHING?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MARCH 6, 2020 OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

     “DOES THE STATE REALLY KNOW BEST ON ALMOST EVERYTHING?”

          It’s beginning to seem as if many leading elected officials in California believe state government knows best about almost everything in virtually every phase of life. That goes on both macro and micro levels.

          Over the last year, this state has threatened city after city with lawsuits for not authorizing enough new housing units to satisfy state officials, even when developers have no great interest in building them. A state commission is demanding other lawsuits if cities and counties don’t do more to reduce homelessness, even where many of the homeless aren’t particularly interested in moving into new shelters, and even while courts in some other states continue issuing bus tickets to California to minor criminals in lieu of sending them to jail.

The Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom reversed voter wishes on rent control, setting up the nation’s toughest regulations on evictions and rent increases less than a year after voters decisively turned down a ballot initiative with the same aims.

Over strong opposition from supposed “beneficiaries,” they passed a law written by San Diego’s Democratic Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez called AB 5 that forces contract workers and freelancers to accept full-time employment from their client companies whether they want it or not, ostensibly so they can be unionized even where only one or two persons are involved.

Newsom wants to send every California 4-year-old to preschool whether their parents want it or not, and his proposed budget would pay to enroll at least 10,000 as a first move.

And the state Senate almost passed the newest version of SB 50, the housing density mandate from Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco that threatened to make almost every California city as jammed as the Castro District where he lives, which is filled with older wooden apartment buildings that are potential firetraps.

On the micro level, Wiener, whose influence in Sacramento sometimes appears disproportionate to his status as just one of 40 state senators, also proposed a ban on some surgeries for babies born with ambiguous or conflicting genitalia. That bill was decisively voted down in the Senate’s Business and Professions Committee, but as with SB 50, Wiener pledges to keep hammering at it until resistance softens.

The bill, SB 201, would prevent “medically unnecessary” surgery on so-called “intersex” babies until those children are six years old. It included a ban on correcting hypospadias, a common male malady in which there can be multiple urethral openings on the underside of the penis.

 For Wiener, parents’ choices don’t matter when it comes to turning a mild malformation into a normal opening. That’s on the principle that infants cannot express an opinion on whether they want the procedure or not.

          Never mind that corrective surgery on this condition is far easier and less painful when the patient is very young; children under six, Wiener has said, have not yet developed their sex or gender identity. And six-year-olds have?

          If there’s a condition where parental and medical decisions ought to govern, this is probably it. 

No matter, Wiener believes he and the state know best about the most intimate matters, just as he thinks they do about housing density, where he views single family homes on spacious lots as abominations. Talk about a nanny state.

          Of course, some state mandates and actions are needed. It’s likely no accident that California has seen no epidemic of measles or whooping cough since toughening vaccination laws over loud objections from some parents.

          And Newsom’s plan to provide $1 billion in aid for sheltering the homeless also appears to be proving positive, starting with his rolling out 100 trailers as a temporary palliative measure. While 100 trailers won’t put much of a dent in the state’s homeless populace of more than 150,000, they are providing temporary solutions for some individuals and families.

          The need here is for restraint in enforcing legislators’ personal preferences on everyone, but with Sacramento now essentially a one-party capital governed by a full slate of Democratic statewide officials and supermajorities in both houses of the Legislature, there are few restraints on the majority.

          So there’s a strong need for self-restraint, an awareness that just getting elected makes no one omniscient.

         

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

IF UNDISCIPLINED, GOP WON’T MAKE FALL BALLOT

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MARCH 6, 2018, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
        “IF UNDISCIPLINED, GOP WON’T MAKE FALL BALLOT”

        It’s well established that the California Republican Party has been almost without influence in the state’s public affairs for years, but at least until now it has always placed someone on the fall runoff ballot running for at least one top state office.

That streak of more than 140 years’ standing seems about to end. It is almost certain, for one example, that no Republican will seriously contest Democratic U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s reelection bid this November, the role of prime challenger going to fellow Democrat Kevin de Leon, longtime president of the state Senate. Mere days before the filing deadline, no significant Republican had entered the race.

        Things are almost as sad for the GOP in the run for the ballot’s other top slot, the governor’s office. Recent polling shows all three of the decently-funded declared Republican candidates for governor – Orange County Assemblyman Travis Allen, San Diego County businessman John Cox and former Sacramento-area Congressman Doug Ose – trail three of the four Democrats in the race.

But if the putative vote totals of those three are combined, they total 18 percent in those polls, with 24 percent of all voters still undecided. As long as the GOP remains splintered, that makes it likely November will match Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, each drawing support from more likely voters than all three Republicans together.

This means the GOP needs the kind of discipline it often displayed in the last century, when hot intra-party contests were rare for Republicans.

In those years, Democrats often staged heated primary election races, just like this year’s. But back then every officially-recognized party was guaranteed a November ballot slot, no matter how few votes its candidates might pull in the primary.

        Passage of the 2010 Proposition 14 and the advent of the top two primary changed all that. Now candidates for all parties must earn their runoff election slots. If you don’t finish in the top two in the spring, you won’t contest anything in the fall.

        So reality at times demands discipline from both major parties. There have been races where so many Democrats ran that they splintered the vote and allowed two Republicans to contest the runoff even in districts where Democrats led in voter registration.

        If Republicans exhibit some discipline and coalesce around one candidate this spring, some Democrats would have to drop out in response, or risk letting the GOP get at least get one ballot position.

        So far, there are few signs of any such party survival instinct for the GOP in a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by a 45-27 percent margin.

Those numbers scared off potentially strong candidates for governor like former Fresno Mayor Ashley Swearengin and current San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer.

  This leaves the GOP with a trio of previous unknowns who have spent some of their early debates sniping at each other more than at the Democrats. More of this behavior appears likely to make the November vote the first since the mid-19^th Century without a Republican running for governor.

        But this doesn’t have to end up being the second single-party runoff election for a top-of-ticket office since the advent of top two. (The first matched Democrats Kamala Harris and Loretta Sanchez in the 2016 Senate race.)  That’s up to the GOP. If the party’s voters had one candidate to rally around, they might combine with some independents to total even more than their current registration percentage. If Republican voters were motivated, they could easily tally 30 percent or more of the total vote, probably enough to win a ballot slot. And once someone reaches the ballot, upsets can happen.

        The risk to Republicans is that if they don’t quality a runoff candidate, they will become even less relevant than they’ve been lately in California, and their registration numbers would very likely drop beneath the 24 percent of state voters who now declare no party preference.

So the question now is simple: Will two of the three current GOP candidates put their egos aside for the good of their party and drop out? At this writing, that looks unlikely.

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     Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, go to www.californiafocus.net

TAX OVERHAUL PLAN HAS POTENTIAL

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MARCH 6, 2015, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “TAX OVERHAUL PLAN HAS POTENTIAL”

          Rarely does a freshman state senator propose anything substantial during his or her first few days in office. But Robert Herzberg, elected last fall from a safe Democratic district in the San Fernando Valley portion of Los Angeles, is hardly a typical newbie.

          Hertzberg, speaker of the state Assembly from 2000-2002 and an advisor to both former Govs. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gray Davis for several years after that, has now taken on one of the toughest, most complex topics any legislator can. He wants to change California’s entire tax system, and he just might pull it off.

          Hertzberg expects his plan, known as SB8, will take at least two years before coming to any floor vote, figuring it will probably undergo major changes in the process. But here are the basics:

          This system would reduce income taxes across the board, while still keeping “progressive” features like having those with higher incomes pay a larger percentage of it as tax. The minimum wage would rise, by a yet-undetermined amount. Business would get some tax breaks, designed to encourage job creation. More than making up for these revenue losses would be a new sales tax on services (education and health care to be exempt). So movie tickets, legal work, accounting and labor on auto body repairs would be taxed. It’s still uncertain how this might apply to the Internet and at what level businesses would be eligible for new tax incentives.

    Of course, any sales tax is regressive, hitting those with low incomes harder than the rich. It’s not certain whether the reduced income tax and a higher minimum wage could compensate for this.

     The plan is not Hertzberg’s brainchild alone. It stems from his work with an outfit called the Think Long Committee, whose membership has included Google executive Eric Schmidt, movie executive Terry Semel, former Republican state Treasurer Matt Fong, Los Angeles businessman and philanthropist Eli Broad, ex-Gov. Davis, former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and former state Chief Justice Ron George, among others. The group is funded by billionaire Nicolas Berggruen.

     “We’re aiming for $10 billion a year in new money from this plan,” Hertzberg said in an interview. “We’ll start with what’s now in my bill, and modify it to try to have it make sense if people have problems with it. It could even end up as a ballot initiative. But we need this to help both our kids and businesses in this state.”

     Hertzberg points to the ongoing controversy over tuition at the University of California and the California State University system as one example of how the existing tax system harms young people in California.

     “We need a new philosophy of government,” Hertzberg said in one essay on his tax plan. “California has long been known as the land of opportunity, but for too many of its residents the future is receding. Inequality continues to rise… Something more is needed. Above all, we need public investment in infrastructure and in public education, especially higher education.”

     Hertzberg is firm about one part of his bill that would hold off cuts in the income and corporate taxes until new sales levies bring in enough money to give low-income workers earned-income tax credits similar to what the federal tax system provides.

     And he says he will not change parts of the plan earmarking the new $10 billion for schools, colleges, infrastructure including road repairs and $2 billion for that earned income tax credit.

     “The revolutionary thing about this is that we would tax services for the first time,” he said. “And that we give the new money to cities, counties, community colleges, school districts, universities and the low income.”

     Hertzberg expects this plan to provoke “the longest discussion of the next two years.” Since he chairs the Senate committee in charge of state and local governance, taxes and finance, “I can call all the hearings on it I want, and I will.”

     So far, there are few supporters or opponents. But both business and labor groups, along with leading Democratic and Republican legislators say they look forward to the talk and the hearings.

     The twin questions yet to be answered: Will this all be mere talk? And should it ever amount to anything more? Stay tuned.

   

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     Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, go to www.californiafocus.net

FORECLOSURE SETTLEMENT: GOOD STEP TOWARD HOUSING RECOVERY

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MARCH 6, 2012 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“FORECLOSURE SETTLEMENT: GOOD STEP TOWARD HOUSING RECOVERY”

The first step toward a California housing recovery has now been taken, in the form of the mid-February legal settlement between 49 states and the five large banks that were the leading culprits in the years of mortgage fraud that created a price bubble and convinced many thousands of homeowners to take on high-value mortgages.

The settlement is for at least $25 billion and could go as high as $45 billion, with Californians getting more than one-third of the benefits, or as much as $18 billion.

No, $18 billion in cash will not suddenly pour into the state’s economy. Actual cash should not amount to more than about $5 billion, still a pretty hefty amount.

But the first step toward reversing the effects of the foreclosure tide that has swept over tens of thousands of homes is to stop the bleeding by calling a halt to the constant increase in the inventory of existing homes that are either on the market or about to enter it. It’s the massive number of houses and condominiums involved that has driven home prices down, placing many thousands of homeowners “under water,” with their properties worth less than the bank loans on them.

The 49-state settlement has been criticized on two scores: 1) That it is not big enough, that insufficient cash will flow to homeowners bilked out of down payments that in some cases amounted to many thousands of dollars, and 2) That California is getting too large a share of the settlement.

The second of those gripes is the more absurd. California gets the lion’s share of the settlement because this is where the largest portion of the abuses occurred. Some critics who claim the state’s share of the new pot is too high also assert the settlement is designed to assuage California’s chronic state budget deficits and that bank customers in other states will be dunned to pay for it via new fees.

No and no. Less than $1 billion of the money coming to California will go to the state itself, and that money will pay for new banking regulatory programs, the big banks’ money appropriately being used to police those same banks and others. If there’s to be significant help for the state budget, it will have to come via increased sales and income taxes as housing-related businesses begin to recover or through rises in property taxes if sales prices increase. Nor will bank customers pay: Bank of America (one of the banks in the settlement) tried upping its fees earlier this year and lost both large numbers of customers and epic amounts of good will.

How will all this actually work? B of A, Wells Fargo, Citibank, JP Morgan Chase and Ally Financial (formerly GMAC) will actually pay out only $5 billion nationally in cash, including $1.5 billion to homeowners who were foreclosed upon illegally.

The cash in the settlement goes to about 750,000 of the 2 million homeowners foreclosed on nationally in the last four years, each getting a check for $2,000. Small redress, indeed, for the ordeal most have gone through and the improper fees often fraudulently charged to homeowners, plus the way the big banks sometimes foisted property insurance on borrowers at up to three times the prevailing rates.

But relatively little cash will end up here, because the illegal robo-signings used in many foreclosures were never common in California.

The lion’s share of the settlement amount will come in reduced loan balances, with about 250,000 California homeowners due to get fully $12 billion in loan write-downs. Other kinds of credits could go to another 210,000 homeowners in parts of the state hit hardest by the housing bust.

This is where the foreclosure tide should start to peter out. It could also help the banks, which have reported the average foreclosure costs them $60,000 in maintenance costs, repairs and brokerage fees.

By writing down loans that most likely would soon turn bad anyway, banks will save themselves expenses while allowing thousands of homeowners to get their heads above water again. Once that happens, there should be little more motive for borrowers to desert their houses, as many have done upon concluding that the value of their properties had declined so far that they could not in the foreseeable future rise above their loan amounts.

By cutting loan amounts, the banks essentially achieve the same goal outlined in a congressional proposal by Rep. Zoe Lofgren of San Mateo County, which would have allowed under-water homeowners to pay no interest for five years, with their regular payments going strictly toward principal reduction.

All this is only a step along the path to housing recovery, but it’s the first really significant one – a point almost completely ignored by most critics.

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Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net.