California economy

Incoming Assembly speaker seeks vast new power for Coastal Commission

If you had to come up with one state agency that has done the most damage to California’s economy with its regulatory sweep and overreach, you’ll never come close to topping the state Air Resources Board. But it you wanted

Self-parody department: Dakota oil boom depicted as threat to CA safety

Chris Reed February 27, 2014

The San Francisco Chronicle has broken new ground in over-the-top petrophobia. Not content to warp the California debate over fracking in the Golden State by never mentioning the Obama administration considers it safe, the Chronicle’s editorial page actually is warning

Why is CalSTRS’ version of corporate skulduggery tolerated?

Chris Reed February 26, 2014

Beginning in the late 1990s and for about a decade afterward, corporate accounting scandals unfolded one after the other. Bipartisan outrage over CEOs and CFOs cooking the books gave way to mostly Democratic initiatives to impose much more sweeping rules

Welfare, housing: Clinton pragmatism still ignored by CA’s dim paleo Dems

Chris Reed February 24, 2014

In the late 1980s, after three straight Republican presidential wins in which GOP candidates won 133 of 150 states, the Democratic Leadership Council seized prominence in Democratic policy circles with its centrist reform agenda. Founded in 1985 by strategist Al

Study of Los Angeles: Prosperity increases income inequality

Chris Reed February 23, 2014

Coverage of income inequality is shockingly slanted and inept. Lazy, populist demonization of the 1 percent is the standard default starting position for explaining why poor people make a small fraction of what the very wealthy do. But as I’ve

Shakedown street: Jesse Jackson targets Silicon Valley — again

Chris Reed February 22, 2014

However one feels about the growing fuss over white and Asian dominance of U.S. tech work forces, there are some fundamental facts to consider, starting with: African-American students are less likely to graduate college with degrees in high-tech fields. This

Video: Entrepreneurship still thrives in CA

John Seiler February 21, 2014

Not all businesses have been driven from California because of its high taxes and regulations. Some entrepreneurs still are find ways to thrive…

Push to restore CA bilingual education dubious in more than one way

Chris Reed February 21, 2014

When software tycoon Ron Unz’s Prop. 227 campaign to end bilingual education in California won landslide approval in 1998, one reason was that a lot of Latinos and white liberals shared Unz’s fundamental view that bilingual ed wasn’t working well

‘We are destined to live with a growing and permanent underclass’

Chris Reed February 19, 2014

It may be building very slowly, and years later than it should have first appeared. But there is beginning to be a groundswell of a broad understanding in California that there is a link between job creation and what the

CA Dems own state of the economy: Right, journos? Right?

Chris Reed February 17, 2014

Whenever President Barack Obama gets blamed for the still-mediocre condition of the national economy, his defenders in the Democratic Party, the punditocracy and in the allegedly neutral newsrooms of America immediately say things like, “He can’t get anything through Congress!