Take a look at this: Leadership, not Politics | Peter Schurman for Governor

Tax-free municipal bonds are selling like crazy because they pay a very high yield. The thing is, they have a high yield because so many states and municipalities are on the edge of going broke, like California. If they go broke the bond holders are supposed to lose their money. But California’s bonds are assumed by buyers to have no risk because everyone believes the government will step in and bail the state out, like they did with the big banks.
From Lockyer Sells 25% More California Bonds Than Forecast

The state, whose budget deficits have left it with the lowest credit rating among U.S. states, raised $2.5 billion, paying a top yield of 5.65 percent on 30-year bonds.

5.65 percent tax-free, when money in a bank might pay you half a percent, taxable.
meanwhile California’s Republicans are working to force the state to go bankrupt, thereby forcing the federal government to come in and bail out the mess they leave behind.

This post originally appeared at Speak Out California
The following letter appears in today’s San Jose Mercury News:

State not geared up for high-speed rail
Is high-speed rail really the answer in California? I think not. I originally thought, great, let’s match Europe’s and Japan’s advanced transportation with our own high-speed trains.
However, California is not Europe or Japan. We do not have convenient trains and buses running everywhere you could possibly want to go in every city.
Consider that if you traveled from San Francisco to Los Angeles by high-speed train in 2½ hours, what do you do when you arrive? Catch a bus or light rail to your destination? Sorry, too inconvenient and time-consuming. Rent a car? Sorry, now you have lost the economy of train travel as well as the time savings.
Either alternative adds at least two hours to your trip making the time equivalent to driving.
I say, “no on high-speed rail.” Let’s save the money and reduce our debt in California!

Let it sink in what the writer is saying here: We should not even try to catch up to the rest of the world, because we have already fallen so far behind that it will cost too much. Instead let’s just try to pay off some of the accumulated debt.
The writer is bearing witness to the results of many years of tax cutting and cutbacks in our government. After the tax cutting started in the 70s and 80s we stopped maintaining the infrastructure, so now we do not have convenient trains or buses or mass transit to use after the high-speed rail reaches your destination. We instead accumulated debt.
So here we are. The consequences of decades of cutbacks are arriving. The rest of the world leaps ahead of us. China has nearly completed a network of 42 high-speed rail lines connecting the major cities, and we can’t even get one project off the ground.
It’s certainly not going to get any better until we start asking corporations and the wealthy to pitch in and pay back some of what they gained from the infrastructure that we built in California, back in the decades before they got tax cuts.
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This post originally appeared at Speak Out California
Michael Hiltzik in the LA Times today,

To everyone who claims that our wealthiest citizens pay more than their fair share of income taxes and we should cut them a break because they’re the ones who, you know, create jobs in our economy, I have four words for you:
Frank and Jamie McCourt.
The McCourts, who own the Los Angeles Dodgers (so she says; he says he’s the owner and she’s not), jointly pocketed income totaling $108 million from 2004 through 2009, according to documents Jamie McCourt recently filed in the couple’s divorce case in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
On that sum, they paid zero federal and state income tax. Jamie suggests that some tax breaks will apply this year too.

The McCourts have eight houses.  Eight.  Houses.
California is laying off teachers, closing parks, etc. — killing the state — just to protect the wealthiest and biggest corporations from paying their fair share of taxes.  Millions of dollars in corporate contributions pay for the nasty smear campaigns — and all the lies about how the wealthy are “hurt” by taxes and will “leave the state” — all to protect THIS!
California needs to take a cold, hard look at the game-playing and the holes in our tax system that allow the rich to get away with paying less taxes than “the help” while at the same time we’re telling teachers we can’t afford to keep them teaching our kids.
And please, let’s stop all this nonsense about “they’ll just leave the state” if we try to make the wealthy and big corporations pay their fair share.
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This post originally appeared at Speak Out California
Why won’t Jerry Brown just announce that he is running for Governor?  Why won’t he campaign?  Why is he letting Meg Whitman get so far ahead of things in this campaign?  Does he just assume he has it “in the bag?”
I suspect that is exactly what he assumes.  My take on Brown is that Democrats who were around when he was Governor and later when he ran for President in 1992 are going to support him, many quite strongly, and they regularly let him know this.  I suspect it is hard for him to go anywhere without stopping to shake a hand and hear from someone who tells him what a great Governor he was, that his ideas on energy and the environment were so far ahead of their time, that he should have been elected President, etc.
So he probably feels a wind at his back wherever he goes.  This is for sure: the “moonbeam” things Brown was about like energy and the environment and unions have proven to be the right things.  I wrote about this almost a year ago,

He was called “Moonbeam” and mocked, but he was right, and we were right, and the country needs to come to terms with this so we can move on and finally DO right.
. . . It is 30 years later and the country needs to get past that mocking of the people who were right. But the mocking and obstruction by entrenched interests are still in the way of letting us move on and do the things we need to do for the economy, the country, and the planet.

The problem with this is that it really is 30 years later now.  This is 2010, and that pool of people just isn’t big enough by any means.  You have to be “a certain age” to even care.  He needs to find a way to reach out and be relevant to people who were not around when he was Governor or when he ran for President.
Does he realize this?  If he is not meeting a lot of the people to whom he just isn’t and who just don’t care, he might not be picking this up at all.  But it just is the case. He needs to start campaigning and saying things that are relevant to the 21st century of he is going to win this election.
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This post originally appeared at Speak Out California
The Republican candidate won the special election in Massachusetts to replace Senator Kennedy, giving them 41 Senate votes. Senate Republicans have filibustered every single bill this year, and this clinches their ability to block the President’s agenda. If this sounds familiar to Californians, it’s because in California the Republican minority is able to block budgets, and we have seen the results.
There are lots of sophisticated explanations for the election’s outcome, mostly involving people being upset at particulars of the health care bill. But I don’t really think that the people who voted for the Republican candidate were all that well informed about differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill, the “public option,” or other intricacies of in-progress legislation.
Instead, when looking for the reasons people voted this way, I think we should take the Republican candidate’s word for it. On his website he says it is for the following reasons:

At his September 12 announcement of candidacy for the U.S. Senate, Senator Brown articulated a core set of beliefs that guide his thinking

• Government is too big and that the federal stimulus bill made government bigger instead of creating jobs
• Taxes are too high and are going higher if Congress continues with its out-of-control spending
• The historic amount of debt we are passing on to our children and grandchildren is immoral
• Power concentrated in the hands of one political party, as it is here in Massachusetts, leads to bad government and poor decisions
• A strong military and vigorous homeland defense will protect our interests and security around the world and at home
• All Americans deserve health care, but we shouldn’t have to create a new government insurance program to provide it

Here’s the thing. Most of the assumptions underlying these statements are simply wrong – factually incorrect. They have been pounded out by a corporate/conservative misinformation machine that just makes stuff out and puts it out there on TV, the radio, email forwarding and every other channel they can find.
But the facts are that the federal stimulus didn’t “make government bigger,” the “out-of-control spending” occurred under the previous Republican president, we spend more on military than every other country in the world combined – and it is the largest government spending program contributing to the debt, and the health care reform specifically doesn’t create a government insurance program (it should) and saves money rather than increase spending.
The Right has a message machine that has been repeating misinformation and getting away with it, because:
1) The leadership of the other party has let them get away with it.
2) There is no comparable megaphone with which to refute the misinformation.
The same is true here in California, and we may be heading for similar election turnovers. Republicans repeat things that simply are not true, but there is lack of leadership from elected democrats and almost no megaphone with which to counter the untruths. The example we regularly bring up here is the assertion, repeated over and over, that businesses and rich people leave California because of taxes and regulations.  Of courase this just isn’t true, but is formulated in a way that sounds like it could be true if you just don’t think about it, and leads to large corporations having even more power over our lives and the wealthy having an even greater share of all income and wealth.
Of course, people and businesses that do leave the state do so because of the high cost of living, which is the result of so many poeple wanting to live here. It just costs more to live in a nicer place.And as I wrote last week, it is a nicer place because of the government and the public structures that We, the People built. In other words, California is a nicer place because of those regulations and taxes!
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This post originally appeared at Speak Out California.

It took years for liberalism’s redistributive itch to create an income tax so steeply progressive that it prompts the flight from the state of wealth-creators: “Between 1990 and 2007,” Voegeli writes, “some 3.4 million more Americans moved from California to one of the other 49 states than moved to California from another state.”

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This post originally appeared at Speak Out California
You hear it over and over again from California conservatives, “Cut taxes and cut spending,” and “government spending is too high.”
So what does this mean to YOU? How does this affect your life?
Simple answer, cutting spending means that your schools, roads, police and fire protection, lines at the DMV, parks, environment, food safety inspections, services to help small businesses and courts all deteriorate. It means that it costs more – much more – for you to send your kids to college. That is what “cut government spending” means.
And in spite of what you think, their promise of cutting taxes rarely means your taxes. There is a huge concentration of income and wealth at the very top, which means that tax cuts really mostly benefit the very, very wealthy. Even the well-known Prop 13, thought of as helping homeowners, shifted the tax burden from the corporate owners of commercial property to middle class citizens. From, Corporate loopholes make Prop. 13 crippling for state:

Thirty years ago, commercial property owners contributed 59 percent of property tax revenues and residential property owners contributed 41 percent. Today, we see a virtual flip: commercial property owners contributed just 43 percent of property taxes in 2008, while residential property owners contributed 57 percent.

Another thing you constantly hear are calls to cut the number of government employees and their benefits. If you think about it, layoffs and pay cuts for government workers (teachers, police, firefighters, road workers, etc.) translates into increasing pressure to cut your own wages as well, plus it means fewer customers for California’s small businesses, fewer teachers in our schools, increased crime rates, etc. Cutting their benefits means that your own benefits come under pressure as well.
Conservatives promising that cutting taxes and spending are good for you have held sway for the last few decades. They are always promising that tax cuts will make things better for regular people. But they haven’t gotten better. The real tax burden keeps shifting further and further away from the wealthy and powerful and onto the backs of the middle class. Meanwhile the things that our government does for us are reduced and reduced, so life gets harder.
The lesson to learn is: glowing promises of a free lunch usually mean that you are the lunch.

This post originally appeared at Speak Out California.
A letter in the San Jose Mercury News the other day expresses the misguided but oft-repeated Republican “spin” that tax cuts and deregulation “create jobs”.  As usual it bears little resemblance to the truth.

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