Snack tax may soon be back

Good morning! A tax on snacks may soon be back. 

A bill introduced by Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia, D-Bell Gardens, would roll back the sales and usage tax exemptions for certain, less-nutritious, snack foods.

The measure, part of Garcia’s agenda to highlight inequities in the tax code, requires a heavy lift to become law. In 1992, voters repealed a tax on snacks, leaving most candy and junk food exempt from sales tax. The measure requires two-thirds majority and a vote of the people.

Garcia’s office estimates the measure would bring in around $1 billion in tax revenue annually. 

While the additional revenue could fund any number of priorities, Garcia has long sought to make a point that snacks with little nutritional value are not taxed, while necessities — feminine hygiene products like tampons — are.

“As I took a closer look at our tax code, it became apparent that while California’s policy is to tax luxury items, the reality is that it’s inconsistent,” Garcia said in a statement. “We tax necessities like tampons but exempt chocolate bars.”

CalWatchdog has more. 

In other news: 

• Voter Fraud: “Voter fraud ‘test’ could backfire.” The Orange County Register has the story. 

• Cap and Trade Challenge: “With President Trump in the Oval Office, California officials are bracing for the possibility that the new administration will undermine the state’s landmark policies on climate change. But the more immediate threat isn’t coming from Washington; it lies in a lawsuit that has been slowly winding its way through state courts.” The Los Angeles Times has more. 

• 2018: “Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom says it could get ‘intriguing’ if Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech entrepreneur and key ally of President Donald Trump, makes a move to challenge him in next year’s governor’s race,” reports Politico.

• Budget: “Now more than ever, voters have decided that billions of those dollars should make their way through Sacramento with hardly a single politician’s fingerprints on them,” reports the Los Angeles Times. 

Legislature:

• Assembly in at 1 p.m. Senate in at 2 p.m., will vote on Xavier Becerra for attorney general.

Gov. Brown:

• No public events announced. 

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog @mflemingterp

New follower: @StanfordNews1

Bullet train report prompts renewed criticism, investigations

Good morning. The bullet train faces renewed scrutiny after a report surfaced suggesting massive cost overruns. 

According to the Los Angeles Times, a “confidential estimate by federal regulators that the cost of California’s bullet train project could jump significantly has prompted critics of the $64-billion Los Angeles-to-San Francisco rail effort to call for new investigations and proponents to disclaim reports that project costs are growing.”

“State officials have accused The Times of mischaracterizing its findings. In a letter to members of the Legislature, the California High-Speed Rail Authority accused The Times of incorrectly using internal deliberations to suggest cost overruns and delays that are not borne out by facts.”

“But critics of the project said the federal analysis validates their concerns that the state will be saddled with multibillion-dollar unbudgeted costs for the foreseeable future.”

CalWatchdog has more. 

In other news:

• Trump: “California’s expectations for Donald Trump’s presidency are in the cellar, with little more than a third of voters believing it will be a success, a new Hoover Institution Golden State Poll shows. But a plurality of voters holds more positive than negative views about some of Trump’s more controversial positions, including his call to restrict immigrants from certain countries, end sanctuary cities and to deport undocumented immigrants.” Politico has more. 

• ACA repeal: PolitiFact CA checks the accuracy of Senate President Pro Tempore Kevin de Leon’s claim that an ACA repeal could cost the state 200,000 jobs. Here’s a hint: You can’t measure the impact without knowing what the replacement is. In fact, CalWatchdog wrote something similar recently.

• Musical chairs: “As top California Democrats plot their future career moves, a critical piece of information is missing: Will Sen. Dianne Feinstein seek re-election? Speculation about the 83-year-old senator’s plans took on new urgency this year, as ambitious statewide politicians decide whether to run for governor with Gov. Jerry Brown termed out. News that Feinstein was fitted with a pacemaker last week reignited the parlor game, with California political circles discussing anew what the procedure might mean for the veteran lawmaker as she evaluates her options.” The Los Angeles Times has more. 

• 2018: “Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire and outspoken Donald Trump supporter, is considering a 2018 bid for California governor, according to three Republicans familiar with his thinking.” Politico has more. 

Legislature:

• Assembly in at 1 p.m., Senate in a 2 p.m. 

Gov. Brown:

• No public events announced. 

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog @mflemingterp

New follower: @TomSchatzCAGW

Thanks to Donald Trump, California’s role at the Republican national convention in Cleveland has been dramatically expanded — out of proportion, some critics have suggested. The changes belied a calculated effort to shift the center of GOP gravity away from its more traditional areas of regional support, where many anti-Trump conservatives and moderates continue to hold influence.

To begin with, Californians have been given prominent speaking slots during the Trump-dominated event. “Sabine Durden, of Moreno Valley, is slated to speak in Cleveland. She’s been a well-known critic of illegal immigration since her son was killed by an undocumented immigrant in 2012, and she’s testified on the issue before Congress,” as the Los Angeles Daily News reported. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., a Trump delegate and nearly Speaker of the House, will also address the convention. “McCarthy’s speech is expected to focus on the House GOP’s ‘Better Way’ agenda and on building party unity,” the Washington post explained.

Topping off the speaking schedule, Silicon Valley titan Peter Thiel will deliver one of the event’s most anticipated and prominent speeches. “Peter Thiel is speaking because he knows Donald Trump, and he’ll be speaking about the Donald Trump, the man he knows,” said campaign chief Paul Manafort. “And as a successful entrepreneur, he can speak from a standard that we think is important for the American people to hear.”

Symbolism vs. substance

Underscoring the Trump campaign’s favor for the west coast, Golden Staters will be up front and personal for the climactic moment receiving the biggest — and likely most enduring — media coverage. “Californians will be in the front row when Donald Trump accepts the nomination at the Republican National Convention this week, according to seating charts released by the party,” the Los Angeles Times reported. 

“California is one of a handful of states where all of the delegates support the presumptive nominee. Because the state’s primary took place after the race was decided and per the state GOP’s rules, all 172 California delegates support Trump and were chosen by his campaign. Placing them in the front of the convention helps Republicans avoid images of disunity.”

But the Trump campaign, notoriously light on staff and improvisational in its strategy, has not given California Republicans much more than uncharacteristically prominent exposure. The state GOP, facing a daunting election year, has been left to forge a path ahead largely on its own. “California Republican Party Chairman Jim Brulte is leading his party’s fight for down-ticket races,” the Daily News noted, but “Brulte said the national GOP’s slow, seemingly reluctant response to demographic change hurts his party in California.” 

“Brulte said Southern California candidates like Young Kim, the first Korean-American elected in Orange County for an Assembly seat, and Ling Ling Chang — who is running for the state senate seat that used to be occupied by Bob Huff and spans portions of Orange, Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties — are critical to reversing the top-of-the-ticket misfortune that has befallen his party.”

Down but not out

While Trump’s campaign and its supporters have refused to dispel the impression, first created by the candidate himself, that they could put California in play, polls have not given much substance to the outsized ambition. According to a recent Field Poll reported by the Washington Examiner, Trump “currently trails his Democratic presidential opponent by 30 percentage points in the Golden State,” 58 to 28 percent, with 14 percent undecided. “Clinton loses 8 percentage points to Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson when he is added to the mix, while Trump loses 2,” the paper added. 

Hoping perhaps to take whatever advantage they can of their newfound status, California’s delegates have nonetheless described themselves as Trump’s firewall in the event that a long-brewing convention-floor insurrection actually bursts out into the open. “We are the backstop,” Brulte told the San Francisco Chronicle. “If you want to mess, bring it on,” said Trump state director Tim Clark. “This delegation was built for a fight. If the Never Trumpers want to start something, they have to go through us.”

PG&E’s Diablo Canyon plant, the state’s last, has wound up in the crosshairs. As the Associated Press reported, “the company is evaluating whether to meet a tangle of potentially costly state environmental requirements needed to obtain renewed operating licenses.”

“The issues in play at Diablo Canyon range from a long-running debate over the ability of structures to withstand earthquakes — one fault runs 650 yards from the reactors — to the possibility PG&E might be ordered by state regulators to spend billions to modify or replace the plant’s cooling system, which sucks up 2.5 billions of gallons of ocean water a day and has been blamed for killing fish and other marine life.”

The fault in question has rattled nerves in the area and throughout the state. “Even before the twin reactors produced a single watt of electricity, the plant had to be retrofitted after a submerged fault was discovered 3 miles offshore during construction,” the wire noted separately. “That cleft in the earth, known as the Hosgri fault, has long been considered the greatest seismic threat to a plant that stands within a virtual web of faults. But new questions are being raised by sophisticated seafloor mapping that has found that the Hosgri links to a second, larger crack farther north, the San Gregorio fault.”

Increasing emissions

At the same time, the environmental implications of an end to nuclear power have also raised serious concerns. The last California plant to close, in San Diego county, shuttered amidst problems with its infrastructure. California’s public utility commission “approved a shutdown deal last year with the San Onofre plant’s co-owners, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas and Electric Co., that assigned about 70 percent of the $4.7 billion shutdown bill to the firms’ customers,” as the San Francisco Chronicle reported. “The companies closed San Onofre after a January 2012 leak of radioactive steam revealed widespread damage to its cooling system.”

The consequences of the closure have worked against anti-carbon policies pushed hard from Sacramento under Gov. Jerry Brown. “With the San Onofre closure, annual statewide emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases linked to electricity production in California jumped by 24 percent,” U-T San Diego observed. “In San Diego, the local electric utility commissioned a major new natural gas plant and will replace an aging plant with new equipment to keep natural gas generators at the ready.” According to expert analysts, the paper added, “the experience could be replicated on a larger scale as many U.S. nuclear plant operators struggle to compete with cheaper sources of energy.”

Innovating nuclear

In response to the dilemma, some leading Californians have come out in favor of revitalizing nuclear power on a more advanced and, presumably, safer footing. In an editorial at The New York Times, Peter Thiel used the recent Paris conference on climate change to force the issue. “If we are serious about replacing fossil fuels, we are going to need nuclear power, so the choice is stark: We can keep on merely talking about a carbon-free world, or we can go ahead and create one,” he wrote.

“We already know that today’s energy sources cannot sustain a future we want to live in. This is most obvious in poor countries, where billions dream of living like Americans. The easiest way to satisfy this demand for a better life has been to burn more coal: In the past decade alone, China added more coal-burning capacity than America has ever had. But even though average Indians and Chinese use less than 30 percent as much electricity as Americans, the air they breathe is far worse. They deserve a third option besides dire poverty or dirty skies.”

I noted that, today, free speech largely has been extinguished at the University of California, Berkeley and other American campuses. They’re now just centers of P.C. indoctrination.

Another example just arrived. Breitbart reported:

“On Wednesday evening, in the very hall where the University of California at Berkeley had just celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, demonstrators shut down a speech by billionaire tech guru–and noted libertarian–Peter Thiel.

“The activists who broke into Wheeler Hall were protesting the non-indictment of police officers in the deaths of black suspects Michael Brown and Eric Garner in Ferguson, MO and Staten Island, NY for the fifth straight evening.”

So they’re using their right to protest to extinguish someone else’s right to free speech.

It’s like something out of the brownshirts in 1930s Weimar Germany.