Budget and Finance

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Bloviating rather than budgeting

SEPT. 1, 2010 By KATY GRIMES Speeches, speeches and more speeches, took precedence over cries for “jobs, jobs, jobs,” at the Capitol Tuesday. Posturing, arguing, grandstanding, partisanship and passion were on tap in the Assembly and Senate as legislators debated

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Do high taxes cost state jobs?

AUGUST 30, 2010 By JOHN SEILER It’s become a commonplace among many Republicans, conservatives and libertarians that California’s high-tax climate kills jobs. The jobs are either destroyed, driven to other states, or not created here in the first place. A

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Pension escape routes being cut

AUGUST 30, 2010 I’ve frequently argued that, as the state faces an unfunded pension liability that’s as high as $500 billion, legislators are not doing anything about a problem that is depleting public services and imposing additional debt and tax

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How Severe is U.S. pension debt?

AUGUST 27, 2010 By STEVEN GREENHUT This piece was originally published on the Nieman Watchdog site. As the economy boomed, few people worried much about the debt that local and state governments were amassing to pay for increasingly generous pension

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Prop. 22 protects corporate welfare

AUG. 23, 2010 It’s always entertaining watching various tax consumers fight with one another over a shrinking revenue pie, which makes the Proposition 22 campaign a spectacle. Despite the chatter from supporters about “saving local services” and stopping Sacramento from

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Tax hikes would harm CA economy

AUGUST 17, 2010 By JOHN SEILER Do tax hikes fix budgets? That was the subject of an article I wrote last month here on CalWatchDog.com. The question is critical as the California Legislature and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, still unable to

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Will California repudiate its debt?

AUGUST 12, 2010 By JOHN SEILER California’s government soon could be paying its bills with IOUs, Controller John Chang announced this week. And a new report found that Californians’ personal income dropped 2.5 percent in 2009, the first decline since World

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Other People's Money

AUG. 6, 2010 After sitting through another week of state legislative sessions and committee hearings, the phrase “other people’s money” keeps running through my head. Last week I spoke with Senator Denise Moreno Ducheny, D-San Diego, and that started me

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Senator: 'Incompetence' Plagues Vote Program

AUG. 4, 2010 By KATY GRIMES Heated discussion took place in the budget committee on Tuesday about a public health program for women. Specifically: how much to fund it this year, setting off  the ire of Sen. Bob Dutton, R-Rancho

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Old LAO Wisdom

JULY 30, 2010 Oh, what a difference six years makes. We were cleaning out our conference room the other day, going through stacks of old government reports and think tank studies when we found a copy of the Legislative Analyst’s

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