But more than with any Legislature this century, the current session has produced some very tart sparring between two African American lawmakers and the lobbyists for the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers who have close to operational control of Democratic majorities in both the Assembly and Senate.

The latest came when state Sen. Holly Mitchell, D-Los Angeles, took exception to the dismissive treatment of one of her legislative priorities:

State Sen. Holly Mitchell, D-Los Angeles, said she is upset with the California Teachers Association’s vocal opposition to the Senate’s plan to cover much of its proposed higher spending on child care with money allocated under the Proposition 98 funding guarantee for schools.

 

Dean Vogel, the association’s president, said that the Senate proposal would take “more away from 5-year-olds to give to 3-year-olds.” In an interview Thursday, Mitchell said she has seen the same logic on union literature, which she called “weakest, most sophomoric argument I could ever hear.”

 

Mitchell suggested that the union’s opposition to the Senate’s plan stems from the fact it believes none of the extra spending would benefit its members. “What else can it be? I’m trying to unconnect the dots, but they haven’t shown me any other option,” she said.

That’s from a Sacramento Bee story this week. It builds on the run-ins that Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, had with the CTA and CFT over her tenure reform proposal and Weber’s beefs with police unions over whether officers should be able to look at body camera footage before writing their initial reports on incidents. Weber was the subject of a deeply flattering Dan Walters column on May 4 that depicted her as a welcome break from the Legislature’s union-dominated norms.

The Capitol’s big guns came out last week – and they were aimed at a 66-year-old grandmother who dared to buck two of California’s most powerful political interests – teacher and cop unions.

Shirley Weber, born in Arkansas and reared in a poor neighborhood of Los Angeles, acquired a doctorate degree and taught at college for four decades before becoming San Diego’s first African American Assembly member in 2012.

Weber is also concerned about whether the teachers unions are trying to hijack Local Control Funding Formula dollars for teachers’ raises, an issue on which she has the support of the full California Legislative Black Caucus.

It was reportedly the first raise in eight years for the rank and file, and the negotiations were handled by United Teachers Los Angeles.

According to an L.A. Times story on the payout:

The tentative three-year deal would cost $875.3 million for all employees, about $285.6 million more than the district’s original offer, according to a memo from Supt. Ramon C. Cortines to board members. Included in the increased amount is an additional $31.6 million for other employee groups, such as administrators, whose contracts entitle them to more money if other bargaining units negotiate better deals than their own.

Teachers unions in Los Angeles and around the state have battled for raises over the past year.

In San Diego, teachers seek a 10 percent wage increase over two years. In San Francisco, teachers obtained a 12 percent raise over three years. And teachers in a San Jose high school district got a 5 percent raise earlier this year.

Many of these teachers are members of either the California Federation of Teachers, the state affiliate of the national American Federation of Teachers; or the California Teachers Association, a chapter of the National Education Association. Together, the two represent 445,000 members.

The CFT files an annual financial disclosure with the U.S. Department of Labor. An analysis of the CFT’s annual labor department filings shows that yearly dues have increased 33 percent since 2005 – about the last time the L.A. teachers got a raise – from $361 annually to $482 last year. Dues have not increased since 2011.

Meanwhile, membership has increased from 51,712 active members in 2005 to 55,647 last year.

Among other findings in the analysis, which was done by accessing reports through this Department of Labor portal:

• The salary of the secretary/treasurer has increased 40 percent, from the $116,786 received by Michael Nye in 2005 to the $163,812 paid to Jeffrey Freitas last year.
• Pay to the president of CFT dropped from the $121,170 paid to Mary Bergan in 2005 to the $84,274 paid to Joshua Pechthalt last year.
• The federation added a salary to the upper ranks: $80,000 to Jim Mahler, head of the Community College Council.
• Overall, total officer disbursements rose 60 percent between 2005 and 2014, from $333,126 to $536,604.
• Employee disbursements, including political organizing, went from $3.6 million in 2005 to $4.9 million in 2014, an increase of 36 percent.
• Loans payable at the end of 2014 were zero compared to $3.2 million in outstanding loans in 2005.
• In 2005, the federation paid $62,000 to Sacramento PR ace Stephen Hopcraft. While Hopcraft’s website says he is still working for the federation, no payments to him were reported for last year. Instead, it reported spending $113,000 with Senders Communication Group in Canoga Park.
• For in-house lobbying at the statehouse, the CFT paid $248,781 in 2013-14. In 2005-06, it paid $329,260.
• The federation now has an unfunded pension liability of $5.1 million compared to zero in 2005. Total liabilities are now $30.1 million compared to $6 million in 2005. The growth has been driven by new accounting rules that require broader reporting of liabilities coupled with a steady creep in unfunded pension benefits.

The data shows a strong performance for the union in a state that has maintained its organized labor base while the rest of the country has seen an explosion of successful right-to-work legislation – Michigan and Wisconsin notably – and an increase in non-union workplaces.

Union membership in the U.S. has dropped from 24 percent of workers in 1973 to 11.1 percent in 2014, according to unionstats.com.

Membership in the public sector, though, has remained in the 30-something-percent range since the late ‘70s, settling at 35.7 percent last year.

In California, membership has remained above the national average since 2004, with 17.5 percent of workers represented by a union last year compared with 18 percent in 2004. The state ranked fifth in the U.S. for overall representation behind Hawaii, New York, Alaska and Washington.

Steve Miller can be reached at 517-775-9952 and avalanche50@hotmail.com. His website is www.Avalanche50.com

Photo of school bus by flickr user Kevin42135, used via a Creative Commons license

But when a second-tier statewide elected official who wants to continue to be a statewide elected official crosses the most powerful unions of all, that’s pretty remarkable. Yet that’s just what Controller John Chiang  did — or appeared to do — on Monday in calling for a public database of the pay of all teachers.

“Chiang [is] requesting that every public school district in California shares with the public all salary and benefits information of all teachers online. …

“‘When public pay information is transparent and easy accessible, citizens have the power to hold their local governments more accountable,’ said Chiang.

“Chiang mailed a letter on Monday to nearly 1,000 school districts requesting the information within 90 days.

“Most community colleges and the University of California system agreed to the plan, but Chiang says he needs K-12 schools and the courts represented.”

Did CTA, CFT see writing on wall? Or is something else going on?

Now it’s already established that teacher pay is by law a matter of public record, and some newspapers already have databases of local individual teacher salaries, such as the Orange County Register. But it’s not the norm, and teachers want to keep it that way. They have the same privacy objections — and their unions the same goal of secrecy — as other public employees.

But their unions are way more powerful. The California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers and their half-million members are first among equals in the Democratic establishment.

Chiang hasn’t remotely the stature of Jerry Brown or the glamor of future Dem gubernatorial candidates Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom. For him to suddenly pipe up and endorse something members of the CTA and CFT don’t like is highly odd. For him to do so just before the CTA voted to endorse him to succeed Bill Lockyer this year as state treasurer, well, that’s hard to fathom. To the public, it makes him look like an open-government crusader, but to insiders who know how Democratic politics work in the Golden State, it makes him seem like a political kamikaze.

Unless the teacher unions see the writing on the wall and know that state law offers districts no way of ducking compliance.

Or unless Chiang has no intention of making this a crusade, and has told the CTA this. The controller is only “requesting” the information. His tone is mild.

Why? Because they’re playing chess, not tic-tac-toe. Chiang and the CTA know that most local districts with union-dominated school boards will drag their feet on setting up databases for years — until they’re forced to by court order.

The California way

So is Chiang a kamikaze? Or is he slickly posturing on the need for complete statewide openness about teacher pay without any real intention of following through with threats and lawsuits?

I’ll be shocked if it’s not the latter. It’s the California way.

By Chris Reed

It turns out that school districts in the state of California can swiftly fire teachers who engage in lewd behavior — but only if it’s a paid part-time job, not incidents in school involving students.

The Smoking Gun website has the details:

“The California teacher who was fired last year after her prior career as a porn actress was discovered by her middle school students has had her appeal unanimously rejected by a state panel that ruled that the online availability of her X-rated work ‘will continue to impede her from being an effective teacher and respected colleague.’

“In a 48-page decision, the Commission on Professional Competence ruled that Stacie Halas, 32, was unfit to continue teaching at the Richard B. Haydock Intermediate School in Oxnard. Halas, a science teacher, began working at the school in 2009, several years after her porn career ended.”

The contrast with the disgusting case of Mark Berndt at Miramonte Elementary School in south Los Angeles could not be more striking. Berndt is very credibly accused of spoon-feeding semen to blindfolded students. So what did L.A. Unified do to get rid of him? It paid him $40,000 to leave after concluding that teacher protections won over the years by United Teachers Los Angeles, a CTA affiliate, prevented his quick ouster.

Subsequently, attempts in the Legislature to make it easier to remove classroom sexual predators were blocked by CTA-allied lawmakers.

What makes this not just politics as usual but appalling is that the CTA’s reflexive justification for all that it does is that “it’s all about the kids.” Keeping sex predators in classrooms? Making it so difficult to fire perverts that they have to be paid off? “It’s all about the kids.”

Amazing. In a pathetic way.

By Chris Reed

On Sunday, as I read iconoclastic pollster Pat Caddell‘s sharp, persuasive tirade documenting the many issues where the national media have spared the public from the details of the Obama administration’s venality and incompetence, I got to thinking about the parallels with the Sacramento media’s coverage of the state government.

What was the single fact that most explains how California works, but which has never appeared in a succinct version in a regular newspaer story or “analysis” of Sacramento? It was obvious. Here’s a one-paragraph version that should be the basis of what journos call the “nut graph” of most stories about state spending and state priorities:

“The members of the most powerful political force in state politics, the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers, get far more money from taxpayers than any other single group. The teacher unions’ power derives from the automatic dues deducted from teachers’ paychecks, meaning taxpayers directly fund the lobbying and political operations of Sacramento’s most influential entity.”

I have lived in California since 1990, and I have seen many stories that point out that the biggest chunk of the state budget — per Proposition 98 — is public education, with a minimum of roughly 40 percent. In that time, I occasionally have seen stories that focus on the fact that compensation for all school employees is by far the biggest chunk of school district budgets.

But I seriously don’t remember a mainstream newspaper story that makes the collective points in the nut graph above. Nor do I remember a story that goes into the details of the nut graph: that teacher compensation has long been at least two-thirds of total state education spending and that it now is more like 80 percent.

Nor have I seen a story that frames the battle over school spending as being almost entirely about teacher pay, or that specifically says teacher pay is the single biggest element of the state budget.

Before now, have you ever read this anywhere? I doubt it.

This tracks with the points made by Caddell about the selective obliviousness of the media. Just as with the national media’s disinterest in noting that the White House lied about a terrorist attack on the 11th anniversary of 9/11, we’re seeing the California media look at Propositions 30, 32 and 38 and not note the centrality of the teacher compensation issue.

If they did, it would be obvious that the dominant issue in state politics is teacher jobs and teacher pay.

Now here is where it gets really pathetic.

Prop. 38

Proposition 38, introduced by liberal civil rights lawyer Molly Munger, has as a central tenet that the money it raises (allegedly) couldn’t go to teacher raises. It’s one of Munger’s talking points. So a KEY PREMISE of 38 is that it will avoid teacher union avarice.

And yet this is never pointed out by the regular media in anything approaching the stark terms laid out in my nut graph above, or the more indirect ways used by Munger.

This is incredible, this avoidance. It’s not just libertarian-lite whiners like me. It’s not just small-government/good-government advocates like CalWatchDog.com. It’s not just the California Republican Party. Anyone who has a functioning brain has to realize what’s going on here.

But not the Sacramento media. Instead, here’s an example of the crap/pap we see. This is a short Associated Press update of a 2005 budget fight that makes my point:

August 9, 2005

Teachers, schools superintendent sue governor over school funding

By JENNIFER COLEMAN, Associated Press Writer

SACRAMENTO — California’s top school official and the state’s largest teachers union sued Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Tuesday to restore $3.1 billion they claim is owed to public schools.

At issue is a deal school officials say was struck during a meeting with the governor in December 2003, a month after he was sworn into office.

Educators said they agreed to accept $2 billion in cuts to help the newly elected governor balance the 2004-05 state budget. To do that, lawmakers had to suspend Proposition 98, the voter-approved funding guarantee for schools.

In return, the governor promised schools would get more money if state revenues increased more than expected, said Jack O’Connell, superintendent of public instruction.

“Revenues did go up, and according to our agreement with the governor public education should have been one of the beneficiaries,” O’Connell said.

Instead, O’Connell said, schools were shorted an additional $3.1 billion over two years.

Schwarzenegger has denied there was a promise to share the excess revenue with schools. Because the funding guarantee was suspended, the schools were not entitled to a share of the billions of unanticipated income tax revenue California took in, his administration said.

In the budget approved earlier this summer, the governor used about $4 billion in unanticipated revenue to pay down some of the state’s debt, fund road improvements and reimburse cities and counties for money they lost when he repealed an increase in the vehicle license fee.

In the lawsuit, O’Connell, the California Teachers Association and some parents ask the court to find the state out of compliance with the law and state constitution.

The 2005-06 spending plan, signed by Schwarzenegger in July, invests nearly $60 billion in schools – more than half the $117.3 billion state budget.

Teacher pay

If you read that, would you have the slightest idea that this fight was almost 100 percent over teacher pay? Would you have the slightest sense of the Sacramento political dynamics it reflected? Would you have any sense of whose ox would get gored if Arnold got his way? Would you have any grasp of the real story of what this said about how Sacramento works?

No, of course you wouldn’t.

I know several reporters who cover Sacramento, and I have OK-to-good relationships with a few. But it is simply beyond my comprehension that so many of them think that it would be bad journalism to explicitly point out that teachers get more money from taxpayers than anyone else. And that these teachers’ unions use automatic paycheck deductions to massively multiply their clout.

These are objective facts, and they make the case for Proposition 32. But the next time that Associated Press or the reporters of the Sacramento Bee or the Los Angeles Times reports them, it will be the first.

By Chris Reed

The key to understanding Golden State politics is knowing that the most powerful forces in Sacramento by a wide margin are the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers. Using union dues and benefitting from the bizarrely enduring notion that what is good for teachers is good for students, the CTA and CFT dominate Sacramento the way the railroads dominated early 20th-century California.

Their overriding goal: operating public schools as a lucrative jobs program where practically nothing can get a teacher fired, up to and including taunting a tortured teenager for his failed suicide attempt.

But now they face a potentially game-changing challenge to their primary goal, which has triggered a panicked reaction from the teachers’ union puppets who control the Legislature. It stems from Los Angeles Superior Court Judge James C. Chalfant’s June ruling that the Los Angeles Unified School District had to include student performance when evaluating teacher laws because of a provision in a 1971 state law, the Stull Act, that had been ignored for decades. As Chalfant tersely put it, “[P]arties may not enter into a contract that violates a statutory law.”

This has been much reported on, but not so much the jaw-dropping legal arguments coming from the California Public Employment Relations Board. Until a May 2011 shake-up, PERB was a low-profile state agency that helped resolve labor disputes involving government workers. But wIth new top lawyer M. Suzanne Murphy, the former legal counsel for the California Nurses Association, leading the way, PERB has redefined its role as being the partner of public employee unions.

In a brief filed with Chalfant, Murphy actually argued that teachers’ collective bargaining rights — which were granted by the Legislature in 1975, four years after the passage of the Stull Act — trump state law. So even though state law says student performance must be part of teacher evaluations, PERB says state law only kicks in after unions exercise their full ability to impede change through collective bargaining.

Blocking pension reform

This is another version of the unique argument that PERB has used to try to block first the vote on and now the implementation of a sweeping pension reform proposal approved by San Diego voters in a June landslide. That argument: Elected officials can’t be involved in initiative campaigns if they have the potential to affect workers whom they oversee because that violates collective bargaining rights. The barely hidden goal is to make it far more difficult for California voters to use their constitutional right to direct democracy to go after our current version of rail barons.

So how has Sacramento reacted to the possibility that veteran teachers’ de facto lifetime tenure might be in peril, and that finally teachers will face objective evaluations of their performance?

With the usual ludicrous kabuki of offering up “reforms” that purport to address real problems caused by special interests but actually strengthen the special interests.

After Judge Chalfant’s ruling, Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes, D-Sylmar, swiftly revived a bill he had introduced in 2011 to change how teachers are evaluated. But school reformers quickly noticed that amid the bells and whistles included in the measure to make it appear as if teachers would actually face some sort of rigorous scrutiny was a provision that said, yes, all changes were subject to collective bargaining at the local level. Even the editorial board of The Los Angeles Times realized this is nuts.

Why doesn’t the Legislature just cut to the chase and pass a law saying all decisions in California, public or private, are subject to collective bargaining with the CTA and CFT?

Perverse politics

If you live outside of California, the perversity of our politics probably seems hilarious — a West Coast version of a Carl Hiaasen novel in which the teachers are the heartless villains, not psycho Florida developers. But if you have a child in the Golden State’s public schools, it’s sickening to watch.

Day-in and day-out, the Democrats who dominate Sacramento fiercely protect the idea that the main function of the K-12 system isn’t to educate kids. Instead, it’s to provide veteran teachers with well-paying jobs and ironclad job protections — and 16 weeks of annual vacation.

The sick twist to this is that the teachers’ unions are empowered by a party that pretends to be the avatar of social justice. In Sacramento, social justice means lifetime jobs for bad teachers in school districts whose campuses increasingly resemble Potemkin villages, with 90 percent-plus of operating budgets routinely going to employee compensation and little left for books, computers and other education tools.

The “Peanuts” comic strip once had a Sunday panel in which Lucy asked her grandmother why — if there were a Father’s Day and a Mother’s Day — there wasn’t a Children’s Day. Her grandma replied, “Every day is Children’s Day.”

Those were much more innocent times. In California, every day is Public Employee Day.

Reed is an editorial writer for the U-T San Diego newspaper.

By WAYNE LUSVARDI

California Gov. Jerry Brown likens himself to a canoeist who paddles a little to the Left then a little to the Right.  Lately, he has been paddling Left with labor unions to propose a new $9 billion tax increase that supposedly will plug an estimated $7 billion state budget deficit. Brown merged his tax proposal with one by the California Federation of Teachers.

But his proposal will get sucked over a giant waterfall to its doom if he ignores the consequences of the federal government’s extremely low interest rate policy on voters. There can be no real economic recovery without raising interest rates to savers and investors. And without an economic recovery, all tax increase proposals are doomed at the ballot box.

A mild increase in jobs will not be sufficient to pass a $9 billion tax hike. Voters won’t feel there is an economic recovery until interest rates rise at least two points over the current inflation rate of about 3 percent. That is, the rates must be at least 5 percent.

Presently, interest rates are below 1 percent for 82 percent of Treasury Bills.

Piddle Paddling at Tax Increases

Brown also still is working to keep off the November ballot a rival tax increase by Molly Munger, daughter of Pasadena billionaire Charles Munger. The “Munger Tax” initiative would increase taxes on everyone with an income of $14,632 per year or higher. It would apply to about 90 percent of all California households. Munger’s tax would mainly fund public schools and the remainder would go to childcare programs.

Both of these tax proposals are headed for a big fall at the ballot box because of the federal government’s deliberate policy of holding down interest rates.  Abnormally low interest rates for savers and investors are squelching an economic recovery.  This is likely to lead voters to vote “No” on any tax increases at the ballot box in November 2012.

JAN. 4, 2012

It’s fun to gloat about our great weather when calling freezing relatives Back East on New Year’s Day. And some good things are keeping the sun shining this year.

Silicon Valley’s global technology dominance will continue in 2012. Despite the foolishness of the state, if you’re a young computer code jock from any corner of the world, Californy is still is the place you ought to be. Silicon gold. Transistor tea. Swimming pools. Entrepreneur stars. Billionaires.

It’s like Detroit was for a young engineer in the 1920s. Or Edwards Air Force Base for test pilots in the 1950s. Or Hollywood at any time for a starlet.

If that’s the place to be, then you don’t care about the government, the taxes, the regulations. Nowadays, you can run a computer business from a laptop at Starbucks while living out of your 1999 Corolla.

Indeed, the silicon boom well could bring in so much tax cash in 2012 that the calls for a tax increase will be a lot harder to make come November.

Time of Troubles

But California in 2012 also faces so many problems that many folks will break out the parkas and head for the Bad Weather States to find work.

For the good news, the record $13 billion tax increase departed Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law in 2009 expired in 2011. It’s not returning in 2012. Although voters might approve a new tax for 2013.

The Schwarzenegger tax certainly is part of the reason why unemployment in California rose from 10.1 percent in January 2009, the month before the tax increase, to 12.5 percent in December 2010 — a 2.4 percentage-point increase.

But in January 2011, the tax increases began to fall off. In that month, Schwarzenegger’s income tax increase expired. In July, the sales tax increase expired.

That’s much of the reason why, in 2011, things got better as the tax receded. The unemployment rate fell steadily throughout the year, from 12.4 percent in January 2011 to 11.3 percent in November 2011, the latest month available.

True, the national economy improved as well, partly because of the new payroll tax cut that was just extended. But California’s unemployment, although still second-highest in the nation after Nevada, improved faster.

This is shown in the following graph. It uses the “Jobs Gap” calculation I came up with two years ago. Notice the green line at the bottom.

Receding ‘Jobs Gap’

In January 2011, there was a 3.4 percentage-point “Jobs Gap,” as I call it, between California and the United States as a whole. U.S. unemployment was just 9 percent, but California’s was 12.4 percent — hence the Jobs Gap.

By November 2011, U.S. unemployment had dropped to 8.6 percent. But California’s had dropped to 11.3 percent. That produced a 2.7 percentage-point Jobs Gap for November.

That means our unemployment rate improved 0.7 percentage-point faster than did the overall U.S. economy.

Throughout the year, Republicans in the Legislature remained solid, for once, in resisting tax increases pushed on them. In this case, the tax increases were advanced by Gov. Jerry Brown, the Democratic Legislature and the powerful government-worker unions.

Brown campaigned all year, pulling out every rhetorical trick for increasing taxes, such as calling his major anti-tax opponents the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (picture above).

Clearly, Californians enjoyed having a little more change jingling in their pockets. They used the money not just to buy more Christmas goodies for their kids. They also used it to feed their families. And some used it to invest in new business and jobs creation.

For 2012, Californians know they will enjoy the whole year without a state tax increase. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that state tax increases hang over 2012 like the Sword of Damocles (pictured at right). And at the national level, no one knows who will be president in 12 months, or what his economic policies will be.

Short-Term Thinking

But as my colleague Steven Greenhut noted, if things continue to get a little better (but not a lot better), people likely will forget that state has some big structural problems.

One is an over-reliance on the income and capital gains taxes that flow like Niagra Falls during boom times, but dry up during bad times. This was analyzed in a 2005 report by the Legislative Analyst, “Revenue Volatility in California.”

The following chart from the report shows what happened:

Note how tax revenues from both stock options and capital gains soared during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, then crashed when the dot-com boom burned into the dot-com bust.

The chart stops before something similar happened during the real-estate bubble of the mid-2000s, which burst in 2007.

The volatility shows the folly of increasing taxes on “the rich.” During boom times, that seems to work. The Silicon Valley boys rake in the cash. The government skims off 10.3 percent of it — or 12.3 percent if Brown’s proposed new tax increase is enacted. The state then blows all the money.

Then the stock market crashes, as in the dot-com crash, and the revenues stop flowing in. But the spending remains at the high level from the boom. Then calls for more tax increases flow in.

This volatility often is used as a reason to attack Proposition 13, which limits increases in property taxes to 2 percent per year. Usually this comes in the form of pushing for a “split roll” on property taxes, with Prop. 13 applying only to home ownership, not business property.

The argument is that soaking business property is a lot more stable than relying on the ups and downs of the stock portfolios of Silicon Valley gearheads.

But once Prop. 13 is breached for business property, it soon would be breached for wealthy homeowners, then for everyone. Prop. 13 remains the bulwark of tax sanity in a state otherwise locked in an asylum basement.

Overspending

But the real problem is not that, in each boom, the state overspent. Governors, legislators and the powerful government-workers unions never learn. They always assume that the good times will continue rolling forever.

During the height of the dot-com boom, Gov. Gray Davis increased general-fund spending 15 percent in fiscal 1999-2000 and another 15 percent in 2000-01. And during the height of the real estate bubble, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger increased general-fund spending 15 percent for fiscal 2005-06 and another 10 percent for 2006-07.

If we have even a modest recovery in 2012, there’s every reason to believe that Gov. Jerry Brown will spend all of it, too, putting nothing away for a rainy day — or a bust. He blew his chance a year ago to put California’s fiscal house in order. He should have pushed for a state version of the flat-tax he proposed in his 1992 presidential bid, a restoration of the Gann Limit on spending he championed 30 years ago, or both.

Fortunately, a spending limit similar to Gann is being advanced and could be on the November ballot.

Brown wasted 2011 on his tax-increase obsession. And he is planning on doing the same in 2012. His State of the State address and budget proposal this month will be geared to push his tax increase.

Tax Increase 2012?

For political junkies, in addition to the presidential election, 2012 looks to be a battle royale on tax increases in California. Not just Brown, but several others are pushing new assaults on taxpayers.

Brown wants $7 billion for schools and public safety.

There’s the Think Long committee’s short-sighted proposal to boost taxes $10 billion, combined with some reform of the tax structure to address revenue volatility. Made up of billionaires, the committee might better spend its time reviving, and booking a gig on, “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.”

Molly Munger wants $10 billion for education and deficit reduction.

And the California Federation of Teachers is seeking a $6 billion tax on millionaires.

There will be others.

Maybe the millionaires and billionaires who favor tax increases should just cough up the cash voluntarily and spare the rest of us an election and higher taxes on the middle class.

More Cuts Needed

What often is overlooked is that more waste easily could be a wrung from the wasteful state budget. Start with cutting all the über–Politically Correct college and university courses that cost millions while advancing anti-intellectualism on campus, as Stan Brin described last week.

And the Cal State system is so top-heavy that it actually has more administrators than professors. Reports Michael Barone:

“Take the California State University system, the second tier in that state’s public higher education. Between 1975 and 2008, the number of full-time faculty members rose by 3 percent, to 12,019 positions. During those same years, the number of administrators rose 221 percent, to 12,183. That’s right: There are more administrators than teachers at Cal State now.”

Forced to slash budgets, Cal State, instead of cutting administrative bloat, increased student tuition 9 percent.

No wonder kids are graduating college with $100,000 or more in debt. It’s party time for administrators but indentured servitude for the student-serfs — who also must pay high taxes if they remain in the state. What a racket.

Next, pension reform is essential — and not just the tinkering around the edges proposed by Gov. Brown.

As the latest Stanford University study shows, the state’s pension liability has soared to $497.9 billion. Unless something is done to cut that amount, even taxing millionaires 100 percent won’t be enough to reduce budget deficits.

Schools for Scandal

And something needs to be done about the state’s failing schools, which score close to the bottom on standardized tests. For example, on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress, California scored 46th among the states in fourth-grade reading, 49th for eight-grade reading, 46th on fourth-grade math and 48th on eight-grade math.

For the high-tech center of the universe, that’s just appalling. If the state had its act together, it would act like the owner of an 0-16 NFL team and fire the whole management. But teacher and administrator contracts don’t allow that.

Still, some reforms are advancing. Charter schools remain popular. And my friend Martha Montelongo has featured several reformers on her Gadfly Radio show, Tuesday nights at 8:00 pm on LaTalkRadio.com, in which I usually participate.

Martha recently featured Yolie Flores, a former reform member of the school board of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Flores now is CEO of Communities for Teaching Excellence, which promotes putting parents and kids ahead of unions and administrators, while emphasizing effective teaching.

All of the major tax-increase proposals are aimed at boosting school spending. But with the schools so broken, it’s like buying used Yugo and installing a new digital navigation system in it.

Moreover, despite claims to the contrary, California school spending has risen in recent years. A 2010 Pepperdine University study showed that school spending actually soared 21 percent from fiscal 2003-04 to 2008-09.

And the extra money went for administrators, not teachers. For example, in 2008-09, Oakland Unified spent a generous $12,946 per pupil. But just 35 percent of that went to classroom instruction, with 65 percent going to administration.

The schools have administered programs to get kids off junk food and slim down. But it’s the schools themselves that are gorged with fat administrative staffs.

As with colleges and universities, wasteful administration has devoured budgets. More taxes would only feed the beast.

Perhaps 2012 will be the year that reforms by Flores and others will be demanded by parents and forced on sclerotic school systems.

The Radiant Future

California is supposed to lead the world into a Radiant Future, to use a Leninist phrase. That certainly was the boosterism promoted by Gov. Schwarzenegger as he “terminated” the state’s problems by making them worse. Well, at least that poseur is gone. But under him, California’s middle class shrank to less than half the population, as the state nosedived toward Third World status.

The problem in 2012 is that the state government, like the U.S. government, is refusing to acknowledge that its past mistakes have caused today’s discontent. Past budget splurges should require whatever budget cuts are necessary to get out of the red and back to the black. Taxes should be streamlined along the lines of Art Laffer’s flat-tax idea.

Instead, the state is stuck in a “Back to the Future” nightmare in which a revanchist Gov. Brown tries to recreate the Atari Democrat technofuturism of his salad days as governor three decades ago.

But the reality of the here and now in 2012 is of most Californians struggling to keep a grip on middle-class hopes and dreams as the government keeps pounding them down into the ranks of the unemployed and the homeless.

Remember the government worker, Huy Pham, who jumped from a government building in Costa Mesa after he was laid off? Pro-government unions and politicians still are blaming his death on the mean City Council of Costa Mesa that fired him amid budget cuts.

As I reported here last week, the April-May edition of “California Teacher,” the magazine of the California Federation of Teachers, contained another lament using Pham’s death to advance the union agenda. An article in the magazine read:

Ann Nicholson is president of the nearby Coast Federation of Classified Employees. Her local is in negotiations now, so Huy’s death “makes us realize just how serious our work is at the negotiation table.” She said the attack on organized labor across the country represents a threat to all middle-class wage earners and the contributions they make to the economy.

Well, it turns out that Pham was high on cocaine when he jumped. Reports the Orange County Register:

A doctor specializing in drug detoxification says the results of the toxicology report of the man who jumped to his death off Costa Mesa City Hall points to cocaine use.

Speculation is swirling over whether Huy Thanh Pham, 29, of Fountain Valley had been using cocaine or whether the report was flawed and turning out a false positive.

“This amount is hard to explain other than cocaine use,” said Dr. Daniel Headrick, who specializes in drug detoxification at Mission Pacific Coast Recovery. “That’s a significant amount in the blood.”

The Orange County Coroner’s toxicology report shows there was .44 mg of benzoylecgonine per liter of Pham’s blood.

Coroner officials confirmed the substance indicated cocaine in Pham’s system but some have questioned whether the substance was showing up because of prescription drugs used to nurse a broken ankle Pham had been tending to, among other possible explanations.

Benzoylecgonine is the primary metabolite of cocaine but it can also be found in a topical treatment used for muscle pain and is sometimes used in surgery for ear, nose or throat procedures. Neither of these cases would show up at these levels in the blood, Headrick said.

“This is a pretty confident report that this person was under the influence of cocaine,” he said after reviewing the report.

Headrick, who is the chief executive officer of the detoxification center and sees about 800 patients a year, said cocaine use can affect the brain, emotions and judgment for months after use.

“Cocaine gets you excited, agitated and some people even go into hallucinations, but eventually it drops you down,” he said. “People can get suicide depression when they use any type of drug, especially cocaine.”

Maybe now the unions will blame his cocaine use on job pressures caused because taxes aren’t high enough to pay for increased pay for government workers.

May 30, 2011

(Hat tip to Martha Montelongo.)

By JOHN SEILER

If you listen to people in the political game, they usually tell you what they’re going to do. But you sometimes have to check out their internal communications.

One of my best sources is California Teacher, the magazine of the California Federation of Teachers, which is part of the massive AFL-CIO super-union. The latest number doesn’t disappoint (.pdf here). It contains the strategy of the CFT — one of the most powerful unions in the state — for jacking up taxes and maintaining their members’ high pay, perks, pensions and political clout.

In his “Up Front” column, retiring CFT President Marty Hittelman laments the budget cuts, then writes:

We must do all that we can to reverse this erosion — and we will….Passage of Proposition 25 [majority vote for the Legislature to pass a budget] will help, but we need to conclude that chapter by passing a ballot proposition that will allow the Legislature to approve taxes by majority vote.

We need to find ways to increase state revenues through a combination of higher tax rates for the wealthiest 1 percent (for now, those making more than $500,000 per year), an oil depletion tax, a tax on services, and a change in Proposition 13 property tax laws, so large corporate properties are reassessed on a regular basis [he’s talking about the split-roll property tax]. California is a rich state anbd we should be able to afford the services that are the responsibility of a civilized nation.

For him, it’s all about jacking up taxes not just in a couple of areas, but everywhere and anywhere. For civilization. So if you’re against him, you’re not civilized.

And he still believes that California is a “rich state,” even though businesses and jobs are fleeing, and we have the second-worst unemployment rate in the country, behind only Nevada — which is improving faster than California.

Certainly, he’s right in one sense: California is a “rich” state for government-union workers.

Hittelman continues:

We must not allow the pressures of everyday life [that is, budget deficits and other realities] to erode our ability to negotiate collective bargaining agreements that support and protect workers so that we can live dignified and productive professional lives.

Deletates to our annual CFT convention were united in their determination to fight back against the continuing attacks on public employees and our unios. Speakers called for solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Florida and numerous other states….

One thing I have learned in my more than 40 years in educatino and union work is that you have the power you assume. Exert your power. Embrace your professional responsibility to speak and act up. And persevere.

Well, the CFT and other California unions have exerted their power so much that they bankrupted the state. They put kept Democrats into all seven statewide offices, and hefty majorities in both houses of the Legislature. The unions also exert strong influence on Republicans in the Legislature. So, they have only themselves to blame for what has happened.

Tax the Rich

The All-Union News section of the magazine includes this headline: “CFT-sponsored poll finds strong support for taxing the rich — Voters respond positively when presented with alternative to slashing public services.” Here’s a Chronicle news story on the same thing.

The CFT story is by Communicatins Director Fred Glass. Typically, he doesn’t understand that raising tax rates isn’t the same as raising tax revenues. If taxes get to high, people just leave, or quit working. Is it really a good idea to make California even more anti-business?

The article reads:

Likely voters also thought it would be a good idea to close business tax loopholes, reassess large commercial properties at current market value (“split roll”), and levy a 10 percent severance tax on oil….

Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, floated the “1 percent on 1 percent” idea by introducing AB 1130 in the Legislature. Passage of the bill is unlikely though, because no Republican will vote for any tax, any time, and the Legislature needs a two-thirds vote to pass a tax.

Well, we’ll see if the GOP holds firm instead of, as always in the past, suffering a couple of sellouts who back tax increases.

AB 1130 and the CFT poll results do provide an opportunity to talk about reasonable state budget solutions. By contacting legislators and telling them the wealthiest Californians need to pay their fair share of taxes, rather than continue to see colleges and schools deteriorate, CFT members can create a new understanding in Sacramento and a new direction to channel voter anger an frustration with the economy. Republican legislators should be informed that their base constituents support the 1 percent on 1 percent bill.

On Wisconsin? — No

The publication continues with an article by Mindy Pines, CFT reporter, on the actions by new Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to rein in the immense power of his state’s government worker unions. She writes:

Moved by the union stand in Madison, CFT members joined 1 million workers throughout the nation in protesting the Republican attack on public employees, unions, and collective bargaining….

According to Aaron Neimark, kindergarten teacher and member of the United Educators of San Francisco [a CFT affiliate], educators are the human face of public employees. [So other unions’ members are the inhuman face?] “We see the families of our students every day and we can counter ideas that we are part of the problem. Collective bargaining for educators directly speaks to how we teach, class size, working conditions…and this directly affects kids.” (Elipses in original.)

This is the promotion of the indoctrination of students by CFT members. Instead of just teaching the subjects in the school, they “can counter ideas that we are part of the problem.”

Legislator of the Year

Another article in the magazine reports that the CFT named state Sen. Loni Hancock, D-Oakland, its Legislator of the Year:

State Sen. Loni Hancock says CFT members can turn around the attacks on unions and education in California. “Let’s go get ’em, just like we did in Wisconsin.

“I get nervous when I hear the word reform,” said Hancock…addressing the conservative push to demonize public workers. All workers should have pension plans, she smphasized. “A fixed benefit pension is a hallmark of civilization.”

Hancock thanked CFT for its leading role in passing Proposition 25, which changed the vote to pass the state budget from a two-thirds to a majority [sic]. “If Prop. 25 had not passed, we would be in Sacramento now negotiating what we have to give away to pass the budget.”

Acknowledging that the state was truly out of money, she apologized for the drastic cuts made to the state budget and likened them to “amputating a leg to save a life.” [Actually, it’s more like liposuction.] The enormous task now is to pass the tax extensions, she said, calling taxes “what people pay for all the things that make a civilized society.”

“All the things” including massive bloat and waste in government, and budget-busting pension programs for the government-worker elite.

Suicide Worker

Then there’s yet another lament for the union worker who, after being fired by the city of Costa Mesa, jumped from a building to his death.

Of course, at least 90 percent of Americans lose jobs in their careers, yet don’t kill themselves, or the country’s population would be 31 million in instead of 330 million. To blame Huy Pham’s death on city cutbacks is absurd. But the California Teacher magazine does it anyway, in an article by CFT Reporter Malcolm Terrence:

Ann Nicholson is president of the nearby Coast Federation of Classified Employees. Her local is in negotiations now, so Huy’s death “makes us realize just how serious our work is at the negotiation table.” She said the attack on organized labor across the country represents a threat to all middle-class wage earners and the contributions they make to the economy.

So, when the middle class revolts and insists on budget cuts instead of tax increases on the middle class, that’s a “threat to all middle-class wage earners”?

The article continues, reporting that Kimberly Claytor, president of the Newport-Mesa Federation of Teachers…

organized a group of delegates to the CFT Convention to attend a candlelight vigil following the death of 29-year-old Huy, who had worked for the city’s maintenance department for four years. He supported his mother and siblings. Costa Mesa city officials predicted they would save from 15 percent to 40 percent of labor costs by outsourcing.

By the way, according to Ballotpedia, last November voters in Costa Mesa actually approved a hefty 33 percent increase in the city’s hotel tax. But even that wasn’t enough to close the city’s budget gap, hence the cutbacks.

The CFT magazine then continues with these amazing words:

Huy’s death recalls that the unstoppable wave of pro-democracy demonstrations sweeping North Africa were triggered by the suicide of Muhammad Bouazizi, a 26-year-old unlicensed fruit vendor.

The CFT just doesn’t get it. Bouazizi was a private businessman oppressed by Tunisia’s tyrannical ruling elite. But in California, the government-worker unions are the tyrannical ruling elite.

It’s shameful how the CFT, and other unions, used Huy’s death to advance their agenda which, as reported above, is spearheaded by even more assaults on taxpayers.