His other promises — to refuse to increase taxes and to “blow up the 麻将游戏 boxes” of massive government waste — were repudiated with record his record $13 billion tax increase to pay for record spending increases. He left office in 2011 with $20 billion deficits plaguing the state, as well as numerous personal and political scandals and the destruction of the Republican party the “post-partisan” governor ostensibly belonged to.

His 2004 work comp reform actually did work at first. According to a report at the time:

At a Boeing Co. aircraft factory on April 19, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) signed SB 899, a bill reforming California’s workers’ compensation system. The measure had passed the state assembly 77-3 and the senate 33-3.

“This bill completes a process that brought together Republicans and Democrats, business and labor, and all the affected parties to produce billions of dollars in savings, protect workers, and root out fraud and waste in the system,” Schwarzenegger said in a news release issued the day he signed the bill. “No longer will workers’ compensation be the poison of our economy. Our message to the rest of the country and the world is that California is open for business. We are making our state once again a powerful, job-creating machine.”

Schwarzenegger said the measure “would cut down on fraud and waste, and would also aim to get injured workers back on the job without having to fall back on the legal system.”

“We cannot continue to force our businesses, non-profits, and government agencies to be pummeled by costs 2-1/2 times the national average,” said Sen. Chuck Poochigian (R-Fresno), the bill’s sponsor. “This [legislation] gives California businesses and their workers a fighting chance.”

10 years after

10 years after, it all was for naught. The San Gabriel Tribune reported:

California has been ranked as the most expensive state for workers’ compensation costs, according to a newly released report.

The Workers’ Compensation Premium Rate Ranking Summary from Oregon’s Department of Consumer and Business Services shows that California businesses spend $3.48 for every $100 of payroll issued.

That’s 188 percent of the median cost of $1.85 for all 50 states. California was the third most expensive state in 2012 and the fifth most expensive in 2010.

“California’s workers’ compensation system is incredibly inefficient,” said Jerry Azevedo, a spokesman for the California-based Workers’ Compensation Action Network, which seeks to reduce costs for employers and improve services to injured workers. “It does not do a good job of achieving its goal. For as much as employers pay, they don’t get a lot out of it.”

That also applies to injured workers, according to Azevedo.

“You would think that since California has the highest cost system that we’d also have the most generous benefits — but we don’t,” he said. “We plow a lot of money into the system but too little of it ends up in the hands of injured workers.”

Typical of things in California nowadays, the people “helped” didn’t get any help, while the bureaucracy and the lawyers made out like bandits.

The best year for the Schwarzenegger 2004 reforms was 2008, when California ranked 13th best for work comp costs. But now, according to Azevedo:

Since 2009, premium costs in California have climbed by 41 percent due, in part, to an increasing rate of work-injury claims at a time when the rate of claims in most states has been declining,” he said. “California’s system is experiencing more claims for cumulative trauma and those filed post-employment — particularly in the Los Angeles region. Average costs per claim have increased by $30,000 since 2005.

In California, businesses just can win.

Tom Torlakson supports a status quo in which an average of 2.2 of the state’s 275,000 public school teachers are fired each year for incompetence — a figure so ridiculous you barely need to add context. It shows the public school system is run for the adult employees, not the students.

Yet as he seeks a second term as state superintendent of public instruction against reformer Marshall Tuck, Torlakson continues to pretend he doesn’t like horrible teachers in the classroom and did something about it.

As he has done throughout his campaign, Tuck condemned Torlakson’s appeal of a Superior Court judge’s ruling in Vergara v. the State of California, overturning laws creating tenure in two years, governing dismissals and requiring layoffs by seniority. Those laws, he said, “have led us to a situation where we can’t have an effective teacher in the classroom” and are “crushing the hopes” of the state’s most challenged students. …

Torlakson agreed that when “teachers are not up to it, move them out” and said that he wrote and helped pass a law this year making it easier to fire “ineffective and abusive teachers.” The bill, AB 215, by Assemblywoman Joan Buchanan, D-Alamo, dealt primarily with teachers charged with abuse, not poor performance.

That’s from John Fensterwald’s coverage of the final forum between the two Democrats running for superintendent. I’m glad he mentioned Torlakson’s, er, disingenuousness, but he was on the kind side. AB 215 has nothing — nothing — to do with getting rid of incompetent teachers. Fensterwald’s use of “primarily” to describe what the bill is focused on gives Torlakson a bit of cover he just doesn’t deserve.

At a little bit after the 51-minute mark of a forum in Los Angeles last week with state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson and challenger Marshall Tuck, the candidates are asked a question from the audience about the Vergara ruling, which is described as holding that state tenure laws are so harmful to low-income students that they violate the Constitution. Should the state accept the ruling, appeal it or work out a settlement in which tenure laws are amended but not scrapped?

Tuck succinctly says the state should accept the ruling and work to fix broken policies hurting students.

But when it’s Torlakson’s turn to respond, he ducks the substance of the Vergara ruling, misrepresents Gov. Jerry Brown’s position, misrepresents the legal arguments made in the state’s appeal and tells a huge whopper about the teacher discipline bill enacted this year — all in a little over a minute. Here’s my transcription of Torlakson’s comments:

We have a fundamental disagreement. I am for kids. I’m for low-income kids. I’ve been a fighter spending my whole career for those kids and their future.

I did say we should appeal that decision because I think it is fundamentally flawed. it’s wrong on the facts. It’s wrong on the law. The governor and the state board of education agreed. We’ve asked the state attorney general to file an appeal and bring it to a higher court level.

I believe job protections giving teachers a chance to have a hearing if they’re on a proposed layoff list to have them have a chance for a fair hearing having experienced teachers do that.

Teaching is a tough job. Not everybody is cut out for that work. I know that. And what we are looking at is how do we move teachers who can’t make it out of the profession faster.

And I helped with a law this year that was signed in by Governor Brown that will expedite the process of removing abusive teachers and ineffective teachers from our schools in it. It’s a tough job, but we should allow teachers to move forward and get rid of the ones who can’t make it and then the others have a chance through … we’re being cut off.

Sigh.

Gov. Jerry Brown did not reject the idea that tenure is bad for minority kids. In his recent debate with Neal Kashkari, he tiptoed around the issue.

In her appeal, Kamala Harris did not reject the idea that tenure is bad for minority kids. She questioned Judge Rolf Treu’s legal reasoning.

Finally, it is absurd for Torlakson to argue that a bill triggered by the difficulties Los Angeles Unified faced in firing a teacher who fed semen to his students has anything to do with targeting ineffective teachers. It’s not just absurd; it is, to use a technical term, a lie.

Here are the first three sentences of AB 215, the teacher discipline law Torlakson crows about:

Existing law prohibits a permanent school employee from being dismissed, except for one or more of certain enumerated causes, including immoral or unprofessional conduct. This bill would also include egregious misconduct, as defined, as a basis for dismissal. Existing law requires the governing board of a school district to give notice to a permanent employee of its intention to dismiss or suspend the employee, together with a written statement of charges,
at the expiration of 30 days from the date of service of the notice, unless the employee demands a hearing. This bill would additionally apply the above to egregious misconduct.

I look forward to the education beat reporters jumping on the plain evidence of Torlakson’s dishonesty. Maybe I’m naive, but I really do. The deceit is too obvious to miss or ignore.