But it looks like he really isn’t running for president.

Of course, in his three charges at the Oval Office — in 1976, 1980 and 1992 — he started late, surged to near victory, then lost. So nothing can be ruled out absolutely until the Democratic primaries are over in 2016.

Yet he said on the “Meet the Press,” “If I could go back in a time machine and be 66, I might jump in. But that’s a counterfactual, so you don’t need to speculate on that.”

If elected, he would be 78 when assuming the presidency — 86 upon leaving it if he served two terms.

The oldest president elected was Ronald Reagan, 69 when elected in 1980, and 77 when he left office. That’s nine years younger than Brown would be if elected.

Reagan, of course, also was a California governor, 1967 to 1975. He served between Gov. Pat Brown, 1959 to 1975, and Pat’s son, Gov. Jerry Brown, whose first period in office was 1975 to 1983.

The Reagan biographies show his staff had to make sure his campaign schedules in 1980 and 1984 were not too grueling. In those days there were newspaper reporters and four major TV networks. But things have gotten more hectic in the intervening 35 years, with social media accelerating the news cycle.

That also could prove a problem for Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, who would be 69 on election day.

By John Seiler

Calling Dr. Freud. Gov. Jerry Brown’s relationship with his later father, Gov. Pat Brown, is complex. It’s so complex it’s a father complex.

Our colleague Steven Greenhut writes about it on Bloomberg, “Who Will Pay for Jerry Brown’ Father Complex?”

It’s full speed ahead for mammoth infrastructure projects in California — especially the ones designed to build a legacy for Governor Jerry Brown.

Officials last week released the final chapters of a draft plan that would divert water from the picturesque Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, a vast Northern California estuary that has long been at the epicenter of the state’s battles over water resources.

The engineering and habitat-restoration project — now estimated to cost $24.5 billion, financed through forthcoming bond measures, federal subsidies and increased fees on water contractors and users — involves a lot of guesswork. Brown, a Democrat, has dismissed concerns, even from within his own administration, about whether this costly endeavor will increase water supplies and save habitat for endangered fish…

When Brown was running for governor in 2010, conservatives feared a return of the slow-growth environmentalism he espoused in his earlier terms as governor and as attorney general (he carried out the state’s anti-global-warming law by suing localities that didn’t conform to his smart-growth vision).

But Jerry Brown isn’t governing like the old Jerry Brown. He is governing like his father, Pat Brown, who was governor from the late 1950s through the mid-1960s, an era of gigantic infrastructure-building endeavors. Paradoxically, California conservatives have used Pat Brown as someone the current slow-growth legislators should be emulating. Put that in the “be careful what you wish for” category.

Read the rest here.

By Chriss Street

There is nothing like the threat of insolvency and a downgrade to junk bond status to motivate traditionally liberal politicians to abandon the environmentalists who heavily fund their campaigns.  Last week, Gov. Jerry Brown of California tossed one of his core campaign-bundling constituencies under-the-bus at a bill-signing event in downtown Los Angeles.

As Brown signed his third measure this year that dramatically narrows the “sustainable” crowd’s ability to use litigation to delay or kill capital projects, the governor said it is time for “big ideas and big projects,” especially ones to “get people working.”  With the pace of public insolvencies and Chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy fillings accelerating across the United States, Brown is the vanguard for high-profile progressives willing to bet that capitalism can pull them back from the precipice of disgrace and potential recall.

For most of Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr.’s first tour as governor from 1975-1983, Gray Davis served as his Chief of Staff. When Brown was campaigning for president in those years, Davis ran California in Brown’s absence.  In 1998, Davis was elected governor by an overwhelming 20 percent margin.

In the next 1,778 days, Davis went on a liberal borrow-and-spend blitz by signing 5,132 bills, including huge pension spikes for public employees, public control of electricity purchasing, substantial increases in school spending and the nation’s first state law requiring automakers to limit auto emissions. He even tried to pass gun control.

But when the economy turned down after 9/11 and the credit rating agencies’ downgrades sent California into a financial crisis, Davis became only the second governor in American history to be recalled by voters.

The recall of Davis sent a scare through politicians across the nation about the need to control spending and become more pro-business.  But with real estate prices skyrocketing, state and local government revenues exploded to the upside.  Spending accelerated even faster than rising revenues as governments borrowed heavily on the hope of an endless rise in property and sales taxes.

Borrowing

When the Great Recession hit in 2008, state and local governments kept borrowing and spending, because they enjoyed huge “stimulus” transfers from the Obama Administration and a two-year lag before tax revenues began to fall.  But In 2011, state and local spending fell for the first time since 1946.  This year, government entities face steep budget deficits and are struggling to pay off debts accumulated over prior years.

The Moody’s and S&P credit rating agencies provided the “investment grade” credit ratings encouraged investors to buy many dicey municipal bonds. Those agencies now fear they may have liability and are actively slashing many ratings.  As ratings levels have hit “junk bond” status, 26 municipalities filed for bankruptcy since 2010.  Three California cities have filed bankruptcy over the last 60 days and Fresno, Duarte, Compton, San Jose and other cities have acknowledged they are in financial crisis.

More ominous, for 60 years municipal debt increased annually, but this year for the first time the municipal bond market will face the “August Cliff”.  This is an event where more money will flow out of government coffers to pay off maturing debt than will come in from expanding new bond sales.  With credit ratings falling and media-driven fear rising about the “Mounting Muni Meltdown,” it is only time before conservative investors become reluctant to put their cash back to work in municipal bonds.

Development

Brown is on a pro-development tear.  He shocked the “greens” last week by joining U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar in announcing plans to build two massive tunnels under the California Delta at a cost of $23.7 billion to carry water from the Sacramento River to connect to the California Aqueduct to quench Southern California’s thirst for new land development, while generating more property and sales taxes.  The next day he dedicated the 117-mile Sunrise Powerlink transmission line that can carry 1,000 megawatts of energy from the Imperial Valley to San Diego — the first major new power lines to connect to San Diego in more than 25 years.

Brown is painfully aware that California already has the second lowest state municipal bond rating in the United States, and that Moody’s recently warned it plans to issue California a downgrade soon, possibly to junk.  My analysis indicates that approximately 20 percent of cities, 30 percent of redevelopment districts and a number of counties in California may file for bankruptcy in the next two years.

Jerry Brown’s father, former California Gov. Pat Brown, first ran for state Assembly as a Republican in 1928, but lost and later joined the Democratic Party.  Pat Brown’s two terms as governor were marked by working closely with the pro-growth private sector to build the enormous California Aqueduct, enact the California Master Plan for Higher Education and found the California Commission for Economic Development.

Jerry Brown seems to have re-embraced his father’s belief in building infrastructure to support private-sector growth to rehabilitate California.  When Jerry Brown was asked why he has signed three bills this year to limit challenges to major infrastructure projects by the state’s restrictive California Environmental Quality Act, Brown responded, “I’ve never seen a CEQA exemption that I don’t like.”

Chriss Street will be in Studio with Paul Preston on “The Inside Education,” Streaming Live Monday August 6 through Friday August 10, 7-10 PM
Click here to listen each night:  http://www.mysytv.net/kmyclive.html

Riverside County Supervisor Jeff Stone advocates something I long have backed: Split California in two.

Let Gov. Jerry “Jobs Killer” Brown, the nutty Democratic Legislature, the government employee unions and others following the North Korean political philosophy have their own state. Then they can raise taxes and impose new regulations to their dark hearts’ content.

And let those of us who favor low taxes and small government have our own state. Like New Hampshire, we would have no income or sales tax, and little state regulation.

The PI reported:

Stone proposed late Thursday that Riverside County take the lead in pushing for 13 counties to secede from the state.

Fed up with high taxes and continued raids on local government funds, Stone said the counties of Riverside, Imperial, San Diego, Orange, San Bernardino, Kings, Kern, Fresno, Tulare, Inyo, Madera, Mariposa and Mono should form the new state of South California.

“We have a state Legislature that has gone wild. They just don’t care. Their goal was to get a balanced budget so they could continue to get a paycheck,” Stone said by telephone late Thursday. “There is only one solution: A serious secession from the liberal arm of the state of California. I know the state of California can do better.”

Right on!

Splitting the state up actually was an idea strongly supported by Gov. Brown — that is, the first one who built the state, Pat Brown, rather than the second one, Jerry Brown, who’s tearing it down. Pat Brown wrote a book on the subject.

Actually, splitting the state in two would be just a start. We need three, four, ten, many Californias.

July 1, 2011

The latest fiscal folly is Senate President Pro-Tem Darrell Steinberg’s bill, SB 653, to allow local governments to increase taxes above state levels. They already can do so with county sales taxes with a vote of the people. But there’s a built-in limitation with sales taxes: people easily can shop in another county.

SB 653 would allow local taxes increases, as well, on income taxes, the car tax, business taxes, property taxes and numerous excise taxes, as on cigarettes, booze, soda and even medical marijuana, which technically still is illegal according to federal law (but shouldn’t be).

Maximums for each tax would be established, such as 1 percentage point for the income tax. But if all the tax increases are imposed in a particular area — which, given the nature of Democrats’ tax obsession, is likely to happen — the multiple increases could be hefty.

According to Kathryn Baron, Steinberg’s bill is a tactical ploy:

The tactical, of course, is leverage with the Republicans if they continue their path of resistance against letting voters decide whether to extend some tax increases in order to close the remaining $10 billion budget gap. Although he didn’t come right out and say it’s a bargaining chip, Steinberg spokesman Mark Hedlund noted that Republicans are calling for pension reform, a spending cap, and some regulatory reform. With the budget deadline of June 15^th within sight, “there’s going to be a lot of moving parts over the next three weeks,” said Hedlund. “There is a lot of compromise and a lot of negotiating and a lot of give and take involved in the budgetary process, so it’s just hammering out the details.”

Well, just let Democrats pass SB 653 into law. At this point, I don’t care. I live in Orange County, which would rebuff any local tax increases. So would most Republican areas.

The GOP should call Steinberg’s bluff and keep opposing statewide tax increases — thus leading the Democrats to impose SB 653 on the state.

The tax increases would be centered in Democratic areas, such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Santa Cruz and Steinberg’s native Sacramento.

Thus, productive people would flee the Democrat areas for Republican areas. The Dem areas’ tax and vote base would erode, while the GOP areas’ tax and vote base increased.

Pressure would be on to split the state, something that should happen anyway. Even former Gov. Pat Brown, Jerry’s daddy, favored splitting the state.

I’m against all tax increases. But I say: Republicans should favor allowing Democrats to commit fiscal suicide in their counties.

America is a democracy. And as H.L. Mencken put it, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

One, two, many Californias!

May 27, 2011

When I first got interested in politics as a kid in the 1960s, people talked of the “Solid South,” meaning only Democrats got elected there. The region was dominated by old segregationists like Sen. John Stennis of Mississippi (pictured at right).

Because only Democrats won elections, they built up seniority and controlled most of the committees in Congress, especially on budgets. They  were adept at getting military bases and contracts for their constituents. That’s why so many military bases are in the South instead of elsewhere. Stennis was so friendly to the military, funneling hundreds of billions to contractors, that the Navy named a supercarrier after him, the U.S.S. John C. Stennis (CVN-74). The ship’s nickname is “Johnny Reb.”

By contrast, anti-war Republican Rep. Pete McCloskey of California, a decorated U.S. Navy and Marine Corps combat veteran, won’t get a tugboat named after him. (Since 2007, McCloskey has been a Democrat.)

The South, of course, changed and now is predominately Republican.

But it’s clear that California has become a new version of the Solid South, with Democrats predominant and Republicans influential only at their country clubs. Dan Walters writes:

It’s not a stretch to say that the Republican Party, which once dominated California politics and was very competitive into the 1990s, has devolved into a party of rapidly aging white people, and as they disappear, its fortunes may sink further.

Walters quotes new GOP state honcho Tom Del Beccaro, who said:

We do not pay enough attention to our next generation. We are not talking to enough minority voters, we are not talking to enough independents and we are not even talking to enough Democrats. Quite frankly, we have trapped ourselves into talking to the converted instead of inspiring a new generation of voters.

Actually, it doesn’t really matter what they do. Republicans will be a minority as long as anyone reading this is alive.

There’s an irony here. Democrats are ascendant and dominant. But there’s no money for them to play with. At least for the next decade, by far the major issue will be the economic and fiscal collapse that began in 2007.

Democrats, not Republicans, will be the ones cutting budgets. And the cuts have just begun because there’s no more money.

If Democrats increase taxes, they’ll just drown the goose that lays the Golden State’s eggs.

Democrats Will Split

What will happen is that Democrats, as they did in the Sold South of half a century ago, will split into Right and Left. The Solid South had the old segregationists like Stennis and George Wallace. But it also developed progressives like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

We’ll still effectively have a two-party system. But it will be Democratic Party A and Democratic Party B. Republicans will become a de-facto third party, winning only in a few areas, such as Orange County.

Who knows, we might even get a new movement to split up the state, an idea actually pushed by Pat Brown, the 1960s governor and father of current Gov. Jerry Brown.

March 28, 2011