The Ed Source website has details:

The agreement settles [a suit] filed last year by students in high schools in Compton Unified, Los Angeles Unified and Oakland Unified. These students were regularly assigned to multiple classes where they were told to sit idly in classrooms or perform menial tasks, including picking up trash or cleaning erasers. Some students were also sent home as part of the class period.

 

The lawsuit alleged that the state failed to intervene when scheduling problems and inadequate course offerings at schools resulted in some students spending weeks in classes during which they received no instruction.

In a prepared statement, the lawyer leading the legal team representing the students at the schools predicted it would be broadly consequential. “[Our case] was the first in the nation to address the denial of equal learning time to children residing in many of California’s most disadvantaged communities and attending many of the most underperforming public schools,” wrote Mark Rosenbaum.

Washington Post offered scathing coverage

The fact that the Washington Post and other national publications reported on the case seemed to back up Rosenbaum’s assertion of its importance. The Post’s national education reporter, Emma Brown, depicted the lawsuit as an embarrassing reflection on how students were treated in some of California’s urban school districts:

The plaintiffs’ complaint said that schools didn’t have enough resources to offer a full menu of courses, leaving students in some cases without access to the courses they needed to graduate within four years …  [S]cheduling problems left students unassigned to classes for weeks at a time.

 

The problems were so bad at Jefferson High in Los Angeles that an Alameda County judge ordered state officials to intervene last year.

 

One student affected by Jefferson’s chaos was senior Jason Magana, who … took Graphic Design twice and then spent weeks trying to get out of taking it for a third time in order to take economics or government, courses he actually needed for graduation. He also was assigned two “Home” classes during eighth and ninth periods, which meant twice a week, his school day ended at 11:20 a.m. …

 

Under the settlement agreement, state education officials must help the six high schools deal with scheduling problems and get rid of their fake classes, which were called “College Class,” “Adult Class,” “Service,” and “Home.”

 

The state must also publicize the requirements of new legislation that was spurred by the lawsuit: AB1012, which Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law last month, prohibits high schools from assigning students to “any course period without educational content.”

 

Finally, state officials agreed to pay the plaintiffs $400,000 for their attorneys’ fees.

The students’ representation was handled by the ACLU  Foundation of Southern California and the Public Counsel organization.

Another ACLU suit could have huge impact

The ACLU is also part of a much bigger lawsuit against the Los Angles Unified School District that puts it on a collision course with Gov. Jerry Brown and state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson and could have a statewide effect.

The Brown administration and Torlakson have said that extra funds going to school districts with higher numbers of impoverished students, English learners and foster children can be used for broad teacher raises, not specifically to help those students. The ACLU says that violates the 2013 law establishing the Local Control Funding Formula. This is from its July 1 statement announcing the lawsuit.

LOS ANGELES – The Los Angeles Unified School District is violating state law by refusing to use state education funds specifically targeted to help low-income students, English language learners and foster youth to increase or improve services for those students, according to a lawsuit filed on behalf of the Community Coalition of South Los Angeles and LAUSD parent Reyna Frias.

 

The suit, filed today in Los Angeles Superior Court, asserts that the district has used improper accounting practices that subvert both the letter and spirit of the 2013 education finance reform law known as Local Control Funding Formula. If the district proceeds with its current plan, high need students stand to lose more than $2 billion in funding over the next decade.

 

“LAUSD is breaking its promise to provide my children and millions of other students in the future, with the services they need and the law says they should receive,” said Ms. Frias, whose children qualify for the funds targeted by LCFF.

The ACLU is partnering with Public Advocates and Covington & Burling LLP in bringing the case. A trial in the case is not expected to get underway until next year. Unlike what happened in Cruz v. California, a settlement is unlikely, since Local Control Funding Formula dollars have already been budgeted for employee compensation for years to come in L.A. Unified, the nation’s second largest school district.

The Los Angeles Times also reported on how solar subsidies often amounted to a transfer of funds from the state government to very wealthy Californians.

As the understanding grows that green energy policies create political winners and losers, a new U.S. Energy Information Administration report shows how rapidly California is advancing with solar power:

Solar generation from utility-scale facilities (capacity of 1 megawatt [MW] or greater) hit a monthly record high of 2,765 gigawatt hours (GWh) in June 2015. The June 2015 solar generation level represents a year-over-year increase of 35.8 percent relative to June 2014. …

Most of the growth in U.S. utility scale solar generation is in California. In June 2015, well over half (56.5 percent) of total solar generation came from plants in California. Arizona (13.4 percent), North Carolina (6.7 percent), Nevada (6.4 percent), and New Jersey (3.3 percent), respectively, followed California as the largest solar contributors to the grid.

But it’s not the utilities building “utility scale” solar facilities. It’s usually multinational corporations setting up solar facilities in the expectation that Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric will buy their electricity to meet the state’s ever more ambitious goals for renewable-energy generation.

The utilities still have enough influence that they managed to persuade the California Public Utilities Commission to adopt a new pricing structure in July that made individual homeowners and businesses that have installed solar panels pay more toward maintenance of the state’s electricity grid.

Utilities: Part of ‘green industrial complex’ or not?

This would seem to presage a future in which power utilities are part of a “green industrial complex” that conservative publications have long warned of — companies and institutions which seek to profit from government environmental mandates that appear popular in red states and blue states alike.

But that’s not how the nation’s investor-owned utilities think the end game of current green politics are likely to play out. As The Washington Post reported earlier this year, it had obtained secret documents from the Edison Electric Institute, a utilities trade group that believes that the growth of renewable energy is an existential threat — not something that can be gamed by rent-seeking with regulators and state legislatures:

If demand for residential solar continue to soar, traditional utilities could soon face serious problems, from “declining retail sales” and a “loss of customers” to “potential obsolescence,” according to a presentation prepared for the group. “Industry must prepare an action plan to address the challenges,” it said.

That action plan so far has focused on getting state utility regulators to make solar-panel owners pay more toward maintenance of the electric grid — an effort that worked in California but that the Post notes hasn’t worked well in most states.

So whom might the utilities find common ground with in their fight against a solar power future? As complaints from urban Democrats in the Legislature suggest, an obvious candidate is lawmakers who understand that cleaner power is usually costlier power.

So far in California politics, the factions that make up the Democratic coalition have managed to stay on the same page on the biggest issues of the day. But if utilities begin to use their clout to warn that poor people are hurt by AB32-style policies — a potentially potent argument in the state with the highest effective poverty rate — that could roil and possibly recast the politics of the Golden State.

These developments put project supporters on the spot in two different ways.

The Los Angeles hearing suggests attitudes about the bullet train in Los Angeles County are moving against the project. That’s what happened in Silicon Valley, where voters supported Proposition 1A in 2008 to provide $9.95 billion for a statewide bullet train system but shifted to intense opposition when the real-life effects of building a high-speed rail system through wealthy communities triggered a powerful, well-financed campaign to force the state to back off.

This and $30 billion in cost savings led Gov. Jerry Brown and the rail authority to adopt a “blended”plan in which high-speed rail would extend from Fresno to northern Los Angeles County, with slower rail on each end connecting riders to downtown San Francisco and downtown Los Angeles, respectively.

But after the rail authority decided last year to accelerate construction in Southern California, community opposition began to build. This has helped fray the loose coalition of the region’s politicians who have long supported the idea of a bullet-train system but are uncomfortable with the emerging specifics.

Is Antonovich’s proposal actually a ‘poison pill’?

Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich — who once lobbied to make sure the bullet train’s route went through his district — now is the leading proponent of minimizing disruption to his district by tunneling through the San Gabriel Mountains for the train’s 15-mile Palmdale-to-Burbank link. Given that this would add billions of dollars in construction costs to a project that already can’t identify how it’s going to pay for its first $31 billion segment, that’s close to asking the rail authority to do the impossible. Such “poison pills” are one way for politicians to oppose a project in indirect fashion.

Antonovich’s 2014 proposal, in turn, led to concerns in January from two other elected Democrats who previously backed the bullet train project enthusiastically. This is from the Los Angeles Business Journal:

Rep. Adam Schiff came out in opposition on Thursday to a proposed alignment of the state’s high-speed rail project that would require a tunnel beneath the Angeles National Forest – damaging chances the plan will be carried out.

 

In a letter sent this month, Schiff, D-Burbank, and Rep. Judy Chu, D-El Monte, told California High Speed Rail Authority Dan Richard to scrap any consideration of a route under the San Gabriel Mountains between Palmdale and the San Fernando Valley because it would be harmful to the environment.

Wealthy environmentalists don’t like Antonovich’s plan. But some poor and middle-class homeowners of the San Fernando Valley don’t like the rail authority’s alternative, and they depict their fight as akin to David vs. Goliath. This is from Glendale resident Stephen Mills’ letter in Friday’s L.A. Times:

California High Speed Rail Authority board member Lou Correa said that he detected “a little bit of NIMBYism” regarding the reaction to bullet train plans. He should get used to it.

 

Affluent neighborhoods have successfully fought intrusive development that would have affected their quality of life, and now working-class neighborhoods are doing the same.

How much is CA project an Obama priority?

Meanwhile, in Washington, the House’s action to pull back federal funds from the state’s high-speed project may prove as consequential as the developments in Los Angeles County. The provision was included in the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act for fiscal 2016, a multibillion-dollar measure that includes many provisions the White House supports.

If the Senate approves this funding bill, would President Obama actually veto it in the name of preserving federal grants to an embattled, increasingly unpopular project that would help only one of the 50 states?

That’s not clear. Doing so would likely prompt a sharp reaction from the Washington Post’s editorial page. It has long been a harsh critic of California’s project.

A 2011 editorial, headlined “California’s high-speed rail system is going nowhere fast,” noted that the state “hasn’t credibly identified a source of funds for the system” and questioned Gov. Jerry Brown’s enthusiasm for the project.

“You up??” he asked his press secretary, Evan Westrup.

Nearly 45 minutes later, Westrup sent Brown and first lady Anne Gust Brown a copy of a Washington Post story on California’s high-speed rail project.

They needn’t have worried. This long Jan. 5 story by Post national reporter Reid Wilson appears to be the one Westrup sent the Browns, and it largely accepts the governor’s characterization of the project’s relative progress and downplays legal challenges.

The groundbreaking “really marks the transition from all the planning and appropriations and legal challenges and the design work to continuous construction,” said Dan Richard, chairman of the California High-Speed Rail Authority, the project’s governing body. “It’s a significant milestone.”

Financing problems were acknowledged, at least.

Even with the legal and political victories, the funding structure is incomplete. Voters approved a $9.95 billion bond aimed at funding the initial construction of the rail project in 2008, by a slim five-point margin. The Obama administration added another $3.2 billion in federal grants, and the legislature agreed in 2014 to provide funding through cap-and-trade taxes on greenhouse gases, which will add another $250 million to $1 billion per year.

Still, that means the rail authority will have about $26 billion at best, less than half the estimated total costs.

Touting the Japanese financing model

But the reporter’s lack of background on the issue led him to accept uncritically Richard’s theory about how the project could be partially funded.

Richard, chairman of the rail authority, said his agency doesn’t expect federal funding in the next four to five years. He pointed to Japan, where nearly a third of funding for high-speed rail projects comes from real estate development near rail stations.

But the state government needs the money up front, not after the system is up and running — specifically $31 billion for the initial 300-mile operating segment, per a Superior Court ruling that Attorney General Kamala Harris chose not to appeal.

It’s interesting how East Coast reporters seem more likely than East Coast opinion writers to accept upbeat takes on the Golden State’s most costly infrastructure project. Both the Washington Post’s editorial page and Post editorial writer/columnist Charles Lane have expressed incredulity at the state’s handling of the project.

Failing the ‘best evidence’ standard

Here’s the opening of a tart Lane column from Jan. 9, 2012:

In announcing the appointment of a new economic adviser last summer, President Obama emphasized his commitment to fact-based policymaking. It’s “more important than ever,” he said, to get “recommendations not based on politics, not based on narrow interests, but based on the best evidence, based on what’s going to do the most good for the most people in this country.”

If only the president and his political ally, California Gov. Jerry Brown (D), would follow that advice regarding their pet project for the Golden State: high-speed rail. No matter how many times they tout the mega-project as the job-creating wave of the future, they can’t change the mountain of evidence that high-speed rail is, in fact, a boondoggle.

You can read the whole Lane op-ed here.

A May 18, 2011, Post editorial — link here — was even harsher.

California may be about to spend a fortune to plan and build a stretch of high-speed track that would end up as a railroad to nowhere in the all-too-likely event that funding for the rest of the system never materializes. But the LAO, the state-level equivalent of the Congressional Budget Office, argues that the legislature should halt most further spending on the project and not start construction until the state can negotiate more flexible terms from the federal government and — crucially — relocate the first section to a route where a fast train would be economically viable even if the entire system never gets built.

There is a certain poignancy to the LAO’s plea for everyone to stop and think. The benefits of high-speed rail in California might indeed outweigh the costs, the LAO notes, but “at this time there is little reliable information to inform this decision.” Think about that for a minute: Fifteen years have passed, and millions of dollars have been spent on studies since the state first passed a law creating a high-speed rail program. Yet after all that, no one really knows whether it’s worth doing. If no one has come up with a convincing rationale by now, maybe there isn’t one.

Maybe this Post coverage is what made the governor anxious about the newspaper’s coverage of his project’s groundbreaking ceremonies.

Sorry, folks — you can just be wrong. Vergara reframes the way the public looks at schools in such a fundamentally anti-teacher union way that it’s going to make some of the most familiar teacher arguments seem idiotic. For example, the frequent CTA refrain that it is “fighting for children” is going to seem laughable (or Orwellian) to anyone who has read Vergara coverage.

To those in denial — to the folks I still meet who think the CTA’s noble talking points are truly reflective of how the CTA wields its power — I’m happy to present evidence that three of the four most influential liberal newspapers in America agree with me. (The other one — the Boston Globe — may also be down on teacher unions, but I couldn’t find evidence it had written a Vergara editorial.)

N.Y. Times: ‘a new chapter in equal education struggle’

When states are sued for providing inferior education to poor and minority children, the issue is usually money — disproportionately more money for white students, less for others. A California judge has now brought another deep-rooted inequity to light: poor teaching.

In an important decision issued on Tuesday, Judge Rolf M. Treu of the Los Angeles Superior Court ruled that state laws governing the hiring, firing and job security of teachers violate the California Constitution and disproportionately saddle poor and minority children with ineffective teachers.

The ruling opens a new chapter in the equal education struggle. It also underscores a shameful problem that has cast a long shadow over the lives of children, not just in California but in the rest of the country as well.

The plaintiffs in the case, Vergara vs. California, are nine public school students who charged that state laws forced districts to give tenure to teachers, regardless of whether they can do the job, making it virtually impossible to fire even the worst of them.

In a blistering decision, Judge Treu agreed: ”The evidence is compelling. Indeed, it shocks the conscience.”

Washington Post: ‘groundbreaking ruling’

A judge who struck down California’slaws on teacher tenure and layoffs said the decision was based solely on the legal aspects of the case but added that he was mindful of the intense political debate about these issues. It is “beyond question,” he wrote, that there will be further political discourse. We certainly hope so. The issues about education equality laid bare by this groundbreaking ruling cry out for new ways of thinking. …

Treu … found that job protections afforded to teachers violate the rights of minority and low-income students to an equal education because they are the ones disproportionately stuck with the incompetent teachers who are hard, if not impossible, to fire. Constitutional rights in education typically have been tied to equitable funding, so the judge entered new territory by declaring a basic right to an effective teacher.

The trial featured powerful testimony about the effect of incompetent teachers on students. “The evidence is compelling. Indeed, it shocks the conscience,” the judge wrote.

Los Angeles Times:  Lawmakers ‘too deferential’ to CTA

California’s extraordinary protections for public school teachers were dealt a heavy blow Tuesday when a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge ruled that the state’s tenure laws unconstitutionally deprive students of an adequate education. To this extent, the judge’s opinion was absolutely correct: The tenure laws are bad policy. In almost no other field of work is it remotely as hard to fire someone for incompetence, or for not doing the job at all. Lawmakers have been far too deferential to the powerful California Teachers Assn. over the years, and now they have been given a strong prod to change their ways.

I’m glad that this ruling has gotten as much coverage as it has. But it’s odd that no newspaper I could find on Nexis or Google had done an analysis piece about how this might affect the Dem coalition. How can all the party’s minority lawmakers stand proud with the CTA and CFT after this?

I truly am baffled by the absence of stories on this obvious angle. The intraparty fight pitting Asian lawmakers vs. Latino and black lawmakers over Prop. 209 has been covered by the Sacramento media. Why not this?

A state judge’s ruling upholding the unappealing ballot initiative title and summary given to a badly needed pension reform measure triggered a lot of gloom Thursday from those who want to slow California’s slide toward ruin. But it’s not necessarily the end of the world.

Here’s a bit of the Sac Bee’s account:

“A Superior Court judge dealt San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed’s pension overhaul campaign another setback on Thursday, rebuffing Reed’s request to have the ballot initiative’s title and summary rewritten.

“Reed and other public officials sued Attorney General Kamala Harris last month, arguing that her description of Reed’s pension initiative, which would empower local governments to change future pension benefits for current workers, was fatally biased.

“The sentence in dispute states that the measure ‘Eliminates constitutional protections for vested pension and retiree healthcare benefits for current public employees, including teachers, nurses, and peace officers, for future work performed.’ Reed and his allies said in their lawsuit that description was ‘false and misleading’ in a way that ‘creates prejudice’ against the measure.

“Not so, said Sacramento Superior Court Judge Allen Sumner. Going through the contested sentence word by word, Sumner found ‘nothing false or misleading’ about how Harris described Reed’s measure.”

It’s not 2004 — pension crisis has sunk in

I dispute the conventional wisdom that invoking “teachers, nurses and peace officers” is super-compelling to stopping voters from voting for pension reform.

Despite opposition from “teachers, nurses and peace officers,” sweeping pension reform measures passed easily in San Jose and San Diego in 2012.

It’s not 2004 still. People understand the crisis is real and is affecting other government priorities in a negative way. Take it away, Washington Post:

“SAN JOSE — Here in the wealthy heart of Silicon Valley, the roads are pocked with potholes, the libraries are closed three days a week and a slew of city recreation centers have been handed over to nonprofit groups. Taxes have gone up even as city services are in decline, and Mayor Chuck Reed is worried.

“The source of Reed’s troubles: gold-plated pensions that guarantee retired city workers as much as 90 percent of their former salaries. Retirement costs are eating up nearly a quarter of the city’s budget, forcing Reed (D) to skimp on everything else.

“’This is one of the dichotomies of California: I am cutting services to my low- and moderate-income people . . . to pay really generous benefits for public employees who make a good living and have an even better retirement,’ he said in an interview in his office overlooking downtown.

“In San Jose and across the nation, state and local officials are increasingly confronting a vision of startling injustice: Poor and middle-class taxpayers — who often have no retirement savings — are paying higher taxes so public employees can retire in relative comfort.”

‘Maviglium’ will bomb at box office

Once again, this is the liberal Washington Post’s framing of the issue, not Fox’s Sean Hannity.

I hope the hard work by Reed (no relation) pays off with the initiative making the ballot. If it does, it will pass, barring a 10-1 edge for the status quo-ers in campaign spending.

“Elysium” was a bomb at the box office. “Maviglium” will be,too.

By Chris Reed

So the Washington Post has a 1,500-word-plus analysis of why leaders and members of environmental groups — starting with the biggest of all, the San Francisco-based Sierra Club — are “more like that of the Republican Party they so often criticize for its positions on the environment than that of the multiethnic Democratic Party they have thrown their support behind.”

But reporter Darryl Fears‘ analysis is, well, vanilla. He focuses initially on the angle that outreach is lacking and that having diverse leaders and members is not a priority of the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Riverkeepers, etc.

What about the angle that cleaning up polluted minority communites in industrial areas is infinitely less of a priority for white enviros than protecting coastal view planes, gnatcatchers, snail darters, etc?

Greens pushed polluters into minority communities

That’s referenced, but only in paragraphs that offer telling detail but superficial insight:

“’We essentially have a racially segregated environmental movement,’ said Van Jones, co-founder of the nonprofit Rebuild the Dream and a former adviser on green jobs to the Obama administration. ‘We’re too polite to say that. Instead, we say we have an environmental justice movement and a mainstream movement.’

“The Sierra Club, billed as the nation’s oldest and largest grass-roots environmental organization with 1.3 million members, was founded in 1892. Like groups that followed, such as the Nature Conservancy in 1915 and the National Wildlife Federation in 1936, they were largely white, upper- and middle-class, and focused on the protection of wilderness areas.

“Two decades later, Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, ‘Silent Spring,’ alerted Americans to the impact of pesticides and toxic pollution on the environment.

“Acting on Carson’s revelations, the mainstream environmental groups helped to push chemical warehouses, pesticide companies and coal-fired power plants from rural and exurban areas, and many polluters migrated to low-income urban areas where people of color live.

“In the 1980s, the Government Accountability Office, the United Church of Christ and the Commission for Racial Justice each issued reports that established a direct link between race and the location of toxic-waste sites, according to a study on power plants and their proximity to minorities released in December by the NAACP. …

“Robert Bullard of Texas Southern University said that in 1980 all five of Houston’s landfills were in minority communities, as were six of the city’s eight incinerators. He said mainstream environmental groups he approached for help did not seem concerned.”

‘Environmental justice’ for plants and birds, not people

And why would that be? Why would those holding “mainstream environmental values” be so unconcerned about “environmental justice”? How could the suffering of humans seem less crucial than the suffering of flora and fauna?

Maybe because some humans don’t exactly trigger empathy among enviros.

Fears doesn’t go near the incendiary topic. But as I noted in a Dec. 31 article for Cal Watchdog, the fact is white environmental groups’ indifference to the interests of minorities used to be a lot worse than indifference:

“The environmental movement for decades called for zero population growth — seen as code for making minorities have fewer kids and for curbing illegal immigration. Now the rhetoric has shifted, but the history isn’t going away. Check out this Southern Poverty Law Center dossier on John Tanton, a Sierra Club activist who led’s the club’s population committee in the early 1970s before it was revealed that he was a white nationalist.”

This matters. Greens pine for the way things used to be — in many, many ways.

I think that by any objective measure, “environmental justice” — fighting the history of sticking heavy polluters in minority communities — is more important than fretting about declining numbers of gnatcatchers and snail darters. But Democratic leaders defer to environmentalists, and enviros don’t agree. Save the obscure fishies! Bugs are people too!

As for poor minorities, well, let them eat cake.

By Chris Reed

Sacramento is still buzzing over a bizarre and obnoxious scandal in which state parks officials hid $54 million while pressing to close 70 parks, and along comes another scandal in which Cal Fire hides millions of dollars while successfully pushing for a new fire-protection “fee,” and what does Gov. Jerry Brown do?

Put the scoop down. “I find it a relatively boring story, to tell you the truth,” Brown told reporters Tuesday.

Brown has been described as brilliant, eccentric,  unique, worldly, weird, etc. But here’s what he’s been since winning passage of Prop. 30 in November: as arrogant as any California politician in a long, long, long time.

The governor dismisses people with sensible criticism of the problem-plagued bullet train project as “defeatists.” Yo, Jerry, does your putdown also hold for the Washington Post editorial page and The Economist, which think the project is nuts?

The governor acts as if temporary sales and income tax hikes have transformed California into a strapping model of robust governance. He completely ignores CalPERS and CalSTRS underfunding, the $10 billion plus the state owes the federal government for borrowing to pay unemployment benefits when the state program went broke, and the fact that another retirement benefit for state employees — health care — is $60 billion-plus underfunded.

Bullying those who don’t parrot his happy talk

California is not on firm ground. Jerry Brown has created a narrative that holds that it is, and he’s gotten journalists from the East Coast to buy the myth. The numbers, however, just don’t add up.

But challenge his narrative of the state being in a new, golden era, and he’ll mock you at a press conference, as he did with Brian Joseph of The Orange County Register. Raise questions about whether the state is as well-governed as he pretends, and he’ll belittle you, as he did the reporters on the Cal Fire scandal by calling their findings “boring.”

He used to be Gov. Moonbeam. Now he’s Gov. Insufferable Know-It-All.

Great, just great.

By John Seiler

The Washington Post notes of Obamacare:

“Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, signed into law 28 months ago and largely upheld in June by the Supreme Court, it’s illegal for insurers to charge consumers a co-payment for a long list of health care services designed to prevent disease.”

It adds:

“They’re free.”

That’s right. Nobody pays for them.

Not only that. But the Post calculates:

“A 2010 study by Harvard University researchers, published in the journal Health Affairs,concluded that ‘medical costs fall by about $3.27 for every dollar spent on wellness programs….’ “

Unfortunately, the Post doesn’t factor the ultimate implications of this. I will.

Health care in America costs 17 percent of our $15 trillion GDP, or $2.6 trillion a year. Now, if: “medical costs fall by about $3.27 for every dollar spent on wellness programs.” Then: if we spend 0.8 trillion ($800 million) on new wellness programs, then the entire $2.6 trillion spent on health care will be erased will!

($2.6 trillion / $3.27 = $0.8 trillion.)

Put another way, if we spend $0.8 trillion on wellness, we’ll save $2.6 trillion. Net savings: $1.8 trillion. That money then could be used to end the $1.3 trillion annual U.S. deficit, with $500 million used to start paying down the $16 trillion federal debt.

And the best of it is: We’ll all get in shape, be as healthy as Olympic gold-medal winners, work harder and generate even more tax revenue for more programs to make us even healthier!

By John Seiler

If you’ve ever lived in Washington, D.C., as I did in 1977 and from 1982 to 1987, you know the place lives under a bubble. They have no idea what’s going on in the rest of the country. But they tell us what to do.

That’s sure the case with E.J. Dionne, the Washington Post’s top political writer. From a San Francisco dateline, he asks:

“If the United States were still governed under the Articles of Confederation, might California be in the position of Greece, Spain or Italy?

“After all, California has a major budget crisis and all sorts of difficulties governing itself. Its initiative system allows voters to mandate specific forms of spending and to limit tax increases and also make them harder to enact. Absent a strong federal government with the power to offset the impact of the recession and the banking crisis, how would California fare in a global financial system?”

He doesn’t seem to know that, unlike in those countries, California law mandates that bond payments are the first priority of payment in any budget. So the state’s current $73 billion in general obligation bonds (meaning they must be paid for from the general fund) are quite secure.

It’s true that California vies with Illinois for the state with the worst credit rating. But that’s because, should the national economy begin to implode, it is these state economies that would be hit the hardest, demolishing their state budgets. But so long as the national economy doesn’t implode, that won’t happen.

Bond rating

So the real problem then shifts to Dionne’s beloved federal government, which has taken out $16 trillion in debt in the name of all Americans. If the Articles of Confederation still were in effect, the federal government never could have run up that debt.

Under the Articles, Congress had no power of taxation. The federal government ran only on money given it by the several states. So the federal government never could have grown into the monstrosity it has become, wasting $3.8 trillion a year while running up trillion-dollar annual deficits.

On its own, California’s far-left politics would not be tempered by the more moderate politics of the rest of the United States. So it might resemble Cuba.

Then again, Canada is run by left-wingers — but lefties who figured out about 15 years ago that they could only manipulate society if reasonable tax and regulatory policies keep the economy growing. Same thing for Australia.

California’s large Latino population also pushes its politics to the left. But as an independent country, California might resemble Mexico; which, as I noted in an earlier article, has less than half America’s national debt (as a percentage of its economy) and has pursued progressively more free-market policies since 1995.

So, by itself, California might develop a hybrid Canadian-Mexican system with lower taxes and less regulation, but maybe a government-run medical system that’s inefficient (as in Canada, where there are long lines and people go to the United States for many operations), but costs half as much.

Dionne’s ‘solution’

Dionne’s “solution” the the ongoing economic problems of California and the United States is … the suspense is unbearable … massive new federal government spending! So the deficits and debt now weighing us down would be increased. Dionne:

“First, we are lucky to have a robust federal government, which the European Union lacks. Early in the recession, the feds were able to offset problems in the country’s most troubled regions with a stimulus program (and also with that auto bailout that so many, including Mitt Romney, opposed). The stimulus should have been bigger, and it should have extended over a longer period. But it helped.”

First, the opposite is true. There never was any recovery. Certainly not in California, where unemployment remains at 10.8 percent.

The bailouts didn’t work. GM would have been better off if its assets had been auctioned off. By now it would be a strong, independent company. Instead, taxpayers lost about $14 billion in the bailouts of GM and Chrysler.

Worse, the GM bondholders were ripped off so that the UAW could get a piece of the action. This set a dangerous precedent and undermined every business bond in the country, disrupting capital formation — and so business and jobs formation. Now, no one’s bonds are secure.

How D.C. looks at California

On California, Dionne naturally likes Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposed $8.5 billion tax hike:

“Moreover, Gov. Jerry Brown deserves credit for trying to get a handle on the California budget crisis. He’s going to the voters this fall with a referendum to raise about $8 billion in taxes to stave off further cuts. Without the money, Brown says, education spending would have to be slashed beyond the cutbacks that have already taken effect.”

Actually, Brown deserves no credit. The tax increase would chase even more businesses and jobs from the state. He also offered only a paltry reform of the state’s underfunded pension systems. And the problem with California’s education system is not a lack of spending, which is generous, but severe structural and pedagogical defects, with the powerful California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers impeding reforms.

Dionne’s view is important because it gives us Californians a glimpse into what our masters in D.C. are thinking about us — and are preparing to do to us.

Maybe the good old Articles of Confederation weren’t such a bad idea after all.