Posts From Chris Reed
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Legislature worries more about animal misery than human misery
California has the highest adjusted poverty rate in the nation — and by a significant margin. Nearly 1 in 4 state residents struggles to make ends meet. Unemployment was about the same in the nation as a whole in 2006.
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Did governor file bid for quick appeal to block bullet-train revolt?
Why did Gov. Jerry Brown abruptly abandon his “stay-the-course” path on the $68 billion bullet-train project in late January? I’ve been poking around a bit and have come up with a theory and some evidence as to why the governor
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CA taxes 150% higher than Washington state’s — to what benefit?
A new survey of state and local taxes finds California and New York take the biggest bite out of their residents’ pocketbooks. The average Californian forks over $9,509 a year; the average New Yorker, $9,718. Alas, the mainstream media coverage
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L.A. proposal: That’s a pension tax — not a pothole tax
This proposal — allegedly from Los Angeles bureaucrats but almost certainly from new L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti — got the scorn it deserved on libertarian and conservative websites when it came out Wednesday afternoon: “L.A.’s elected officials should put a half-cent
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Will failed Prop. 209 rollback help GOP with Asian voters? It depends
With Asian-Americans making up 14 percent of the state’s electorate, there is a small but real chance that this past month’s developments in the Legislature could prove the biggest story in California politics in years. I refer to Asian Democratic
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Discovered: a new way unions manipulate CA status quo
Californians who don’t belong to a public employee union have every right to feel as if the state is rigged against them. Because districting is based on population, not number of citizens, Democrats do better in Sacramento from the get-go
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Ruling on Chuck Reed’s pension initiative not end of the world
Editor’s update, 2 p.m.: San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed is reportedly suspending the initiative push until 2016 because the court delays related to the ballot language challenge will make it difficult for signature gatherers to meet deadlines — not because
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CA mayor’s car vandalized; all assume it was a cop or firefighter
On its surface a Tuesday story in the San Luis Obispo Tribune is a funny, mordant comment on small-town politics in California. But if you dig a little, it turns out to be related to yet another pathetic, union-favoring power
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CA Dems: Are they following the pattern of another one-party state?
After I got out of college in the 1980s, I spend a fun few months working as a reporter for a weekly newspaper in Kauai. The chairman of the County Council was an affable young Democrat in his late 20s
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Buzz builds in TX, FL over privately funded bullet-train projects
Back in 2008, perhaps the single biggest thing that supporters of Proposition 1A had going for them was that a California bullet-train network just sounded cool and futuristic. Critics, however, pointed out correctly that the $9.95 billion bond that went
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