In response to Jon Fleischman’s August 23rd column entitled “AB 1215 – Mandating That a Fee Cannot Be Called a Fee – Seriously”, I would like to offer a different opinion. Although I’m a four-term Congressman, in a prior life I owned and operated a number of new car dealerships in California and am very familiar with California’s “price control” on the amount a dealer can charge to perform a host of work required by the state.

AB 1215, a bill currently before the California Legislature, would for the first time in 5 years raise the statutory cap the Legislature imposes on private dealer businesses to perform state-mandated title and registration paperwork, in addition to a plethora of other state-mandated requirements (for example, providing consumers “free” credit scores, other credit disclosures, tire chain notices, license bracket notices, etc.). Even with the increase, California would still have the second lowest cap in the country – most states have no cap at all. California imposes no such… Read More

We need to fundamentally change the way the state conducts its business. Today the Assembly passed legislation I was proud to be the principal co-author of dealing with performance-based budgeting. We must make state government more accountable, more transparent and ultimately, more effective.

I am the proud principal co-author of Senate Bill 14 (SB 14) that will put in place performance-based budgeting. Currently, the state budget operates on the principle of baseline budgeting. Many programs take the previous year’s amount and factor in an automatic increase. So what is often discussed in public as a cut is, in fact, simply a reduction in the rate of growth. This not only confuses the public, but also shifts the debate. Instead of focusing on whether a program is working efficiently or is even needed, the entire discussion becomes about the size of the increase.

The baseline model does not facilitate discussion or agreement on priorities. Instead, it needs to be about goals and desired results. Under the baseline model, state officials do not have the necessary information to determine which programs are really working. Baseline budgeting does not… Read More

The latest move by liberal Democrats to disenfranchise Californians from their right to petition government is a move acknowledged by State Senate leader Darrell Steinberg that would push all such initiatives off the June 2012 ballot and consolidate them on the November ballot. And what reporters like Dan Walters are missing in their pieces on this last minute sneak attack on the franchise in the Legislature is what the November 2012 ballot would actually look like if Steinberg is successful. Ugly is the word, and according to most people who study the relationship between ballot size and voting, the result will be less public participation and significant voter “fall off” from voting.

This is because every scientific study that exists of voter attitudes demonstrates that the more information that is placed into voter pamphlets and the longer the ballot becomes by adding more measures, the… Read More

We don’t typically reprint press releases, but this one contains a great sample of the kind of STUPID, JOB KILLING legislation that California Democrats are advancing through the legislature. It is unbelievable that at a time when regulatory relief is needed, that they would simply continue to pile on more barriers to job creation… Also, remember that these bills below are just a sliver of the vast quantity of bad bills going through the legislative process… Senate GOP Leader Dutton to Legislative Democrats on Jobs – ‘Do No More Harm’

Sacramento – Senate Republican Leader Bob Dutton (Rancho Cucamonga) released the following statement today calling for Legislative Democrats to join with Republicans in voting down any legislation that will further hurt the economy:

Two weeks ago yesterday, the legislative Democrats promised to focus on job creation in the last three and half weeks of this legislative session. There are now less than two weeks to make good on that promise.… Read More

The “Citizen’s” Redistricting Commission, which rendered redistricting lines that assure one party super-majority control of the California Legislature for the next decade, (didn’t Mao Tse Tung also do that in China?) filed a petition (paid for by us taxpayers) with Attorney General Kamala Harris today arguing small points about wording of documents related to the approved referendum and signature circulation to quality it. In the petition, the “Citizen’s” Commission calls on the Democratic Attorney General from San Francisco to interfere with the signature gathering time frames and stop current collection efforts until the highly technical wording issues are resolved, thus putting the rest of us at a huge disadvantage and cutting against Proposition 11’s intent to give a referendum challenge a half-way decent chance of qualifying before the June election.

Details are at the self-absorbed URL: www.wedrawthelines.ca.gov.

It seems we are going to become a one-party state no matter what.… Read More

I have a question. I mean this in all sincerity. I ask it without intending a drop of cynicism. My question is this: How do tax increases create jobs?

The question is prompted by the governor’s news conference on August 25. It is no secret that California has a serious jobs problem. Our unemployment rate is the second highest in the nation, and that understates the problem as our jobless rate does not include (1) those who have given up searching for jobs, and (2) those who are underemployed and seek full time work but cannot find it because of our anemic economy. Persistent joblessness destroys our economy, our communities, and our families. For that reason, the governor and Democrat leadership have promised to focus on the jobs problem in the last two week of the legislative session.

It is about darn time. The GOP months and months ago proposed dozens of pro-jobs and pro-economic growth bills. But, as I detailed in my last column, the Democrats killed all of those bills. And now they want to focus on jobs? Welcome to the issue, guys. Better late than never.

Except maybe not so, which brings me back to taxes. The governor and Democrat… Read More

From the U-T’s Logan Jenkins…

“…what has me singing hosannas of joy is the holy war between state Sen. Joel Anderson, R-El Cajon, and Caltrans.”

Read the column here.… Read More

This just in from Patrick Gleason & Kelly W. Cobb over at Americans for Tax Reform…

Americans for Tax Reform is active in all 50 state capitals and from this perspective one thing is clear, when it comes to legislative creativity, lawmakers in Sacramento have every other state easily beat – no contest. Unfortunately for those currently contending with the state’s nearly 12% unemployment rate, California legislators only seem to use their creativity for the purpose of enacting job-killing tax increases and other measures that only serve to further depress the Golden State’s already flagging economy.

The latest exhibit of this unfortunate fact is Assembly Bill 155, legislation that, if Democrat lawmakers have their way, would “gut-and-amend” an existing bill to re-enact a sales tax on out-of-state and online purchases signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown in June. The end goal of this legislation, pushed by the often misguided and incorrect Sen. Loni Hancock, is simply to block California voters… Read More