Richard Rider Rant

Go to my new "leftie" Rider blog

2010-04-21T09:03:00.000-07:00

If perchance you come across this blog with Google, please be aware that I seldom post here anymore. I have a new, more active blog:
www.RiderBlog.NotLong.com

While this blogger.com "Rider Rant" area has interesting posts from much of 2009, all my new stuff goes to the new blog.

Two reasons for the switch (including the "leftie" factor):

1. Arcane formatting differences.

2. Open Salon is a big leftie blogging area. I don't allow comments on my blog items (HUGE waste of my time). I'm driving 'em CRAZY, since I don't give them the "COMMENT" forum to post their pathetic rebuttals. Their frustration comes through to me as a few enraged progressives frantically search me out via Google and vent their collectivist spleens. Life is good.

BTW, if you haven't looked into using "RSS feeds" to read the ever-updating news and blogs -- you must do so now. Much more efficient way to educate yourself, and to waste your time more productively. As an intro, I recommend an informative if slightly gonzo 3 minute YouTube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU

For my "RSS reader," I use www.igoogle.com as my browser home page. This Google option offers many, many other neat services as well (all on the same page) -- stock and commodity quotes, weather for multiple locations, calculator, daily cartoons, etc.

Study reveals San Diego trolley folly

2010-04-17T08:36:00.000-07:00

Check out the SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE article of 27 September, 2009 on commuting in San Diego County. The story got little consideration, but is a blockbuster when it comes to justifying our massive trolley expenditures. The madness of this wasteful spending becomes readily apparent.

The article reveals that 90.9% drive to work. Only 3.5% use public transportation.

Of that 3.5%, only 9% of these public transit users ride the trolleys. That comes to 0.315% of all county commuters ride our multi-billion dollar trolley boondoggle. Almost 9 times as many commuters ride the buses as ride the trolleys.

It gets worse. SANDAG admits that about ¾ of the trolley riders used to take the bus. Hence only about 0.07875% of the trolley commuters are former car commuters. For you numerically impaired, that’s less than EIGHT ONE-HUNDREDTHS OF ONE PERCENT of former car commuters now do part or all of their work commute on a trolley.

For this minuscule usage, we have spent (as Carl Sagan used to so elegantly intone) “billions and billions” of dollars on trolley construction – plus tens of millions more annually in subsidies.

If we REALLY care about public transit, we should be pushing for shifting SANDAG policy (and funding) emphasis to lower cost, more efficient, far more flexible buses. Let’s end our trolley "edifice complex."

Rider blog moved to new provider

2009-10-06T07:15:00.000-07:00

Because this blog service does not handle well bloggers' HTML postings, I've decided to move my budding blog efforts to a largely LIBERAL blog service. I can copy and paste my Word articles on the new blog, and have only minor problems with the formatting.

Go to www.open.salon.com/blog/Richard_Rider for my more recent postings. Maybe some day I'll post up all my previous "Richard Rider Rant" distributions. Every one a gem, of course.

Again: www.open.salon.com/blog/Richard_Rider

Latest California "Breaking Bad" article

2009-08-27T06:31:00.000-07:00

The live link above will take you to my 21 August update of my constantly updating article "Breaking Bad: CA vs. the Other States," posted as an editorial on the online East [San Diego] County Magazine. I recommend this version of my article because it has "live" links to all the reference URL's in the article -- something very difficult to achieve in this blog.

The latest version update includes the depressing update figures on CA unemployment. For the Month of July we moved back up to the 4th worst unemployment rank (from 6th). We've gone up from 11.6% to 11.9% unemployment. Even more depressing (when comparing CA with the rest of the country), the national unemployment rate went DOWN slightly to 9.4% from 9.5%.

Fun online debate on library outsourcing

2009-08-16T15:50:00.000-07:00

RIDER COMMENT: Every so often you just gotta have fun in a debate. I sure did here -- I suspect you will enjoy this.

Someone infatuated with government-run libraries wrote back to take issue with my PR on LSSI running the Riverside County libraries. Initially they wrote me to complain about my one-sided piece. Things got funner and funner after that.

ONE

----- Original Message -----

From: CHRIS
TO: Richard Rider
Sent: Wednesday, August 12, 2009 2:32 PM
Subject: Re: PR: Time to Think Outside the Library Box

Richard,

Kinda one-sided review in your opinion piece. I looked at your link and dug further at both county web sites. Perhaps you also tried and found Riversides line item budget less than transparent, no metrics on circulation of materials, hours of operation or customer feedback for the past decade?

Being a frequent flier at my local branch library, and occassional user of the city's libraries, I find them worlds apart. Staff at the county sites are very engaging with the public and coordinated learing activities are plentiful.

Yes, I'm interested in the almighty cost to the taxpayer, but that is only one factor worthy of our consideration. The educational and entertainment value of libraries can be measured too, it's just not reported as often.

When did you last visit the Riverside and San Diego libraries?

Christopher

---

TWO

From: Richard Rider
To: "Chris
Subject: Fw: PR: Time to Think Outside the Library Box

Date: Thursday, August 13, 2009, 3:50 PM

Gosh, Christopher, imagine that -- I wrote a one-sided opinion piece!

Remember, I'm not a reporter. Reporters are trained professional journalists who diligently compose objective one-sided pro-Big Government articles -- mindlessly regurgitating government press releases without seeking contrary opinions -- and they get paid for their work.

I've never visited the Riverside County libraries, but have spoken with several people up there over the years who are regular users. They are VERY happy with their libraries. (I've followed this issue for at least 8 years.) I was last in a San Diego city library on Saturday a week ago.

You seem to be assuming that somehow the Riverside system is substandard. What makes you think that? Because it's not run by the government? I've been able to find no discontent with their operation (tried Google too!). Do you have ANY evidence that such is the case.? Even hearsay?

BTW, how does one measure "the educational and entertainment value of libraries", something you assert can be done?

Oh, BTW, you might want to speak to Nancy Johnson, the the Riverside County head librarian -- the ONLY government employee involved in the Riverside County system -- she is the boss. A 30 year professional librarian, she speaks VERY highly of LSSI. She doesn't equivocate in her praise.

She'll tell you that after LSSI took over, the County Supervisors were delighted because they stopped getting calls from citizens complaining about the libraries. The one Supervisor who voted against the contract (with all the usual concerns) is now one of LSSI's biggest boosters -- his name is Bob Buster, if you wish to contact him.

Ms. Johnson goes on to praise the fact that their library employees are not under the civil service system. LSSI can reward good employees with better pay increases, while withholding same from mediocre performers -- and firing the slothful. Just the potential for firing precludes the need for having to use that tool very often.

---

THREE

----- Original Message -----
From: CHRIS
To: Richard Rider
Sent: Thursday, August 13, 2009 5:17 PM
Subject: Something about that library you've put on a pedestal

So your a closet advocate for added taxes to support public services as long as public employess have been eliminated!!! (see commentary below)

Remarks by Judith Auth, Riverside Library Director

Presented to CAL-TAC Workshop, March 11, 2006

NOTE: RIDER SUMMARY -- THIS IS HOW WE CONNED VOTERS INTO RAISING TAXES FOR OUR LIBRARY EMPIRE (NO NEED TO READ FURTHER ON THIS REPORT -- SKIP TO "LAST"]

Twenty years ago when the LA author Carolyn See came to the Riverside Library to speak, she called us (Riverside and

San Bernardino Counties) the "goat counties." Today we are the fastest growing region in the United States. In 1991 the

Riverside Library participated in a Project for Public Spaces, exploring how a downtown library could be a catalyst for

social and economic change. Today I am gong to tell briefly how we became that catalyst. We presented the library not as

being in the book warehouse business, but in the people development business. We raised the expectations of our public.

And you can too.

Our 2002 ballot measure To Renew the Library was the first successful ballot measure for municipal services in Riverside

in 40 years. The success for measure C belongs entirely to the Library Board and the campaign committee. In spite of the

skepticism of our elected officials, the Library Trustees and the library constituency carried the day.

In 1998 the Library Board authorized a public opinion survey by Godbe Research. The survey results indicated modest

support for a library tax. But before the board could act on the results, several events occurred in Riverside that sidelined

the effort. You may recall the October 1998 City Hall shooting in which the mayor and two city council members were

injured. Then two months later, a nervous policeman shot to death a young black woman. These tragic events put the

City of Riverside under a Summary Judgment by the State's Attorney General.

In 2000, the library trustees met with the mayor to consider a ballot measure for the spring. But this time, it was the

School District that was determined to go out for a major bond issue and the mayor asked the library to step aside.

Undaunted, the Library Board asked for a survey update by Godbe. The results were not promising. At best, it looked as

if an $11 parcel fee could pass with the 66 2/3 approval. Eleven dollars wouldn't accomplish what the survey results said

the public wanted so an education campaign was in order.

The Library hired a local public relations firm to educate the voters and to raise their expectations. Three mailers were

designed to go to each household in the City's Public Utilities bill. The first identified what the needs were. The second

outlined the results of several community meetings identifying what improvements were most desired. The third was

delivered after the successful vote and urged residents to write in support of the library's application for Proposition 14

funds.

The campaign committee's first meeting was September 11, 2001. On that fateful day, all 13 of the invited guests showed

up and began strategizing for a successful vote in 2002. The committee chair was a retired judge, the recent recipient of

Riverside's Sunshine Award for the successful remodel of the historic 1909 county courthouse. Other members of the

committee were trustees, members of the library foundation, the county law librarian, a lawyer, a CPA, Friends of the

Library and our consultant who had prepared the educational materials.

Between September 11 and March 2, we raised more than $80,000 in cash and in-kind services for one general mailing

and ads in the local newspapers. One of our first meetings was with the Editor and Publisher of The Press Enterprise.

Together with the committee chair and a trustee, I met this formidable person who grilled us thoroughly as to our likely

prospects for success. I was later to find out that she was favorably impressed by our presentation and she gave us the

support we requested.

An even more intimidating meeting was with the City Council who had to vote to put this item on the ballot. It was a

library trustee who made the pitch, who laid on the rail between the speaker's podium and the dais for the elected officials,

a quarter, a dime and two pennies. "For 37 cents a week," he said, "We can improve our library service delivery by 12

million dollars over the next ten years. That's just a nickel a day."

For promotion we enlisted teams of community leaders, business people, and educators to pose for ads and the direct mail

piece. For the argument in favor we asked the popular president of the community college and the executive director of

Fair Housing. There was no argument against. To get out the vote, we secured a telephone bank in the lawyer's office

and called several thousand persons from the Registrar of Voter's list. We concentrated on those who had voted in the

recent successful school bond election. We crossed off any who were opposed. We sent out absentee ballots registrations.

We printed endorsements in the newspaper. We used automated calling the day of the election. We did not walk

precincts nor did we make yard signs. We did not have media advertisements other than the newspaper.

On election day we received 69% approval for the $19 a year parcel tax with a ten year sunset. In our annual report to the

community published January 14, 2006, we headlined,

Measure C Keeps Its Promises. With a 20% augmentation in funding, we have accomplished a 40% increase in hours

open and public access computers. We have increased programs and programming attendance by 66% for adults, 200%

for children.

We have a new automated circulation system, one new branch library and two more expanded facilities on the horizon.

And now it is time to plan for the renewal of Measure C. The current measure sunsets in 2012. We aim to put a new

measure on the ballot in 2007. If it does not pass, we have a couple more years to try. Our first goal is the formation of a

new committee and then the accumulation of private funds to mount the campaign. Already the survey research folks are

at work assessing the public's satisfaction with the Library's performance to date. The results due this summer should help

us frame our proposal.

In closing I would like to reflect on the power of a successful election. The Library Trustees charged with the

administration of the public library have a renewed sense of their critical role as interpreters of the public will and

defenders of the public library tradition. They recognize that libraries have been notoriously passive about funding,

accepting whatever is left over after public safety and development appropriations are made.

By capturing 69% approval, the Riverside Library is looked at with new respect by the elected officials, and the other city

departments. Two years after our successful vote, the Fire Department went to the ballot box. With help from the

catastrophic fires in the mountains that fall, they got 69% to build five new fire stations. Next year, the Parks, Recreation

and Community Services Department plans to go out for a special tax. Their success or failure will be something we will

study before mounting our next effort.

And finally, library staff understand that their performance on the job makes a difference in the public's support for

libraries.

I am confident that Riverside's residents will continue to be willing to pay for the enhanced library services they now

enjoy. Measure C has indeed kept its promises, providing more materials, more computers and more open hours.

Borrower registration and attendance are up, programming audiences have doubled. The Eastside Library and Cybrary is

open, demolition has begun for the expanded Arlington Library, and the Orange Terrace Library is on the horizon.

2007 is a year for making more promises to Riverside for its libraries, promises we are just as certain to keep as those we

made in 2002.

FOUR -- LAST BUT NOT LEAST

RIDER RESPONSE:

Chris, now THAT's a quality response. Seldom do my debaters seek out hard facts on the Internet to refute my case. My sincere congratulations!!!

Of course, you DO understand that the person giving the talk is not a private sector person, but rather a public employee -- the director of the library system. Notice how unfair it was for proponents to use the customer utility bills to send propaganda supporting a library tax increase. THREE TIMES! And note that nowhere do they mention any support or pro-tax activity by LSSI.

Naturally, I oppose such tax increases. I believe in the last decade or so I've written the ballot arguments against two county sales tax increases for libraries. I worked the media and handled the debates, and we ultimately defeated each tax. It's not unusual for government library systems to seek to raise taxes. And it's not often people accuse me of being a tax increase advocate.

Still, great job! Wonderful research! Biting zinger about the "closet advocate for added taxes"!!!!! Swell effort!!!!!!

(Can ya feel it coming yet?)

Only one teeny tiny little problem.

(Your sense of unease should be growing . . .)

The devil's in the details.

(Uh oh. . . . )

Seems one word changes it all around.

(Here it comes!)

Still, great try on your part. And I mean it!

(Okay, okay -- out with it!)

scroll down . . .

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Your librarian's article on the parcel tax is about the Riverside CITY library system!!

MY opinion piece is about LSSI running the Riverside COUNTY library system.

Okay, I admit it -- it's not fair they both have "Riverside" in their names. An honest mistake on your part. But since you had fun with your zinger, I thought I'd have my fun as well.

Hell, for all I know, maybe the COUNTY raised taxes for their library as well. Remember, the facilities are still owned by the county. Maybe you could research that for us both. Remember -- that's COUNTY, not city.

And just to state the obvious -- the Riverside CITY library system is run by (and for) city government employees.

P.S. Nothing further was heard from "Chris."

2009-08-16T15:44:00.000-07:00

Time to Think Outside the Library Box

by Richard Rider
12 August, 2009

San Diego County has a number of public library systems open to the general public. Two operations are quite large – the San Diego County and San Diego City libraries. In addition, the cities of Carlsbad, Chula Vista, Oceanside, Coronado, Escondido and National City each have their own library systems.

Without exception, each jurisdiction’s library department has become a swelling financial drain on taxpayers. A byproduct has been the reduction of the hours of operation. This expanding cost – reflecting primarily the mushrooming compensation packages for public library employees – has been a growing problem in good times. During this recession, it’s become a much bigger problem.

It’s time to consider an alternative way of delivering library services. There is a company – LSSI – that operates public and private libraries. They improve the service, hours of operation and customer satisfaction. And they do it for less cost.

I’m not talking about selling off the libraries. Normally the government contracting with LSSI still owns the buildings and materials. But LSSI takes over the operation of the library, meeting the criteria set by the government.

One does not have to go far to see how well this alternative works. In 1996 Riverside County was facing operational difficulties, and so it contracted with LSSI to run their 33 branch libraries and two bookmobiles. Coincidentally, that’s the EXACT number of branch libraries and bookmobiles now operated by the San Diego County library system.

The results have been well received in Riverside County – by both patrons and politicians. Read the summary of this success story below.

But first, go to the LSSI website http://www.lssi.com/approach.html. In particular, watch their seven minute video. Click on the button “View Video.” Yes, it’s a promotion piece, but is has interviews with city managers, mayors and county supervisors who laud their services. It’s really quite illuminating.

The Riverside County Example

With 33 library branches, Riverside County, CA is easily the largest government library customer for LSSI. LSSI has operated the Riverside County libraries since 1996, and apparently is highly regarded in that county. The following is on their website:

http://www.lssi.com/riverside.html

Riverside County, California, operates 33 branch libraries and two bookmobiles serving a high growth population approaching 1 million residents in 13 cities across an area approximately the size of Massachusetts.

For more than 80 years, Riverside County contracted with the City of Riverside for library services. The library system was administered by a city-appointed Board of Library Trustees, all City of Riverside residents.

When a state mandated shift of property taxes resulted in funding reductions affecting the county libraries in the mid ‘90s, the individual cities and Riverside County Board of Supervisors sought more direct control. As a result, in 1996 the City of Riverside did not renew its contract to operate the County Library System and the County had only six months to develop an alternative plan.

The County issued an innovative and ground-breaking RFP seeking optimal library services within an established budget. After a comprehensive selection process, LSSI was selected to operate the County Library System. Riverside became the first library system in the nation to outsource its library operations to a private firm.

Through careful monitoring and control of the contract process, LSSI and the County have been able to increase library services without changing funding sources, increased taxes or additional fees. All former library system employees found positions for the same base pay rate and retained vacation time and accruals.

Key operational benefits in Riverside County of the LSSI managed system include:

· Expansion of the library system from 24 to 33 library sites

· Expansion of local employment opportunities from 119 local employees to 193

· More than doubling of total weekly hours of operation from 618 hrs/wk to 1380 hrs/wk

· Increase of book budget allocation from $180K to $1.95M$5M in additional grant funding

· Automation partnership with San Bernardino County, greatly increasing circulation access

· Development of early literacy program

· Establishment of ESL classes to meet community requirement

· Development of Latino outreach program, "Leer es triunfar" (Reading is succeeding)

· Winner of a 2005 John Cotton Dana Library Award

-----

If our politicians ever decide that our cities and counties are supposed to be run for the public rather than for the public EMPLOYEES, we can start pursuing alternative methods of delivering government services – such as LSSI. Since our local governments are running out of financial alternatives, perhaps that time is close upon us. We certainly hope that such is the case.

– 30 –

RICHARD RIDER RANT - 8/11/09

2009-08-12T16:18:00.000-07:00

The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism, but under the name of Liberalism, they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program until one day America will be a Socialist nation without knowing how it happened.
Norman Thomas – 6-time Socialist Party Presidential candidate

1. Letters to editor in response to my U-T trash fee op-ed are informative in several ways
2. Government productivity often is internally frowned upon – the opposite of the private sector 3. “Time to Pull the Plug on the Library”
4. Damned planet refuses to heat up – environmentalists distraught
5. Environmental madness still rules in Congress
6. Generic political cartoon, but seems to apply to CA best
7. Massachusetts is our health care canary in the coal mine
8. British patients with stiff upper lips forced to live in agony
9. Textbooks doomed – about time!
10. Nevada produces funny, biting ads at California’s expense – California Big Government disciples, beware
11. SD Airport board members abusing expense accounts big-time
12. Sales tax on CA laptop computers can exceed 13%
13. Cash for clunkers: Trade in American, buy foreign
14. San Diego press folks finally figuring it out – they’re switching to work for government
15. Fair share? Top 1% paid more federal income tax than 95% of the rest

1. Letters to editor about my U-T trash fee op-ed are informative in several ways
RIDER COMMENT: As you doubtless recall from my last Rant, I had an op-ed published in the San Diego Union-Tribune, opposing charging a trash fee for San Diego city residential refuse pickup. My piece was printed in conjunction with another op-ed in favor of the fees.
http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/jul/26/lz1e26rider225053-we-pay-more-spending-must-be-con/?&zIndex=138070

The online comments afterwards under my op-ed were lively and informative – well, MY comments and the comments from those who agreed with me were informative. You might want to check ’em out. Or not. It was good to see that only a couple of diligent city workers bothered to make comments – I thought I’d be inundated with their propaganda.

Then the following Sunday the paper ran letters to the editor about the issue. The results were optimistic from my standpoint. Six letters were on my side, only one against.

When the letters editor picks the letters to publish, he tries to pick them to roughly represent the total letters submitted. That 6-1 ratio probably roughly represented the ratio of the total letters submitted. That means that, if this thing comes to the ballot, we have a good chance of winning, even with the labor unions spending millions to raise the fees (by repealing the city’s “People’s Ordinance”).

Moreover, I didn’t plant any of the letters. I knew three of the respondents on my side – two libertarians and a LIBERAL – but they wrote on their own (and did fine jobs, I might add).
Here are the U-T letters:
http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/aug/02/mz1e2letters20368-two-sides-san-diego-trash-issue/?&zIndex=142544
Letters to the Editor
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Two sides of the San Diego trash issue
Re: “Trash talk / Paying for a service many San Diegans don't get” by Leonard Martin and “Before we pay more, spending must be controlled” by Richard Rider (Dialog, August 2):

Another tax? Another fee? How about a “sidewalk tax” for people who want to walk on the sidewalk? How about a “wheelchair tax” to help pay for installing wheelchair curb-cuts? How about a “sidewalk tax” for people who have the Union-Tribune thrown on their sidewalk every morning? How about a “breathing tax”?

Or, how about cutting city expenses? That's what I have to do if things get too expensive and get out of hand.

JOHN DEL SANTO
San Diego

Expecting us to just forget about the fact that we are already paying for this service is criminal. Why not try reducing the employees' benefits and automatic annual raises. And why are we paying people to spy into garbage to see if it complies with recycling laws. I think people can follow a few rules without a snitch watching over their debris, much less paying the snitch, too.

AMY DEL NAGRO
San Diego

If the People's Ordinance of 1919 is rescinded, you can be assured of only one thing: The City Council will find creative ways to use the money for anything but trash collection.

Our city does not have a good record when it comes to spending our money. So, if you don't give it to them, they won't spend it.

ALFRED C. STROHLEIN
San Diego

Individuals who elect to live in multiple complexes that do not qualify for “free” waste services should not complain. It's a question of free choice. Fairness has little impact when a question of choice enters the mix.

Most multi-unit dwellers choose to enjoy the amenities of free laundry rooms, computer rooms, play rooms, health spas, swimming pools, Jacuzzis, barbeques, landscaping, etc. If one opts not to enjoy some of these amenities they should consider a single-family dwelling. These units continue to be in the majority.

VIC TALLARIDA
San Diego

“Tax fighter” Richard Rider offers nothing substantive regarding trash collection besides his usual diatribe against taxes, fees, city employees and unions. His opinion piece could apply, virtually unchanged, about almost any issue facing the city. In his stead, I offer a solution that remedies the inequity Leonard Marin addresses in his companion piece.

The City Council and mayor should remove trash collection from the menu of city services, just like closing library branches, removing fire rings, etc. The roughly 50 percent of households, like mine, paying for private trash collection would be unaffected. Those now receiving trash collection as a city service would be charged no fee nor would their taxes be diverted to collect my trash, presumably satisfying “one-issue” zealots like Rider. Instead, people currently receiving city trash collection would face choices and personal choice is what America is about. There would be no tax increase, no redirection of tax monies, no fees to the city, no city employee pensions involved, just plain old personal responsibility and free enterprise allowing equal treatment of all households.

DAVID COHEN
Hillcrest

Leonard Martin writes that the repeal of the People's Ordinance “will free up nearly $60 million annually, the first year and every subsequent year . . . ” How can anyone in his right mind believe that repeal of the ordinance will provide the city with an extra $60 million to spend on maintenance and other city obligations. If the ordinance is in fact repealed, which can only happen by a vote of the people, that $60 million or whatever amount is currently used to fund trash removal from city resident homes should be credited back to each and every homeowner paying taxes in the city of San Diego. In effect lowering taxes, which will be offset by a fee that is paid to a private trash hauler. Any other treatment of these funds is in fact an increase in local taxes.

GREGG LAWLESS
San Diego

George Orwell would have found a place for Leonard Martin and the Union-Tribune's vision of “free city trash service” if he were writing “1984” today. The idea that residential property owners are getting services “free” from the city is laughable. The lack of a bill with the heading “trash pickup charge” does not make the service free. So let us be honest, this isn't about apartment dwellers in City Heights being raked over the coals for the benefit of Rancho Bernardo or Point Loma. It's about finding ways to generate more city revenue without being constrained by honesty.

GERALD HOSENKAMP
San Diego

2. Government productivity often is internally frowned upon – the opposite of the private sector

RIDER COMMENT: In a comment on Chris Reed blog article about state worker compensation, BobSp raised a GREAT point about worker productivity. It's common -- even mandatory -- in the private sector that productivity should improve. In the public sector, in many instances, increased productivity is actually frowned upon.

The public employee labor unions make sure that better performance is not rewarded with higher pay. Work twice as hard (or half as hard) as your government co-worker, get the same pay. Showing up your government co-workers by "working too hard" can result in harsh words, shunning, or worse.

Perhaps more important, government managers are paid more the larger their "responsibility." And the number one criterion is how many people the managers supervise. The last thing a government manager wants is a smaller work force.

I remember my younger days as a LT in the Navy Supply Corps where I learned this lesson first hand. I suggested that by reworking my 32nd St Naval Station galley (cafeteria, to you land lubbers) work schedules and using private minimum wage food service personnel (we already used a private contractor for low level galley "mess cook" work), we could get rid of 75% of my civil service employees who were being paid for eight hours while only needing to work for three hours at most.

No one challenged the feasibility or accuracy of my proposal. But my superior (rank-wise) and his superiors were aghast at the idea.

Their thinking was that we should keep the deadwood because sometime in the future the Department of Defense might send out a "RIF" (Reduction in Force) mandate, and we'd want to have the unneeded employees to cut at that time.

Hence my civil service drones continued droning. Such is the nature of government.

Here’s the Chris Reed blog item and comments:
http://weblog.signonsandiego.com/weblogs/afb/archives/034823.html

3. “Time to Pull the Plug on the Library”

RIDER COMMENT: Below is an excellent commentary opposing the proposed downtown San Diego library -- written by SD County Taxpayers Association President Lani Lutar. The title of the piece says it all.

The online reader comments are lively, with library lovers having a hissy fit. I missed out on putting in my own comments in a timely fashion – a loss to posterity.

http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/articles/2009/06/09/opinion/lutar060909.txt#info

VOICE OF SAN DIEGO
Time to Pull the Plug on the Library

By Lani Lutar

Tuesday, June 9, 2009 The proposed downtown library currently remains on life-support after receiving a temporary extension from the State Librarian. Councilmember Carl DeMaio, a vocal critic of the project, recently pointed out that significant funding shortfalls for construction continue to plague the project. Beyond the cost of construction, the city would have to find almost $6 million every year to cover increased annual operating costs.

Equally troublesome, the latest proposal includes the highly questionable use of school bond dollars to make up for a lack of private funds. Given the city's dire financial situation for the foreseeable future, pulling the plug on boondoggles like this project has never been more important.

In 2005, construction of the library was estimated to cost $185 million, more than double the 1996 estimate of $63 million. Funding for construction of the project was slated to come from $80 million in CCDC redevelopment funds, $20 million from a State grant and $85 million in private donations. When private fundraising failed to meet the December 2008 state grant deadline, project proponents suggested the inclusion of a school on the two top floors of the proposed library to make up for funding shortfalls and extend the viability of the grant.

In order to maintain the $20 million grant from the state, the city and school district are required to conduct a "feasibility study" to update construction costs and determine any redesign needs to accommodate a school as part of the building. This $169,000 study will update cost estimates and analyze any changes in design necessary to accommodate the inclusion of a school.

The city and San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) have yet to reach an agreement on the proportionate funding of the feasibility study, but before $169,000 of taxpayer money is spent to investigate whether the hybrid project is actually viable, the complete inability of the proposal to pencil out must be considered.

A recent report released by the Office of Councilmember Carl DeMaio highlighted the following:

* Adjusting the 2005 proposal for construction cost inflation only (i.e. ignoring the school component) suggests that costs have increased from $185 million to $208 million today.
* Additional construction costs associated with Field Act compliance are likely to increase construction costs by at least another 3-4 percent. This yields an estimate of $214 million today.
* Using the most conservative of these inflation adjustments ($208 million construction cost), the project is underfunded by $55 million, even after taking the additional $20 million of school bond dollars in account.
* According to the city's Independent Budget Analyst, the new main library will require $5.7 million more per year to operate than the current downtown library.

This means that the new library will add to the city's annual operating costs at a time when budget deficits abound, branch library closures have been threatened and hours have been reduced.

Private fundraisers have also promised to cover the first five years of operating cost increases, which amounts to more than $28 million. In total, private fundraisers have promised to raise $85 million for construction of the library, plus $28 million for operating costs. To date, only $33 million has been acknowledged, and far less confirmed.

Furthermore, excess space in the library was originally designed to help mitigate cost by generating revenues. Adding the school to the proposal eliminates anywhere from $950,000 to $1.5 million of estimated annual revenue that would help to offset the annual operating cost increases.

The red balance sheet outlined above tells the real story of the downtown library proposal: taxpayers are left holding the bag. Under the funding proposal in 2005, public funds (from CCDC and the State) accounted for 55 percent of the project cost. Today, assuming construction cost inflation to $208 million, taxpayer funds (via CCDC, Proposition S, the State, plus the shortfall of $57 million) would make up more than 80 percent of project funding.

Furthermore, the proposed use of Proposition S school bond dollars for the project is a desperate attempt to save this ill-advised project and a classic case of bait-and-switch. Prior to the election last November, SDUSD sought endorsements from a variety of stakeholder groups, and provided lists of projects it planned to pursue with the bond dollars. During this campaign, SDUSD clearly outlined the need for a new elementary school downtown. However, law requires elementary schools to be housed on the lower floors of buildings and the available space in the proposed library is on top floors.

Within moments of this discovery, the need for the new elementary school downtown was conveniently tossed aside by the school district in favor of a high school which could save the project.

Every aspect of the library proposal depicts a financial disaster in the making. Construction is underfunded, the city cannot afford the increased operation and maintenance expenses and library boosters want taxpayers to pick up a greater portion of the total bill. In no uncertain terms, the time has come to pull the plug on this proposal once and for all.

Lutar is president and chief executive officer of the San Diego County Taxpayers Association, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that promotes accountable, cost-effective and efficient government. You can reach her at lani@sdcta.org .

4. Damned planet refuses to heat up – environmentalists distraught

RIDER COMMENT: There’s been considerable consternation by the environmentalists about the insufficient level of urgent concern about global warming, even among the young. After all, we’ve been warned! But perhaps our reality trumps the highly questionable “sky is falling” predictions.

The following excerpt from a recent Mark Steyn column summarizes the widespread skepticism well. BTW, Steyn – an acerbic, witty conservative columnist – is always a fun read – except for his opponents.

http://tinyurl.com/nkcukl

Behind the Times
by Mark Steyn

. . .

If you’re 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you’re graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade. There has been no global warming this century. None. Admittedly the 21st century is only one century out of the many centuries of planetary existence, but it happens to be the one you’re stuck living in. Alan Carlin, in a report for the Environmental Protection Racket — whoops, Environmental Protection Agency — that they attempted to suppress, says:

Fossil fuel and cement emissions increased by 3.3 percent per year during 2000-2006, compared to 1.3 percent per year in the 1990s. Similarly, atmospheric C02 concentrations increased by 1.93 parts per million per year during 2000-2006, compared to 1.58 ppm in the 1990s. And yet, despite accelerating emission rates and concentrations, there’s been no net warming in the 21st century, and more accurately, a decline.

. . .

5. Environmental madness still rules in Congress

RIDER COMMENT: Ya know, we are just getting jaded. Bill after feel good bill works their way through Congress, costs us TRILLIONS, and does nothing for us or the environment. The article below details one of the worst ones in process.

http://www.ncpa.org/commentaries/waxman-markey-deserves-to-die

Waxman-Markey Deserves to Die
Commentary by Pete du Pont
July 26, 2009

The economy-destroying measure ekes out a House victory.
Source: Wall Street Journal online

The fresh news about Washington--the White House and Congress--is that things are not going very well. A new president in full command of public-policy matters is having problems, from health care to taxes to massive federal spending and now to the Waxman-Markey bill, one of the oddest and most far-reaching pieces of legislation advocated by the new administration.

It passed the House a few weeks ago by a 219-212 vote--not much of a margin. Most interesting was the fact that of America's 50 state delegations in the House, 28 voted no and 22 aye, and one quarter of the 219 majority votes came from New York and California. Most of America's states and communities didn't much like the bill.

No wonder, for it would regulate many things--energy, wages, imported goods, corporations, states, cities, buildings and houses, snowmobiles, lawn mowers, light fixtures, candelabra base lamps and many others--while containing broad exemptions for regulation of agribusiness, ethanol and biofuels. The Waxman-Markey bill would be without question the biggest expansion of federal government control over our economy since the 1930s.

The Heritage Foundation concludes it would reduce America's real gross domestic product by $400 billion each year--a cumulative loss of $9.4 trillion by 2035--leading to almost 2.5 million job losses, and raise inflation-adjusted electricity rates by 90%. For a household of four, it would cost on average $2,979 annually and in 2035 the total family cost would be over $4,600 for everything, including power, food, supplies, gasoline and transportation.

Our federal government would have full control over global-warming matters. States would not be permitted to create their own cap-and-trade programs, but could be given emission allowances by the federal government which they could sell to generate funds for clean energy programs.

The federal government would also have control over the carbon permit process. It would give away 85% of the permits to utility companies, refineries and other politically connected businesses, and these no-cost permits could be used by companies to continue to crank out historically high CO2 emission levels, or be sold to other companies for real money.

Next would come the expansion of American protectionism. China and India have declined to participate in global-warming control, so under Waxman-Markey we would be able to impose tariffs on their goods coming into America, something India's environmental minister pointed out to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton a few days ago. The other side of that coin is of course that they could impose tariffs on our exports too. That would hurt American businesses and expand government control of our economy, products and businesses, all in the name of fighting global warming.

Of course we have seen the predecessor of the Waxman-Markey bill in the European Union's cap-and-trade regulation, a political failure as well as an economic one. As Heritage's Ben Lieberman has pointed out, it has not worked in various countries, and is now being opposed by nations that need to burn coal for their electricity generation. As the Washington Post wrote last February, European "emission targets were set too high. Too many pollution allowances were given away to industry. . . . Companies made windfall profits by charging customers more for energy while selling allowances they didn't need. And the Europeans have not had much success in reducing greenhouse gas emissions."

As Lieberman observes, "To the limited extent European nations have reduced emissions below business-as-usual levels it has hurt their economies. . . . Far from seeing evidence of the bright new green economy some are now promising, we are seeing that cap and trade has contributed to the harm." Waxman-Markey would operate much the same way with many of the same results in America, and that means central government planning would pull America down to European levels.

So who is in favor of this massive expansion of governmental authority in America? Labor unions of course, for tucked away is the requirement that any project receiving grants from the billions of giveaways in the Waxman-Markey bill would be required to apply Davis-Bacon union wage rules.

Environmentalists like it too, but as climate researcher Chip Knappenberger pointed out in May, neither Henry Waxman nor Ed Markey nor anyone else in Congress is arguing that "the bill is going to save the earth from human-caused climate apocalypse." It won't, and it "will have virtually no impact on the future course of the earth's climate." The Waxman-Markey reduction of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, Mr. Knappenberger concludes, would reduce temperatures by less than one-tenth of a degree Fahrenheit by 2050.

The real purpose of Waxman-Markey is to vastly expand the scope, power and authority of the federal government. Washington would permanently regulate and dictate the performance of the U.S. economy, reward constituencies it favors and punish those it doesn't, and make more and more Americans dependent upon federal largesse.

6. Generic political cartoon, but seems to apply to CA best

http://www.bostonherald.com/galleries/index.php?gallery_id=791&p=7

7. Massachusetts is our health care canary in the coal mine

RIDER COMMENT: Unwittingly, Massachusetts signed on in 2005 to show us how the currently proposed national health insurance would actually work in America. Would that we could learn from the results.

http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba667

Three Lessons from Massachusetts
Brief Analysis Health
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
by Greg Scandlen

The Massachusetts experiment in health care reform offers many lessons that are applicable to the current debate in Congress. The goals of the Massachusetts plan are similar to proposals supported by Democratic congressional leaders and the Obama administration: universal health insurance coverage through greater access to health insurance.

The Obama proposals would use similar means to achieve these goals: requiring individuals to purchase insurance and creating an "insurance exchange" where they can buy heavily regulated, heavily subsidized health insurance.

Some of the lessons to be learned from the Massachusetts experience have been well-chronicled elsewhere, but there are three lessons that remain to be explored.

Lesson 1: Reform has raised costs, not lowered them. The state has indeed lowered the number of uninsured dramatically - down to 2.6 percent of the population by some estimates. But it has done so in a very expensive way that does nothing to control costs. Massachusetts has relied primarily on two factors to fund its plan: 1) state premium subsidies for almost everyone who has gained coverage and 2) the requirement that individuals enroll. This is a huge burden on taxpayers and on anyone who pays directly for health care:

* The state was able to get the federal government to pay for much of these new costs, but even with that help, state government spending has increased 42 percent since 2006.
* The Massachusetts program has cost about one-third more than projected when the law was passed.
* Before the Massachusetts health insurance reform plan was implemented in 2005, total per capita health care spending in the state was 33 percent above the national average.
* In just two years under the Massachusetts reforms, from 2005 to 2007, health care spending per capita rose an additional 23 percent.

Lesson 2: The people reform was intended to help say they are being hurt. That level of spending might be justified if it was clear that large numbers of previously uninsured people were being helped. But a survey conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health found just the opposite.

* Slightly more than half (51 percent) of those required to purchase coverage say their health care costs have gone up and only 14 percent say they have gone down.
* Some 22 percent say the law is helping them personally, but 60 percent say it is hurting them.

Although the survey found that most residents of Massachusetts support the law, the level of support is greatest among those least affected - the people who are more likely to have insurance or be able to afford coverage because of their education and income:

* Some 69 percent of those with college degrees or incomes of more than $75,000 a year support the law.
* Just 49 percent of those making $25,000 to $50,000 and only 45 percent of those with a high school or lower education, support it.

Lesson 3: Everyone else is being hurt, too. It isn't only those directly affected by the mandate who are being hurt in Massachusetts. Due to the sudden increase in demand for physicians, every resident who would like to see a doctor is being harmed. Massachusetts has by far the largest number of physicians per capita of any state. Despite this, patients in Massachusetts now have the longest waiting times to see a doctor, according to a recent survey of physician waiting times in 15 major U.S. cities. For example, in Boston the average waiting time to get an appointment for any of five types of specialists is almost double the wait in the next highest area, Philadelphia. [See the table.]

Long waiting times to see a physician have caused the use of hospital emergency rooms to soar by 17 percent to 2.5 million visits in 2007. Half of these ER visits were for nonurgent conditions. Although one of the state's goals was to increase access to private physicians for the previously uninsured, Massachusetts payments to community health centers for free care to the indigent have increased from $52.2 million in 2005 to $58.6 million in 2007.

Lessons for America. Of all these developments, the most sobering one is the soaring waiting times to see a doctor. Previously, Massachusetts enjoyed the highest number of physicians per capita of any state, and it had one of the lowest rates of noninsured in the country. If any jurisdiction could have accommodated a surge of newly insured people it should have been Massachusetts. By contrast, California has half as many physicians per capita and twice the level of uninsured. Imagine what will happen to waiting times in California if all the uninsured suddenly become insured. As in Massachusetts, if they can't see a doctor on a timely basis, patients may seek treatment at hospital emergency rooms. But California doesn't have any excess capacity there, either. Waiting times in ERs will soar. Other big states like Texas and Florida are even less able than California to serve the newly insured.

What kind of health care reform requires working people to pay for coverage, but then deprives them of the ability to see a doctor? It is the kind that will generate an enormous backlash of outraged patients. Members of Congress need to think twice before embarking on the same journey as Massachusetts.

Greg Scandlen is director of Consumers for Health Care Choices at the Heartland Institute.

8. British patients with stiff upper lips forced to live in agony

RIDER COMMENT: No, a stiff upper lip is not an English medical malady. It’s just that the wise central planning souls in charge of the UK’s national health insurance now eschew adequate pain relief for folks with lower back problems. Acupuncture is being recommended instead (cheaper – even when it doesn’t work!).

Rationing health treatment is SOP in dear old Britain – for those who cannot afford private health care.
http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=18282

BRITISH PATIENTS FORCED TO LIVE IN AGONY

In England, the government's drug rationing watchdog says "therapeutic" injections of steroids, such as cortisone, which are used to reduce inflammation, should no longer be offered to patients suffering from persistent lower back pain when the cause is not known. Instead the National Institute of Health (NHW) and Clinical Excellence (NICE) is ordering doctors to offer patients remedies like acupuncture and osteopathy, says the Telegraph.

Every year, one-in-three people are estimated to suffer from lower back pain, while one in 15 consult their general practitioner (GP) about it. Specialists say therapeutic injections using steroids can deaden nerve endings, can provide months or even years of respite from pain. Others fear that if funding, tens of thousands of people, mainly the elderly and frail, will be left to suffer excruciating levels of pain or pay as much as £500 (about U.S. $847) each for private treatment, says the Telegraph:

* The NHS currently issues more than 60,000 treatments of steroid injections every year.
* NICE said in its guidance it wants to cut this to just 3,000 treatments a year, a move which would save the NHS £33 million (about U.S. $56 million).
* But the British Pain Society, which represents specialists in the field, has written to NICE calling for the guidelines to be withdrawn after its members warned that they would lead to many patients having to undergo unnecessary and high-risk spinal surgery.

While the NICE guidelines admit that evidence was limited for many back pain treatments, where scientific proof was lacking, advice was instead taken from its expert group.

But specialists are furious that while the group included practitioners of alternative therapies, there was no one with expertise in conventional pain relief medicine to argue against a decision to significantly restrict its use, says the Telegraph.

Source: Laura Donnelly, "Patients forced to live in agony after NHS refuses to pay for painkilling injections," Telegraph, August 2, 2009.

For text:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/5955840/Patients-forced-to-live-in-agony-after-NHS-refuses-to-pay-for-painkilling-injections.html

9. Textbooks doomed – about time!

RIDER COMMENT: While the level of education in the U.S. has deteriorated, one area of learning has shown remarkable growth – textbooks. They’ve grown in a number of ways.

Certainly modern textbooks have grown in entertainment value compared to the drab textbooks of yore. They’ve grown in the sheer quantity of material offered (much of which is never covered by classroom teachers). Then there is all that growth in PC coverage. Robust growth can be observed in the price of textbooks. And all of this adds together – leading to the oppressive growth in the massive size and weight of textbooks – today’s textbook tomes lugged around by kids without school lockers.

It’s time to put an end to this madness – at least the madness of hard copy textbooks. The day of the personal/laptop computer has arrived. And the price for such has plummeted.

***

SIDEBAR: One ongoing canard is that the “digital divide” leaves behind the poor without computers. Nonsense! There are many inexpensive ways to buy a computer. Go on Craigslist and buy a used basic desktop computer for $125 or less. Sometimes MUCH less. Furthermore, there are charities that provide computers for poor kids for free!

Yes, the poor have fewer computers at home – but that’s a decision they make. Anyone with the slightest initiative can solve that problem for little cost. Instead most poor folks spend far too much on TV’s, cell phones and video console games. No one likes to point out that such bad decision-making is one big reason the poor are poor!

***

Let’s go back to taxpayer-paid education. It appears that some educators are figuring out that digital textbooks can be read and studied on a portable computer. Some mavens are predicting that hard copy textbooks will all but disappear within five years.

Meanwhile notebook laptops are down under $300 retail. Simple full-size laptops can be found under $350 retail. Given the cost of hard copy textbooks, it would seem that the districts can save money (and students’ posture) by buying cheap, no frills notebooks or laptops for students (the notebooks weigh under 3 pounds) and then acquire textbooks electronically. I suspect the savings on software textbooks could pay for the notebooks in a year.

School districts in Arizona have already figured out the benefits of providing laptops and avoiding costly textbooks. As we all know from our online experiences, there’s a wealth of FREE material on the Internet available for dissemination – including educational material. Furthermore, the Arizona districts are encouraging teachers to disseminate good lesson plans prepared for the computer.

Here’s a link to a May, 2009 LA TIMES editorial encouraging the digital textbook option:

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/may/23/opinion/ed-textbooks23

And here’s a link to an encouraging (and more detailed) article in the 9 August, 2009 NY TIMES – referencing the Arizona district experience:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/education/09textbook.html

10. Nevada produces funny, biting ads at California’s expense – California Big Government disciples, beware

RIDER COMMENT: The zany folks in the Nevada Development Authority keep putting out outrageous ads pounding on how business-UNfriendly CA is. The ads – both print and video – are slick, funny and irritating – as they should be. And the gonzo nature of the ads is getting Nevada a good bit of free media coverage as well. Here’s a couple newspaper ads that I particularly liked:

To look over what the Nevada Development Authority has to say about leaving CA for the Las Vegas area, go to:
http://www.nevadadevelopment.org/

11. SD Airport board members abusing expense accounts big-time

RIDER COMMENT: A couple years ago the SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE did a fine exposé on the extravagant spending by the appointed members of the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority. Currently the agency has a $121 million budget, which it derives from public money – primarily from airport fees and rents.

As a result of that exposé, new spending guidelines were put in place. Guidelines, smidelines. Our airport officials don’t need no stinkin’ guidelines. Must be so, since they imperiously ignore said guidelines.

We know that such is still the case, thanks to a follow-up investigation by the intrepid Voice of San Diego. Here’s the link to their just-released article:

http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/articles/2009/08/09/economics/846airport080909.txt

You might be wise not to read it – if you pay the fees for flying in and out of San Diego’s Lindberg Airport. Don’t want you going postal in the airport.

Perhaps the most egregious incident was when two board members flew to England for a Charger exhibition game (I’ll leave it to you to conjure up the rationale for that trip). No taxpayer expense was spared – from the $5,500 first class airline tickets to the $350 Charger reception to the $1,200 for seats (a board member and a guest -- $600 each) at the game. And just to be clear, that’s the price for EACH board member’s football two tickets, reception and airfare.

Ya gotta’ love authority Chairman Bob Watkins’ response to the Voice story – it’s just lowly-paid reporter envy. Great stuff – his elitism is insufferable.

Just in case you think the above expenses are a one-time aberration – consider this: San Diego Airport staff fly to Los Angeles for as much as $820 a ticket. And yes, that is Los Angeles, California.

Now, let’s see if these political appointees avoid being fired.

Assuming that they are not fired, surely they will be denied reappointment by the politicians who first put them there. Yeah, when pigs land on the Lindberg runway.

12. Sales tax on CA laptop computers can exceed 13%

RIDER COMMENT: Currently our total sales tax on goods in San Diego County ranges from 8.75% to 9.75%, depending on where the purchase is made. But what few people realize is that California now levies a second DE FACTO sales tax on laptops, computer monitors and TV’s. The Electronic Waste Recycling Act of 2003 was passed to levy an E-waste “fee” on items with a screen (anything larger than 4”). Supposedly this fee is imposed to somehow help recycle such items.

BTW, included in this law are provisions to make tossing such items in the trash a criminal offense. And that aspect of the law covers other items as well (such as computer cases with the innards included), though few know just what those items are.

The E-waste tax is crudely figured based on the size of the screen.

4” up to (under) 15” is an $8 fee

15” up to 35” is a $16 fee

35” and above is a $25 fee

This is not like some bottle or can deposit you can get back when you properly recycle your screen device. It’s money that’s disappears into state government.

I ran into one particularly nefarious aspect of this tax when this spring I purchased a laptop at Costco. I got a great deal for $450. But like most laptops sold today, my screen was a tad bigger than 15”. 15.1”, to be exact. Currently this is probably the single most popular size for a laptop screen. For that tiny incremental increase, the state doubles my E-waste fee from $8 to $16.

So what’s my total “sales tax” on that $450 purchase? 8.75% (“normal” sales tax) + 3.55% (E-waste fee) = 12.3%. If I had purchased my laptop from the El Cajon Costco, it would have cost me 13.3% sales tax.

Most people realize that they can break the law by avoiding the sales tax – buying their computers from out-of-state vendors via the Internet. But few think about the fact that such a purchase also avoids the E-waste tax – doubtless violating another law.

As this knowledge spreads, it surely will not help our California vendors sell our uber-taxable computer laptop, monitor and TV’s. Too bad.

And BTW, CA is looking at banning plasma TV sales in CA (for energy savings) – making out-of-state purchase the only alternative (yeah, and making that choice will surely break yet another law).

13. Cash for clunkers: Trade in American, buy foreign

RIDER COMMENT: The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes the “Cash for Clunkers” trade-in program. Once again, our central planners have screwed up. American taxpayers subsidize foreign car industry. Read on.

http://www.dickmorris.com/blog/2009/08/10/cash-for-clunkers-trade-in-american-buy-foreign/

CASH FOR CLUNKERS: TRADE IN AMERICAN; BUY FOREIGN

By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN

Published on DickMorris.com on August 10, 2009

The only part of the stimulus program that is working, the cash-for-clunkers program is, in reality, a subsidy to foreign car companies, proving that Barack Obama is the best president Japan ever had.

The Department of Transportation reports that the ten leading trade-ins are all American branded cars while six of the top ten new cars purchased - and four of the top five - are foreign. So the United States Senate is about to pass additional funds to subsidize the trade-in of American cars and the purchase of foreign cars.

DOT reports that the following are the ten top trade-ins, all American:

Ten Top Trade-Ins Under Cash for Clunkers

1. Ford Explorer
2. Ford F150 Pickup 2WD
3. Jeep Grand Cherokee 4 WD
4. Jeep Cherokee 4 WD
5. Dodge Caravan/Grand Caravan
6. Chevrolet Blazer 4 WD
7. Ford Explorer 2 WD
8. Ford F150 Pickup 4 WD
9. Chevrolet C1500 Pickup 2 WD
10. Ford Windstar FWD Van

And the top ten new car purchases, subsidized by the American taxpayer, are mainly foreign vehicles:

Top Ten New Car Purchases: Cash for Clunkers

1. Toyota Corolla
2. Ford Focus FWD
3. Honda Civic
4. Toyota Prius
5. Toyota Camry
6. Ford Escape FWD
7. Hyundai Elantra
8. Dodge Caliber
9. Honda Fit
10. Chevrolet Cobalt

It is a violation of the World Trade Organization rules to enact a public subsidy program and skew it toward only domestically produced products, so the Congress has no choice but to extend the program to all comers. No choice, that is, but to not spend the money in the first place.

Cash for Clunkers will do wonders for the Japanese economy, but its impact on the US job situation is problematic. This unintended consequence is a great illustration of what happens when the blunt tool of government subsidy is applied to the fine tuning of a free market economy. Government planners keep getting it wrong. That's why socialism is such a bad idea.

So Obama can boast of a great success in taking American cars off the road and replacing them with foreign cars. Great going!

14. San Diego press folks finally figuring it out – they’re switching to work for government

RIDER COMMENT: Normally when I conclude a speech on local politics, I ask the audience what’s the ONE thing that they should take with them out of the lecture – what ONE piece of advice could turn their lives around.

Someone eventually comes up with the right answer – “get a government job.” More specifically, get a San Diego CITY government job.

I give the same advice to media folks at the conclusion of an interview or press conference. Given the tenuous nature of their occupational job security, coupled with their stagnated compensation, such advice fits them particularly well.

As the article below demonstrates, it looks like many media pundits have indeed heeded my advice and become government employees at an accelerating rate – even more than I realized. After years of covering stories that show the stark contrast between public and private sector employment, many reporters have fled to (or been laid off and gone to) government jobs.

I’m worried that such a career pattern might give reporter cause to hesitate in doing investigative journalism, delving into our politicians’ antics. I doubt such a potential conflict is a major factor, but the number of press folks switching to public “service” is unsettling.

It also means that when the press wants info from government, it’s often their former co-workers that they deal with – which is a little too chummy for objective media coverage.

http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local-beat/Trend-Reporters-Turned-Pols-52687452.html

Another S.D. Journalist Goes Into Politics

San Diego has experienced a noticeable shift of journalists entering the world of politics
By RON DONOHO

Updated 3:45 PM PDT, Fri, Aug 7, 2009

Next time you read a byline in a local newspaper or magazine, or watch an anchor on a nightly TV newscast, take note: Those people may soon be your public servants. Over the past few years, there’s been a steady march from the field of journalism into politics.

On Monday, Tim McClain is expected to begin working as a legislative assistant/press secretary for San Diego County District 4 Supervisor Ron Roberts. For the previous dozen years, McClain was the editor of "Metropolitan" magazine and appeared on "Editors Roundtable” on KPBS.

What’s it like to go from asking the questions to answering and/or avoiding them?

"I love journalists and writers -- I've always been a big defender of what they try to do," McClain said. "And I'll help them do their jobs from this side of the fence."

Last month, San Diego City Councilwoman Marti Emerald (District 7) hired former KGTV weather reporter Geni Cavitt to be her director of communications. You might recall Emerald was the "Troubleshooter” consumer reporter for 10News.

Within the last year, San Diego mayor Jerry Sanders snatched up San Diego Union-Tribune writers Gerry Braun and Rachel Laing to be director of special projects and deputy press secretary, respectively.

District 6 City Councilwoman Donna Frye has also double-dipped at the Union-Tribune. Former reporters Mark Sauer and Chet Barfield are now her district representatives.

Former U-T reporter Tony Manolatos was grabbed to be the director of communications for District 2 City Councilman Kevin Faulconer. District 1 County Supervisor Greg Cox has the U-T's Luis Monteagado as his spokesman. And the director of communications for the past couple years for District 5 County Supervisor Bill Horn is former KFMB-TV anchor John Culea.

And now, I'd like to announce I'm running for president ... not.

Ron Donoho is a regular contributor to NBCSandiego.com and a contributing editor to sandiego.com. His Web site (sandiegoDTOWN.com) is dedicated to news, sports, culture, happy hours and all things downtown.

15. Fair share? Top 1% paid more federal income tax than 95% of the rest

RIDER COMMENT (well, actually, mostly Bill Leonard’s comment): The Tax Foundation has crunched the IRS numbers for the most recent data available, 2007. It found the top one percent of taxpayers paid 40.4 percent of the total income taxes collected by the federal government. What is remarkable about this is the share of the tax burden by the top one percent now exceeds the share paid by the bottom 95 percent of taxpayers combined. In 2007, the bottom 95 percent paid 39.4 percent of the income tax burden. This is down from the 58 percent of the total income tax burden they paid 20 years ago.

The top one percent is comprised of just 1.4 million taxpayers and they pay a larger share of the income tax burden now than the bottom 134 million taxpayers combined. Given that we are no longer a republic, but rather simply a “majority rules” democracy, that fact does not bode well for the wealthy – as more voters feeling little pain from the income tax seek to increasingly soak the rich to benefit themselves.

The substantiating income tax data tables on the foundation’s website (links below) are illuminating. One aspect that the report did not discuss is that we had tax cuts in rates during this decade, and now the wealthy pay more taxes (a higher percent of their income), and a higher percent of the total income taxes paid. The Laffer Curve lives!

I may dig deeper into this data at another time.

http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/23408.html

http://www.taxfoundation.org/blog/show/24944.html

RICHARD RIDER RANT 7/31/09

2009-08-11T11:38:00.000-07:00

There are severe limits to the good that the government can do for the economy, but there are almost no limits to the harm it can do.
Milton Friedman, Nobel laureate

1. Rider trash fee opposition op-ed in SD UNION-TRIBUNE.

2. One area of employment grew in the county – you’ll never guess. Well, actually you probably WILL guess.

3. SD County firing volunteer firefighters like crazy – and crazy is the word for it.

4. Read about Rider’s heroes – volunteer firefighters.

5. Media blacks out story predicting 1.1 million California jobs lost from AB 32’s Draconian environmental regs

6. For a great daily dose of free market economics, go to . . .

7. Fools! You could have made a fortune (like me) investing in greedy health care companies. Or not.

8. California “only” the 6th worst state? We wish!

9. Feds’ stimulus often “much ado about nothing.” Their PR departments are working overtime. Naturally at our expense.

10. If Obama disappoints his fans, they will have only themselves to blame.

1. Rider trash fee opposition op-ed in SD UNION-TRIBUNE
In the Sunday, 26 July edition of the San Diego Union-Tribune "Dialog -- Insight and Opinion" section there is a full page "Trash Talk" two-opinion debate. I wrote the pro-taxpayer column – you’ll see the details below.
The issue is whether to repeal the San Diego city "People's Ordinance" which includes single unit residential trash pickup as a city service. Proponents of the repeal want to start charging fees for this city service, while opponents (such as I) see this as a slippery slope -- a way to start raising DE FACTO taxes without the required 2/3 vote of the electorate (or any vote at all, actually). See my column for more thoughts on this.
BTW, the U-T (hopefully inadvertently) summarized the issue with a pro-fee, anti-taxpayer explanation published with each column -- omitting any reason for NOT imposing the fee.
Here's the U-T summary. See what you think.
---
The city of San Diego is mandated, under the People's Ordinance of 1919, to use tax money, rather than a fee for service, to pay for trash pickup at most single-family residences. Over the years, many have called for the repeal of the ordinance on the grounds that it is unfair to those who live in multifamily units and that by charging for trash pickup, as many municipalities do, the city could ease its financial problems.
---
BACKGROUND: The San Diego County Grand Jury did an "investigation" and concluded that we should start charging fees. But their investigation is by law secret, and they won't tell you who they talked to. Their foreman wrote the "raise fees" column.
Well, I have a good idea who they talked to -- and, more important, I know who they DIDN'T talk to. They went to city bureaucrats and politicians who favor charging the fee, and probably some Big Government professor at a local government college. Apparently the (not so) Grand Jury spoke with NO ONE who disagreed. Not me, not Carl DeMaio, not the San Diego County Taxpayers Association (which actually has not yet taken a position on the matter) -- not anyone I can find who is familiar with city government and opposes the new fees.
IF this change would result in REBATES to all San Diego taxpayers of the current taxes being spent on trash pick-up, I could support such a measure. But this is about one thing – getting more revenue for the city so the politicians don’t have to face down the city workers over excessive compensation issues.
You can read the two columns online. Of course, you can read the comments by readers – and my devastating retorts. There is a lively give-and-take between yours truly and the fee fanciers.

Here are the two SD U-T columns:
SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE
Trash talk
Before we pay more, spending must be controlled
By Richard Rider
July 26, 2009
To now start charging “fees” – in reality taxes levied without a vote of the citizens – for city services previously paid for by taxes is a dangerous idea, and shear madness in a recession.

For generations, the city of San Diego has provided for single-unit residential trash pickup, paid out of city revenues. Now we are told that this historical service is a budget problem, contributing to the city budget deficit. A recent grand jury report calls for new fees for residential trash pick-up. What has changed?
Granted, this recession is dramatic. But city revenue has dropped only modestly. Indeed, property tax revenue is still going up. The city's 2009-2010 general fund revenue is projected to be only 3.7 percent lower than 2008-2009.
What is different is San Diego's municipal expenses. They have soared. And clearly the driving force is our runaway city salaries, pensions and health care costs.
A recent grand jury report claimed that these compensation excesses have largely been brought under control – an embarrassingly silly assertion. In this stock market, the city pension fund deficit is approaching $2 billion. Unfunded retiree health care costs exceed $1 billion. Three years after the citizens mandated that the city begin competitive bidding of municipal services, there has been zero progress. The vaunted two-tier pension plan for new non-safety employees saves only a tiny amount for taxpayers, and is still far too generous. This past calendar year, city payroll costs – not counting benefits – rose by $43 million.
To now start charging “fees” – in reality taxes levied without a vote of the citizens – for city services previously paid for by taxes is a dangerous idea, and shear madness in a recession. It's a slippery slope, leading to city labor unions insisting on fees for all sorts of municipal functions in order to maintain the employees' opulent compensation packages.
How bad can it get? Some towns in other states have been charging fees exceeding $500 to have police or firefighters to come to a traffic accident – even a minor one.
Trash fee proponents want us to pay more, but refuse to control costs. Before such fees are even considered, we should first make every effort to improve efficiency.
Most important, we should put city trash collection out to aggressive competitive bid for substantial savings. We are the only city in the county to use government workers to pick up refuse.
Just because city taxpayers pay for a service does not mean that overpriced city employees have to provide the service. Given our incredible overcompensation of city workers, taxpayer savings could easily exceed 30 percent. Similar savings can be achieved by putting other city functions out to bid – libraries, printing, street light maintenance, landscaping, etc.
The majority of the San Diego City Council is beholden to the labor unions that put them in office. But these politicians are not fools. They know they can't keep spending what they don't have.
It comes down to this: If our politicians run out of revenue options, they will control spending: seeking ways to deliver city services at lower cost. If they can talk us into paying more taxes and fees, they won't control spending.
Our job as voters and taxpayers is to provide the adult supervision needed to get our elected officials to do the job we pay them for – making citizens' welfare a higher priority than the prosperity of city workers. (Find this article on line here)

Rider is chairman of San Diego Tax Fighters.
--------------------
RAISE FEES OP-ED by Rider’s opponent
Trash talk
Paying for a service many San Diegans don't get

By Leonard D. Martin
July 26, 2009
Yada, yada, yada (I thoughtfully summarized it for you, but you can read it here).

2. One area of employment grew in the county – you’ll never guess. Well, actually you probably WILL guess.
RIDER COMMENT: For me, two items stood out from a 20 July Rick Toscano blog/column in the Voice of San Diego concerning the San Diego County job market for the fiscal year just ended 30 June, 2009:
A. Of the 9 categories of employment in the county, the largest was “government.” An amazing 18% of working folks in the county are employed by some government – federal, state or local. Of course, this does not count people employed under government contracts. Nor does it count those employed by government regulations, or the government-created legal morass we find ourselves in.
B. Of these 9 categories of employment, only one category actually grew. Need I tell you which one? HINT FOR DULLARDS: I don’t even need to bother telling you what the other categories are. Click here

3. County “firing” volunteer firefighters like crazy – and crazy is the word for it
RIDER COMMENT: As you probably recall, I headed up the opposition to last November’s San Diego countywide parcel tax (the perennial Prop A) to pay for a regional fire fighting agency. Everything I said in our opposition argument seems to have been proven true.
Except one thing.
My “official” published opposition SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE op ed was titled “No: County already has funds to improve firefighting.” Of course, that assertion proved correct.
What I got wrong was the timing. On election night when it became apparent that we opponents would indeed win, I predicted in a Channel 10 TV interview/debate that “within six months the county will come up with the funding for the fire district.” Actually it took less than three weeks after election night.
We saw this “found money” turnaround before when a few years ago the county pushed a ¼% sales tax proposition for libraries. Their actual semi-official campaign slogan was “There is no Plan B” – claiming that there was no source available to fund new and renovated branch libraries. We won that election handily. As it turned out, they started coming up with the needed funding less than 48 hours after they lost the election. Essentially everything was built that they wanted without the “critical” sales tax increase.
But back to the county’s new regional fire agency. Here’s the ironic postscript. As I’ve said before, government can screw up anything. Now they’ve screwed up our county volunteer firefighting.
The meddling of the County Supervisors has been disqualifying or driving away many of the volunteer firefighters that used to work for free, but are now essentially being banned from volunteering and forced to quit. In particular, this includes our grizzled veterans who know more about back country firefighting than those labor union city slicker firefighters who assist in the big brushfires.
It's apparent that the politicians and others who are so anxious to raise the standards for volunteer firefighters miss one important point -- supply and demand.

PAID fire departments have oodles of applicants -- as many as 100 applicants per opening. Most of today's newly hired urban paid firefighters are, if anything, overqualified. Paid fire departments can be picky.

On the other hand, VOLUNTEER fire departments have a constant battle getting volunteers. Along with the lack of pay, volunteers are required to take the same fire fighting (and often EMT) training of our paid firefighters -- sometimes at their own expense. This involves hundreds of hours of training and studying. And has been pointed out, the volunteers often must pay for most of their own gear.

Raising the standards shrinks the pool of volunteers. And it looks like that shrinkage is going to hit us hard this fall just when we may be facing major back country fires. Given our drought situation, that seems to be a likely event.

The irony is we can expect the labor union firefighters and politicians to place substantial blame on the county-forced understaffed volunteer fire departments for the property damage and lost lives from such fires. 'Vat a country!
How this mass disqualification of firefighter volunteers saves lives and property is an absolute mystery. But it’s a tale worth telling. Or, in this case, reading. And I strongly encourage you to read my next item as well – an excellent ode to volunteer firefighters.

SAN DIEGO READER
Big Agency Burns Little Volunteers
By Joe Deegan Published Wednesday, July 22, 2009
The history of wildfires in San Diego’s backcountry has yielded a vigorous volunteer firefighting subculture. Its foundations are self-reliance, strong community involvement, ingenuity, independence, and thrift. Today, those who embody the tradition feel threatened. They perceive the enemy to be the new San Diego County Fire Authority.
A plan to consolidate fire departments, both professional and volunteer, has been the pet project of county supervisor Dianne Jacob since the mid-1990s. But after the 2003 Cedar fire, according to the Los Angeles Times on October 31, 2003, Jacob conceded that “even with [consolidation], there is a dark cloud over all of us called lack of adequate resources.” Click here to continue

4. Read about Rider’s heroes – volunteer firefighters
RIDER COMMENT: PARADE MAGAZINE (that color supplement in many of the big papers’ Sunday edition) is one of my LEAST favorite publications. Their cover stories seem to alternate between self-indulgent articles about narcissistic celebrities who overcame adversity (truly pathetic stuff, sometimes), and stories about “The Crisis in ______________” (a different crisis every time – but always a crisis).
Last Sunday’s crisis was day care/preschool for tykes. The INEVITABLE conclusion of every such crisis story is that we need massive new government spending to cure the problem of the week.
But something went VERY wrong in their 5 July issue. Their cover story was a truly inspirational article lauding the nation’s volunteer firefighters.
VOLUNEER firefighters! Not our government often-overcompensated labor union firefighters. VOLUNTEERS! I was stunned to read about my REAL firefighter heroes in PARADE.
This was a GREAT piece! I’m suspect heads later rolled in PARADE’s pinko home office.
Here are some salient factoids in the article that few Americans are aware of:
A. 72% of all our nation’s firefighters are volunteers.

B. By most states’ laws, these volunteers have to receive the same training as the full time paid firefighters. Plus EMT training often is included.

C. More than 20,000 of the nation’s 30,200 fire departments are all-volunteer (and thousands more fire departments are a mix of paid and volunteer firefighters).

D. Of the 118 firefighters who died in the line of duty in 2007, 68 were volunteers.

You can read it here

5. Media blacks out story predicting 1.1 million California jobs lost from AB 32’s Draconian environmental regs
RIDER COMMENT: My maven Chris Reed succinctly says it all here.

6. For a great daily dose of free market economics, go to . . .
RICHARD RIDER COMMENT: Below are (probably too many) examples of a terrific free blogging service you might want to sign up for. You can receive updates as a daily email with links (the sample below). Or for you Internet sophisticates, receive an RSS feed to your computer or Blackberry. You can click on the "Google" icon below will post the “CARPE DIEM” RSS feed on your "igoogle.com" home page, if you have one (like me!). Or to your "Google Reader" service if you use that option.
The blogger, a rather libertarian free market college professor, is big on the fact that the economy has already turned around, and that few have noticed it (until this week!). He’s been saying so for months.
More important, the author has LOTS of interesting insights on economic and political issues, with data. Excellent stuff.
If the graphics aren't there to see, go to his website -- See here.
CARPE DIEM

Bidding Wars Break Out On Low-Priced FL Homes
Posted: 21 Jul 2009 04:48 PM PDT
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – July 21, 2009 – Bidding wars are returning to South Florida’s housing market, as investors and first-time buyers compete for homes and condominiums listed at $200,000 or less. The race for properties is reminiscent of the boom years from 2000 to 2005, when multiple offers on all types of dwellings helped push prices to record highs.

Back then, a dearth of properties for sale had buyers rushing to scoop up anything they could find, for fear that prices would keep rising. Now, frustrated with a bloated inventory of foreclosed homes in disrepair, buyers go to great lengths when they spot a house or condo in pristine condition.

“When they find a good listing, people are pouncing,” said Terry Story, a real estate agent for Coldwell Banker in Broward and Palm Beach counties.

Agents say the heated competition has been building in recent months, a result of low mortgage rates and the $8,000 tax credit for first-time buyers that expires Nov. 30. Steady sales increases during the past year gradually have worked off the inventory of available homes. Real estate agents are convinced that the overall market has hit bottom or is close to one. Click here

Median Home Prices in Houston Hit Record High
Posted: 21 Jul 2009 01:49 PM PDT
HOUSTON — (July 21, 2009) — Sales of single-family homes for the greater Houston area continued to improve in June, with the highest volume recorded since August 2008 and the highest median price in history. This comes despite a year-over-year decline in overall property sales of 15.0 percent and 13.5 percent for single-family homes, according to new monthly data compiled by the Houston Association of REALTORS® (HAR).

At $164,500, the June single-family home median price – the figure at which half of the homes sold for more and half sold for less – rose 2.8% from one year earlier to reach an all-time high. The average price of a single-family home in Houston dipped 2.4% last month to $221,783 compared to June 2008. That represents the highest average price since August 2008. Continued here

Houston Chronicle story here, "Houston's median home price hit an all-time high last month, as the market was boosted by seasonal buying, low interest rates and a tax incentive to spur sales."

Why America Shouldn't Buy "Buy American"
Posted: 21 Jul 2009 01:06 PM PDT

Is your iPod unpatriotic?

Its 451 parts are made in dozens of nations, and creating the little doodads employs thousands of foreigners. Final assembly is done in China—a country that right-wingers and left-wingers alike fear is an economic threat to the U.S.

As the recession worsens, maybe patriotic Americans should be smashing foreign-made iPods in protest. Or at least hiring bikini-clad American women to do the job, which is exactly what Reason.tv did. Our patriotic, sledgehammer-wielding bikini bandits headed to California’s Venice Beach to smash some foreign-made iPods to make a political statement about saving American jobs. Watch the Video Here.
Watch another version of the video and find out more here at Reason.tv.

See related CD post "iPod Teardown: Who Really Makes It?" from June 2007.

Posted: 21 Jul 2009 08:08 AM PDT
Despite Troubles In the U.S., GM Thrives Abroad; Sales in China Increase by 38%

National Public Radio -- General Motors, once the world's largest automaker, has had a rough few months. In June, the company filed for bankruptcy. Last week, as part of a massive restructuring plan, 60 percent of the company's ownership shifted to U.S. taxpayers.

However, the news isn't all doom and gloom for the U.S. auto giant. Many of the company's international operations are posting strong gains. In China, GM's second-largest market, sales jumped to 814,442 units in the first half of 2009 from 590,132 during the same period in 2008 — an increase of 38% (see chart above). And in Latin America, seven countries set GM sales records in 2008.

MP: In the first half of 2008, GM sold almost three times (2.7X) as many cars in the U.S. (1,589,000) as in China (590,132), and this year vehicle sales are almost the same in both countries: 947,518 in the U.S. (data here for U.S.) compared to 814,442 in China.

For GM's sake, let's hope they don't start a "Buy China" campaign, or start erecting signs saying "Parking of U.S. vehicles strictly prohibited and will be towed at owner's expense." (Click here to read and listen to the story)

SD Airport board members abusing expense accounts big time

2009-08-11T11:31:00.000-07:00

RICHARD RIDER COMMENT: A couple years ago the SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE did a fine exposé on the extravagant spending by the appointed members of the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority. Currently the agency has a $121 million budget, which it derives from public money – primarily from airport fees and rents.
As a result, new spending guidelines were put in place. Guidelines, smidelines. Our airport officials don’t need no stinkin’ guidelines. Must be so, since they imperiously ignore said guidelines.
We know that such is still the case, thanks to a follow-up investigation by the intrepid Voice of San Diego. Click here to link to their just-released article.
You might be wise not to read it – if you pay the fees for flying in and out of San Diego’s Lindberg Airport. Don’t want you going postal in the airport.
Perhaps the most egregious incident was when two board members flew to England for a Charger exhibition game (I’ll leave it to you to conjure up the rationale for that trip). No expense was spared – from the $5,500 first class tickets to the $350 Charger reception to the $1,200 for seats (a board member and a guest -- $600 each) at the game. BTW, that’s the price for EACH board member’s football two tickets, reception and airfare.
Ya gotta’ love authority Chairman Bob Watkins’ response to the Voice story – it’s just lowly paid reporter envy. Great stuff – his elitism is insufferable.
Just in case you think the above expenses are a one-time aberration – consider this: San Diego Airport staff fly to Los Angeles for as much as $820 a ticket. And yes, that is Los Angeles, California.
Now, let’s see if these political appointees avoid being fired. Assuming that they are not fired, surely they will be denied reappointment by the politicians who first put them there.
Yeah, when pigs land on the Lindberg runway.

2009-07-31T12:11:00.000-07:00

RICHARD RIDER RANT 7/31/09

There are severe limits to the good that the government can do for the economy, but there are almost no limits to the harm it can do.
Milton Friedman, Nobel laureate

1. Rider trash fee opposition op-ed in SD UNION-TRIBUNE.

2. One area of employment grew in the county – you’ll never guess. Well, actually you probably WILL guess.

3. County dismissing volunteer firefighters like crazy – and crazy is the word for it.

4. Read about Rider’s heroes – volunteer firefighters.

5. Media blacks out story predicting 1.1 million California jobs lost from AB 32’s Draconian environmental regs

6. For a great daily dose of free market economics, go to . . .

7. Fools! You could have made a fortune (like me) investing in greedy health care companies. Or not.

8. California “only” the 6th worst state? We wish!

9. Feds’ stimulus often “much ado about nothing.” Their PR departments are working overtime. Naturally at our expense.

10. If Obama disappoints his fans, they will have only themselves to blame.

1. Rider trash fee opposition op-ed in SD UNION-TRIBUNE

In the Sunday, 26 July edition of the San Diego Union-Tribune "Dialog -- Insight and Opinion" section there is a full page "Trash Talk" two-opinion debate. I wrote the pro-taxpayer column – you’ll see the details below.

The issue is whether to repeal the San Diego city "People's Ordinance" which includes single unit residential trash pickup as a city service. Proponents of the repeal want to start charging fees for this city service, while opponents (such as I) see this as a slippery slope -- a way to start raising DE FACTO taxes without the required 2/3 vote of the electorate (or any vote at all, actually). See my column for more thoughts on this.

BTW, the U-T (hopefully inadvertently) summarized the issue with a pro-fee, anti-taxpayer explanation published with each column -- omitting any reason for NOT imposing the fee.

Here's the U-T summary. See what you think.

---

The city of San Diego is mandated, under the People's Ordinance of 1919, to use tax money, rather than a fee for service, to pay for trash pickup at most single-family residences. Over the years, many have called for the repeal of the ordinance on the grounds that it is unfair to those who live in multifamily units and that by charging for trash pickup, as many municipalities do, the city could ease its financial problems.

---

BACKGROUND: The San Diego County Grand Jury did an "investigation" and concluded that we should start charging fees. But their investigation is by law secret, and they won't tell you who they talked to. Their foreman wrote the "raise fees" column.

Well, I have a good idea who they talked to -- and, more important, I know who they DIDN'T talk to. They went to city bureaucrats and politicians who favor charging the fee, and probably some Big Government professor at a local government college. Apparently the (not so) Grand Jury spoke with NO ONE who disagreed. Not me, not Carl DeMaio, not the San Diego County Taxpayers Association (which actually has not yet taken a position on the matter) -- not anyone I can find who is familiar with city government and opposes the new fees.

IF this change would result in REBATES to all San Diego taxpayers of the current taxes being spent on trash pick-up, I could support such a measure. But this is about one thing – getting more revenue for the city so the politicians don’t have to face down the city workers over excessive compensation issues.

You can read the two columns online. Of course, you can read the comments by readers – and my devastating retorts. There a lively give-and-take between yours truly and the fee fanciers.

Here are the two SD U-T columns, each preceded by the URL.

http://tinyurl.com/ngetul

SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE

Trash talk
Before we pay more, spending must be controlled
By Richard Rider

July 26, 2009

To now start charging “fees” – in reality taxes levied without a vote of the citizens – for city services previously paid for by taxes is a dangerous idea, and shear madness in a recession.

For generations, the city of San Diego has provided for single-unit residential trash pickup, paid out of city revenues. Now we are told that this historical service is a budget problem, contributing to the city budget deficit. A recent grand jury report calls for new fees for residential trash pick-up. What has changed?

Granted, this recession is dramatic. But city revenue has dropped only modestly. Indeed, property tax revenue is still going up. The city's 2009-2010 general fund revenue is projected to be only 3.7 percent lower than 2008-2009.

What is different is San Diego's municipal expenses. They have soared. And clearly the driving force is our runaway city salaries, pensions and health care costs.

A recent grand jury report claimed that these compensation excesses have largely been brought under control – an embarrassingly silly assertion. In this stock market, the city pension fund deficit is approaching $2 billion. Unfunded retiree health care costs exceed $1 billion. Three years after the citizens mandated that the city begin competitive bidding of municipal services, there has been zero progress. The vaunted two-tier pension plan for new non-safety employees saves only a tiny amount for taxpayers, and is still far too generous. This past calendar year, city payroll costs – not counting benefits – rose by $43 million.

To now start charging “fees” – in reality taxes levied without a vote of the citizens – for city services previously paid for by taxes is a dangerous idea, and shear madness in a recession. It's a slippery slope, leading to city labor unions insisting on fees for all sorts of municipal functions in order to maintain the employees' opulent compensation packages.

How bad can it get? Some towns in other states have been charging fees exceeding $500 to have police or firefighters to come to a traffic accident – even a minor one.

Trash fee proponents want us to pay more, but refuse to control costs. Before such fees are even considered, we should first make every effort to improve efficiency.

Most important, we should put city trash collection out to aggressive competitive bid for substantial savings. We are the only city in the county to use government workers to pick up refuse.

Just because city taxpayers pay for a service does not mean that overpriced city employees have to provide the service. Given our incredible overcompensation of city workers, taxpayer savings could easily exceed 30 percent. Similar savings can be achieved by putting other city functions out to bid – libraries, printing, street light maintenance, landscaping, etc.

The majority of the San Diego City Council is beholden to the labor unions that put them in office. But these politicians are not fools. They know they can't keep spending what they don't have.

It comes down to this: If our politicians run out of revenue options, they will control spending: seeking ways to deliver city services at lower cost. If they can talk us into paying more taxes and fees, they won't control spending.

Our job as voters and taxpayers is to provide the adult supervision needed to get our elected officials to do the job we pay them for – making citizens' welfare a higher priority than the prosperity of city workers.

Rider is chairman of San Diego Tax Fighters.

--------------------

RAISE FEES OP-ED by Rider’s opponent

http://tinyurl.com/ko3h7u

Trash talk
Paying for a service many San Diegans don't get

By Leonard D. Martin

July 26, 2009

Yada, yada, yada (I thoughtfully summarized it for you, but the link IS above for you to read).

2. One area of employment grew in the county – you’ll never guess. Well, actually you probably WILL guess.

RIDER COMMENT: For me, two items stood out from a 20 July Rick Toscano blog/column in the Voice of San Diego concerning the San Diego County job market for the fiscal year just ended 30 June, 2009:

A. Of the 9 categories of employment in the county, the largest was “government.” An amazing 18% of working folks in the county are employed by some government – federal, state or local. Of course, this does not count people employed under government contracts. Nor does it count those employed by government regulations, or the government-created legal morass we find ourselves in.

B. Of these 9 categories of employment, only one category actually grew. Need I tell you which one? HINT FOR DULLARDS: I don’t even need to bother telling you what the other 8 categories are.

http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/toscano/

3. County “firing” volunteer firefighters like crazy – and crazy is the word for it

RIDER COMMENT: As you probably recall, I headed up the opposition to last November’s San Diego countywide parcel tax (the perennial Prop A) to pay for a regional fire fighting agency. Everything I said in our opposition argument seems to have been proven true.

Except one thing.

My “official” published opposition SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE op ed was titled “No: County already has funds to improve firefighting.” Of course, that assertion proved correct.

What I got wrong was the timing. On election night when it became apparent that we opponents would indeed win, I predicted in a Channel 10 TV interview/debate that “within six months the county will come up with the funding for the fire district.” Actually it took less than three weeks after election night.

We saw this “found money” turnaround before when a few years ago the county pushed a ¼% sales tax proposition for libraries. Their actual semi-official campaign slogan was “There is no Plan B” – claiming that there was no source available to fund new and renovated branch libraries. We won that election handily. As it turned out, they started coming up with the needed funding less than 48 hours after they lost the election. Essentially everything was built that they wanted without the “critical” sales tax increase.

But back to the county’s new regional fire agency. Here’s the ironic postscript. As I’ve said before, government can screw up anything. Now they’ve screwed up our county volunteer firefighting.

The meddling of the County Supervisors has been disqualifying or driving away many of the volunteer firefighters that used to work for free, but are now essentially being banned from volunteering and forced to quit. In particular, this includes our grizzled veterans who know more about back country firefighting than those labor union city slicker firefighters who assist in the big brushfires.

It's apparent that the politicians and others who are so anxious to raise the standards for volunteer firefighters miss one important point -- supply and demand.

PAID fire departments have oodles of applicants -- as many as 100 applicants per opening. Most of today's newly hired urban paid firefighters are, if anything, overqualified. Paid fire departments can be picky.

On the other hand, VOLUNTEER fire departments have a constant battle getting volunteers. Along with the lack of pay, volunteers are required to take the same fire fighting (and often EMT) training of our paid firefighters -- sometimes at their own expense. This involves hundreds of hours of training and studying. And has been pointed out, the volunteers often must pay for most of their own gear.

Raising the standards shrinks the pool of volunteers. And it looks like that shrinkage is going to hit us hard this fall just when we may be facing major back country fires. Given our drought situation, that seems to be a likely event.

The irony is we can expect the labor union firefighters and politicians to place substantial blame on the county-forced understaffed volunteer fire departments for the property damage and lost lives from such fires. 'Vat a country!

How this mass disqualification of firefighter volunteers saves lives and property is an absolute mystery. But it’s a tale worth telling. Or, in this case, reading. And I strongly encourage you to read my next item as well – an excellent ode to volunteer firefighters.

http://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2009/jul/22/big-agency-burns-little-volunteers/

SAN DIEGO READER

Big Agency Burns Little Volunteers
By Joe Deegan | Published Wednesday, July 22, 2009

The history of wildfires in San Diego’s backcountry has yielded a vigorous volunteer firefighting subculture. Its foundations are self-reliance, strong community involvement, ingenuity, independence, and thrift. Today, those who embody the tradition feel threatened. They perceive the enemy to be the new San Diego County Fire Authority.

A plan to consolidate fire departments, both professional and volunteer, has been the pet project of county supervisor Dianne Jacob since the mid-1990s. But after the 2003 Cedar fire, according to the Los Angeles Times on October 31, 2003, Jacob conceded that “even with [consolidation], there is a dark cloud over all of us called lack of adequate resources.”

On May 29, 2008, the County Grand Jury pinned the blame for wildfire damage on too much trust in backcountry volunteer fire departments. The report suggested that people were acting as if it was still “the ‘Old West,’ when people banded together and formed groups to protect themselves.” What is needed, according to the report, is what most large counties use, a regional firefighting agency.

So the County asked citizens to fund it. But at the polls last fall, voters narrowly defeated a $52-a-year parcel-tax initiative to consolidate all fire departments in the region. The plan had wider support than the outcome indicates, as a two-thirds vote was required for passage. In the wake of defeat and anticipation of more big wildfires, a familiar rant went up that San Diegans are too cheap to pay for government services.

But Jacob had Plan B ready to go, a $15.5 million agency with the power to coordinate firefighting efforts in San Diego’s backcountry. “County officials said the authority [could] be formed although voters rejected the tax,” according to a November 23, 2008 California Fire news release. The new agency has responsibility to watch over “about a third of the county,” more than 920,000 acres. Within that area, “The authority will cover about 50,000 people…now served by six volunteer agencies and Cal Fire.… The volunteer agencies will remain but will be better-funded and administered by a fire warden, a new position.”

“The fire authority is one of the first steps in the process of creating a countywide agency,” the news release continued. “Jacob said she hopes to expand the regional authority within the next two years to include other parts of the unincorporated county now served by rural fire districts. After that, urban areas served by fire departments would be included.”

The good news for the volunteer firefighters seemed to be the $95 to $110 per 24-hour shift they’re set to receive under the new plan. But as paid employees, they had to qualify for workers’ compensation. And that meant passing a physical exam, as well as background and credit check, conditions of the contract the County offered them. A number of volunteers are in their 70s and/or out of shape. So many resisted signing the contract, saying they were thinking over their decision until the last minute of an initial July 1 deadline the County gave them. But on June 24, the County told the volunteers they had until the next day to sign or lose the opportunity to fight future backcountry fires.

During the period of mid- to late June, the Ramona Sentinel and North County Times aired out volunteer firefighters’ grievances about having to take the physical exam. One fire chief stated that some volunteers feared an exam failure would mean they wouldn’t be able to qualify for health insurance in the future. The newspaper accounts focused mainly on the volunteer departments surrounding Ramona.

To get a different perspective, I speak with three volunteers from the Shelter Valley Volunteer Fire Department. Shelter Valley lies 16 miles east and downhill from Julian. All three of the volunteers concurred that the physical exam constitutes a serious issue for many firefighters who still have much to contribute. Fire operations chief Tony Mayors, who is 53, tells me he knows he can’t pass the exam due to his high blood pressure. But he has been a volunteer in Shelter Valley for 12 years and the operations chief for 5. He believes his experience of fighting fires in the area is still a valuable resource.

Mayors eventually did fail the physical, but, the County has not rejected him outright. Instead, he’s been placed on hold while officials try to figure out how he might be used. “I think I should still be able to go out on calls,” Mayors says. “Call it quality control or whatever you want, but I’ve been doing this so long I can correct less experienced firefighters’ mistakes when I see them. That’s why I became a chief. I know I can’t carry a hundred-pound fire hose up a steep hill. But I can hardly be useful in my own way if I’m not allowed to go out on calls.”

I speak about the issue with Gig Conaughton, a spokesman for the County’s Department of Planning and Land Use, the administrative home for the new fire authority. Conaughton tells me the County cannot even allow volunteers to perform field supervision if they can’t pass the physical. “Think about it,” he says. “Somebody who goes out on a call might suddenly face a dangerous situation where they’re needed to help. It wouldn’t be safe. We [do] have one to three administrative positions that experienced chiefs could be offered.”

Gerald Sanders is currently the administrative chief at the Shelter Valley department. He has worked as a local volunteer for 30 years. He is 78 years old. “I know I could pass the physical,” he tells me, “because I walk eight miles every other day.” But these days, he confines himself to the “technical issues and paperwork.”

For years, Sanders has written grants for the Shelter Valley department. He thinks the money he has brought in totals somewhere near $800,000. With some of it, the department bought several of its own trucks, including one brush clearer and a small fire engine, and converted a station wagon into a medical emergency response vehicle. The department also built the Shelter Valley fire station.

The County gave Shelter Valley another truck. But it’s a bulky gas guzzler, says Sanders, and his colleagues agree. “The ladder is so high on the truck,” says Tony Mayors, “that you’d have to be seven feet tall to pull it out.”

Does the County prefer, I ask, that you use that truck?

“Yes, it’s got their name real big on the door,” says Mayors, laughing. “Our trucks have a small Shelter Valley logo.”

What would have happened if the volunteer departments did not sign the county contracts? “They would have taken our equipment and buildings,” Gerald Sanders tells me, “and replaced our volunteers with Cal Fire firefighters. Of course, the professionals would fight the fires as well as we have. But we have a record of having never missed a call out here and never having anyone get hurt. The Shelter Valley department covers a 582-square-mile area, so that’s not too bad. And one thing we do know better than outsiders is the terrain, all the little canyons. We’ve been to every one of them.

“But only 10 percent of our calls are fire related,” Sanders continues. “The rest are emergency rescues. For stopping fire, the biggest need in the backcountry is brush control around people’s properties. If the County wanted to help us, they would do more of that. But they don’t have the personnel to do it.”

I ask the County’s Gig Conaughton how brush management is handled. “The County has an ongoing relationship with Cal Fire regarding brush and weed control,” he writes me by email. “We loan budgeted equipment (trucks) to Cal Fire, which provides manpower to do inspections. Our County Code Enforcement follows up if abatement is called for.”

Ron Thornhill used to drive Shelter Valley’s fire engine. Not anymore. He decided not to take the physical even though he’s 50 and believes he would pass it. Thornhill is the angriest of the men I speak with. His biggest concern is the money the County is spending on its new fire authority.

“The volunteers were doing a very good job,” says Thornhill, “and doing it for nothing. I can’t tell you the number of small fires we stopped before they got going. If they reach the top of the hill and there’s a Santa Ana wind, you’re going to get the next Cedar fire. But that never happened on our watch.

“Now the County comes along and is going to spend $15 million and not do any better than we’ve been doing. And we did it free.

“I heard the County is renting a house for Cal Fire firefighters who will come in here from the outside and work out of our station. That’s new salaries they’ll pay and new benefits packages and new workmen’s comp payments they’ll make with taxpayer dollars. Today, I went down and turned in my equipment. No more firefighting for me.” Thornhill is not the only one. Of 12 original volunteers, 6 decided to take the physical. Among those 6, 2 passed to become County-approved firefighters.

I confirm with the County’s Conaughton that two Cal Fire firefighters, one an officer, will live in a rented building at Shelter Valley. He wants to emphasize, however, that the new guys will become members of the Shelter Valley community.

It’s a touchy point for operations chief Tony Mayors. “Yeah,” he says, “they say the County can generate money better than our barbecue fund-raisers. But we care about this community, and the community cares about us. I’m going to feel terrible if I have to let them down. And it won’t be the same not making the hamburgers.”

Meanwhile, Cal Fire firefighters have been rotating in and out of Shelter Valley, making it difficult for local volunteers to help them learn locations. And fiscal reality may be setting in. In talks with their new supervisors, chiefs Sanders and Mayors have learned that the County probably can’t afford to keep two Cal Fire firefighters permanently stationed in Shelter Valley. Since the local volunteer force has been “decimated,” in the words of Sanders, new volunteers will have to come from outside the area, and none will be officers. The Mount Laguna Volunteer Fire Department is already sending down new volunteers.

There may be hope that some of the lost Shelter Valley volunteers might still contribute. There has been a tiny bit of progress, Sanders tells me. “The County agreed to allow us mediation on points of dispute. But they’ve reserved the right to walk away from talks after ten days. Which means that if they don’t like something we want, they can wait ten days."

4. Read about Rider’s heroes – volunteer firefighters

RIDER COMMENT: PARADE MAGAZINE (that color supplement in many of the big papers’ Sunday edition) is one of my LEAST favorite publications. Their cover stories seem to alternate between self-indulgent articles about narcissistic celebrities who overcame adversity (truly pathetic stuff, sometimes), and stories about “The Crisis in ______________” (a different crisis every time – but always a crisis).

Last Sunday’s crisis was day care/preschool for tykes. The INEVITABLE conclusion of every such crisis story is that we need massive new government spending to cure the problem of the week.

But something went VERY wrong in their 5 July issue. Their cover story was a truly inspirational article lauding the nation’s volunteer firefighters.

VOLUNEER firefighters! Not our government often-overcompensated labor union firefighters. VOLUNTEERS! I was stunned to read about my REAL firefighter heroes in PARADE.

This was a GREAT piece! I’m suspect heads later rolled in PARADE’s pinko home office.

Here are some salient factoids in the article that few Americans are aware of:

A. 72% of all our nation’s firefighters are volunteers.

B. By most states’ laws, these volunteers have to receive the same training as the full time paid firefighters. Plus EMT training often is included.

C. More than 20,000 of the nation’s 30,200 fire departments are all-volunteer (and thousands more fire departments are a mix of paid and volunteer firefighters).

D. Of the 118 firefighters who died in the line of duty in 2007, 68 were volunteers.

http://www.parade.com/articles/editions/2009/edition_07-05-2009/Why-They-Serve.html

PARADE MAGAZINE

72% of America's firefighters are volunteers

Why They Serve
by Peter Greenberg

published: 07/05/2009

When the fire alarm sounds, across America, grocers immediately leave their checkout lanes, architects put down their pencils, plumbers drop their wrenches, chefs hand over their cooking chores, and telephone repairmen leave the lines cut. Our nation’s volunteer firefighters are always prepared to serve.

Of the estimated 1.15 million firefighters in the U.S., 72% are volunteers. Their departments can be found in small towns and large cities, in isolated areas of Alaska and New Mexico, on Indian reservations, even abroad. Since March 2008, 10 volunteer firefighters from New York State have helped to lead the fire department at Camp Phoenix in Afghanistan. More than 20,000 of the nation’s 30,200 fire departments are all-volunteer. In Massachusetts alone, there are about 120 fire departments made up entirely of volunteers. In fact, most small and midsize communities in the U.S. rely primarily on volunteer firefighters.

There are departments located completely underground, their stations mined out of the side of a mountain (Creede, Colo.), others staffed by high school students (Aniak, Alaska), and others, such as the department in Dover, Del., that work solely to protect state capitals. Yet all share one thing in common: They are central to the American community, and in many towns, they are the community.

The volunteer fire department is often the first line of defense in times of emergency. When Continental Flight 3407 crashed short of the runway near Buffalo, N.Y., in February, killing 50, the first responders were the 64 members of the Clarence Center Volunteer Fire Company.

These days, volunteer fire service can sometimes mean making do with a barely equipped firehouse on a limited budget or having the local car dealer pitch in to fix broken equipment. But it doesn’t mean using untrained staff. Most volunteer fire departments require the same standards of their members as paid municipal firefighters. The volunteers train in CPR, hazardous materials, communications, and advanced firefighting techniques. The work also is no less dangerous: Of the 118 firefighters who died in the line of duty in 2007, 68 were volunteers.

On Fire Island National Seashore, a 32-mile-long strip of beach 50 miles east of New York City, most of the fire trucks are specially converted four-wheel-drive vehicles. “Out here, when you turn 18, you join the volunteer department,” says Ed Horton, 52, a building contractor who has been a member of the Ocean Bay Park Fire Department for more than 30 years and currently serves as fire commissioner. “It’s just the way it is.”

For Horton, the fire department is all about community and family. His grandfather helped found it in 1950, his father was a chief, his mom served as fire commissioner, his brother Michael is the current chief, and his youngest daughter just joined. “There’s this feeling that because we’re on an island and we’re volunteers, that we’re untrained,” Horton says. “But it’s not true. We’re subject to the same rules and regulations as mainland departments. You do this job because it’s part of your family, part of your community.”

The Ocean Bay Park Fire Department consists of a 1957 Willys Jeep fire truck and three other vehicles. Two are 1000-gallons-per-minute pumpers, which carry more than 1000 feet of hose—nearly enough to reach across Fire Island, from bay to ocean. With limited water on the island, it’s not unusual for the firefighters to pump seawater from the south bay to fight a blaze. In winter, there are few fires. But in the summer, when the population on Fire Island explodes from several hundred year-round residents to more than 50,000 people, the department can be extremely busy.

In fact, at many resort and vacation destinations, volunteer fire departments are nothing less than lifelines. Take the small Alaskan community of Skagway. In the high summer season, the population doubles to about 1600. That would be tough enough on the small department, which was created during the Gold Rush of 1898. But on most days, there can be as many as six cruise ships that pull into Skagway’s tiny harbor, instantly expanding the population to around 16,000 and making the Skagway volunteers stay on duty for at least eight hours a day. Fighting fires? No—mostly providing EMT services and racing sick cruise-ship passengers to hospitals 200 miles away.

And then there are the “Dragon Slayers,” volunteer firefighters in the remote town of Aniak, Alaska. The entire department: four adults, including a schoolteacher and bush pilot, and nine high school students. Their equipment: one ambulance and an aging 1976 pumper truck in need of repair. Aniak is isolated. There are no roads to any other village in Alaska, and Anchorage is 350 miles away. “We struggle a lot, but somehow we make it work,” says Fire Chief Pete Brown, 64, a retired fishing guide. This year, the Aniak fire department expects to handle at least 300 alarms—a huge number for a town of 600 residents.

No matter where NBC News anchor Brian Williams goes on assignment, the first place he stops is the local volunteer firehouse. “If you want to know what’s going on in town, that’s where you need to be,” says Williams, who joined the Middletown Township, N.J., fire department as a volunteer at 18. “The volunteers know their town, because they are their town. It’s all about community.”

“I never had any thoughts of becoming a firefighter,” says Mary Hauprich, 45, a writer and mother of two from New York. But three years after moving to Islesboro, a small enclave (pop. 600) off the coast of Lincolnville Beach, Maine, she was approached by its volunteer firefighters. “They heard I was a writer, and they said they just needed someone to take notes at their meetings,” she recalls. “I said I would. And the next thing I knew, I had signed on. As it developed, I never took a single note!

“It uncovered a passion I didn’t know was there,” she says. Before long, Hauprich was learning about all the pumps, how to attack an interior fire, and how to fix a fire truck. Currently, there are 21 members in the department (her husband Brian, a former chef, also volunteers as an EMT) and only four vehicles. “For six years, I was the only woman in the department, but I recruited another,” she says proudly. “She manages a nearby farm.” Hauprich’s 15-year-old son is now a captain of Islesboro’s junior firefighters program.

Recruiting is a worrisome issue for many volunteer fire departments. “It’s a real problem,” Brian Williams says. “We need to find more people willing to serve.”

In some departments, membership levels are dropping to—pun intended—alarming levels. “We need folks to support their volunteer fire departments,” Williams adds. “They’re the guys who come when you call, and they truly are the backbone of America.”

Author and travel expert Peter Greenberg has been a volunteer firefighter since he was 18.

5. Media blacks out story predicting 1.1 million California jobs lost from AB 32’s Draconian environmental regs

RIDER COMMENT: My maven Chris Reed succinctly says it all below.

http://weblog.signonsandiego.com/weblogs/afb/archives/035106.html

CHRIS REED BLOG

July 24, 2009
Yet another media greenout: Report predicting 1.1 million job loss from AB 32 is ignored

A study commissioned by the California Small Business Roundtable -- see the PDF here -- suggests California may someday look back on the current 11.6% state unemployment rate as a golden era.

Sanjay Varshney, dean of the college of business administration at Sacramento State, and Dennis Tootelian, director of the university's center for small business, predict that AB 32 will cut the state's economic output by 10 percent and lead to the loss of 1.1 million jobs.

That's right. 1.1 million jobs. More than the 904,300 jobs California has lost since the recession officially began in December 2007.

Now, of course, the fact that a business group sponsored the study raises questions about it. But the study's warnings about the dire effects of forcing state businesses to switch to cleaner but much costlier forms of energy -- unlike their rivals in other states and nations -- track precisely with the high-profile economists who trashed the California air board "scoping plan," which ridiculously asserted AB 32 would have no economic downside.

Here's the kicker: The California media eagerly report the claims coming from a handful of zealot UC Berkeley professors that their "research" shows AB 32 will be an economic bonanza. But how many California newspapers detailed Varshney's and Tootelian's findings?

None.

According to Nexis, the only coverage it got was from Investor's Business Daily.

This is pathetic. And typical. Remember, the high-profile economists who trashed the AB 32 "scoping plan" were ignored by almost everyone -- until after the plan was adopted by the air board.

Arnold thinks AB 32 will be his lasting legacy. It sure will. Just not remotely in the way he thinks. Abetted by the media, the Schwarzenegger depression is just around the corner.

Posted by Chris Reed at July 24, 2009 11:44 AM

6. For a great daily dose of free market economics, go to . . .

RICHARD RIDER COMMENT: Below are (probably too many) examples of a terrific free blogging service you might want to sign up for. You can receive updates as a daily email with links (the sample below). Or for you Internet sophisticates, receive an RSS feed to your computer or Blackberry. You can click on the "Google" icon below will post the “CARPE DIEM” RSS feed on your "igoogle.com" home page, if you have one (like me!). Or to your "Google Reader" service if you use that option.

The blogger, a rather libertarian free market college professor, is big on the fact that the economy has already turned around, and that few have noticed it (until this week!). He’s been saying so for months.

More important, the author has LOTS of interesting insights on economic and political issues, with data. Excellent stuff. See below.

If the graphics aren't there to see, go to his website -- http://mjperry.blogspot.com

CARPE DIEM

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bidding Wars Break Out On Low-Priced FL Homes
Median Home Prices in Houston Hit Record High
Why America Shouldn't Buy "Buy American"
Despite Troubles In the U.S., GM Thrives Abroad; Sales in China Increase by 38%
Markets in Everything: EKGs, MRIs on a Blackberry
Chicago Fed Index Increases for 5th Straight Month
Now Here Is a Real Housing Crisis; And It Probably Won't Be Getting Better Anytime Soon
Bidding Wars Break Out On Low-Priced FL Homes

Posted: 21 Jul 2009 04:48 PM PDT

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – July 21, 2009 – Bidding wars are returning to South Florida’s housing market, as investors and first-time buyers compete for homes and condominiums listed at $200,000 or less. The race for properties is reminiscent of the boom years from 2000 to 2005, when multiple offers on all types of dwellings helped push prices to record highs.

Back then, a dearth of properties for sale had buyers rushing to scoop up anything they could find, for fear that prices would keep rising. Now, frustrated with a bloated inventory of foreclosed homes in disrepair, buyers go to great lengths when they spot a house or condo in pristine condition.

“When they find a good listing, people are pouncing,” said Terry Story, a real estate agent for Coldwell Banker in Broward and Palm Beach counties.

Agents say the heated competition has been building in recent months, a result of low mortgage rates and the $8,000 tax credit for first-time buyers that expires Nov. 30. Steady sales increases during the past year gradually have worked off the inventory of available homes. Real estate agents are convinced that the overall market has hit bottom or is close to one.

Median Home Prices in Houston Hit Record High

Posted: 21 Jul 2009 01:49 PM PDT

HOUSTON — (July 21, 2009) — Sales of single-family homes for the greater Houston area continued to improve in June, with the highest volume recorded since August 2008 and the highest median price in history. This comes despite a year-over-year decline in overall property sales of 15.0 percent and 13.5 percent for single-family homes, according to new monthly data compiled by the Houston Association of REALTORS® (HAR).

At $164,500, the June single-family home median price – the figure at which half of the homes sold for more and half sold for less – rose 2.8% from one year earlier to reach an all-time high. The average price of a single-family home in Houston dipped 2.4% last month to $221,783 compared to June 2008. That represents the highest average price since August 2008.

Foreclosure property sales showed further decline, as they have each month this year, making up 16.8% of all single-family home sales in the Houston area in June. That compares to 34% percent in January, 28% in February, 24.5% in March, 23.6% in April and 19.9% in May. The median price of June foreclosure sales reported in the Multiple Listing Service fell 3% from $90,000 to $87,000 on a year-over-year basis.

Houston Chronicle story here, "Houston's median home price hit an all-time high last month, as the market was boosted by seasonal buying, low interest rates and a tax incentive to spur sales."

Why America Shouldn't Buy "Buy American"

Posted: 21 Jul 2009 01:06 PM PDT

Is your iPod unpatriotic?

Its 451 parts are made in dozens of nations, and creating the little doodads employs thousands of foreigners. Final assembly is done in China—a country that right-wingers and left-wingers alike fear is an economic threat to the U.S.

As the recession worsens, maybe patriotic Americans should be smashing foreign-made iPods in protest. Or at least hiring bikini-clad American women to do the job, which is exactly what Reason.tv did. Our patriotic, sledgehammer-wielding bikini bandits headed to California’s Venice Beach to smash some foreign-made iPods to make a political statement about saving American jobs.

Watch the video and find out more here at Reason.tv.

See related CD post "iPod Teardown: Who Really Makes It?" from June 2007.

Despite Troubles In the U.S., GM Thrives Abroad; Sales in China Increase by 38%

Posted: 21 Jul 2009 08:08 AM PDT

National Public Radio -- General Motors, once the world's largest automaker, has had a rough few months. In June, the company filed for bankruptcy. Last week, as part of a massive restructuring plan, 60 percent of the company's ownership shifted to U.S. taxpayers.

However, the news isn't all doom and gloom for the U.S. auto giant. Many of the company's international operations are posting strong gains. In China, GM's second-largest market, sales jumped to 814,442 units in the first half of 2009 from 590,132 during the same period in 2008 — an increase of 38% (see chart above). And in Latin America, seven countries set GM sales records in 2008.

MP: In the first half of 2008, GM sold almost three times (2.7X) as many cars in the U.S. (1,589,000) as in China (590,132), and this year vehicle sales are almost the same in both countries: 947,518 in the U.S. (data here for U.S.) compared to 814,442 in China.

For GM's sake, let's hope they don't start a "Buy China" campaign, or start erecting signs saying "Parking of U.S. vehicles strictly prohibited and will be towed at owner's expense."

Markets in Everything: EKGs, MRIs on a Blackberry

Posted: 21 Jul 2009 07:42 AM PDT

Medical data delivered to the Palm of your hand, Anytime... Anywhere....

The mVisum Medical Communication System is a communication tool that allows medical professionals to securely receive, review and respond to patient data recorded at the point of care. Information is transmitted via secure HIPAA compliant internet servers then transmitted through mobile technology to the required physicians’ handheld smartphone.

Sent data can include: EKGs, DICOM Images, Cine Loops, X-Rays, CT Scans, and MRIs.

Traditional information such as vital signs and other textual information can also be included in the delivered message thus providing a complete picture of patient condition.

Chicago Fed Index Increases for 5th Straight Month

Posted: 21 Jul 2009 07:25 AM PDT

CHICAGO FED -- The Chicago Fed National Activity Index shows that economic activity improved in June - the index was –1.80 in June, up from –2.30 in May. The three-month moving average, CFNAI-MA3, was –2.12 in June, up from –2.65 in the previous month (see top chart above).

June’s CFNAI-MA3 suggests that growth in national economic activity was well below its historical trend. The increase in the index was primarily due to the production and income category of indicators. This category made a smaller negative contribution to the index in June, –0.32, compared with its contribution in May, –0.70. The smaller negative contribution was driven by the fact that total industrial production decreased 0.4 percent in June after declining 1.2 percent in May.

MP: The Chicago Fed National Activity Index (CFNAI-MA3) has increased in each of the last five months, the first five consecutive monthly increase since the end of the 2001 recession, see bottom chart above.

Now Here Is a Real Housing Crisis; And It Probably Won't Be Getting Better Anytime Soon

Posted: 21 Jul 2009 06:10 AM PDT

Forbidden to buy and sell houses, Cubans rely on informal exchange to look for a better location or something in a better condition. The bureaucratic machinery to manage these bartered trades is complicated, so many pay a "stimulus" to the bureaucrats at the Housing Institute to help the process move more quickly. There are specialists in finding each family what they need, called "exchangers," and it's an occupation at the edges of the law.

The illusion that Raul Castro would allow a real estate market has been vanishing after a year of the mandate. The Cuban leaders know that if they authorize it, citizens will redistribute themselves in a short time. Those who have convertible money will move to the best neighborhoods and those who earn only Cuban pesos will live on the periphery. The fact that there are not rich areas and poor areas is not because, as some believe, we've achieved social justice, but rather the inability to buy and sell houses. What they haven't been able to face is the people's creativity, which disguises the frequent acts of buying and selling as simple exchanges.

~Yoani Sanchez, Cuban blogger

Update: See related NY Times article "With a Whisper, Cuba’s Housing Market Booms" (January 28, 2008), thanks to Colin for the pointer

Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610

http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2009/06/women-dominate-higher-education-at.html

Women Now Dominate Higher Education at Every Degree Level; The Female-Male Degree Gap Grows

It's college graduation season, and according to data available from the U.S. Department of Education, an estimated 3,092,800 degrees will be granted this academic year (2008-2009) for Associate's degrees (714,000), Bachelor's degrees (1,585,000), Master's degrees (647,000), Professional degrees for MD, DDS and JD (91,000) and Doctor's degrees for Ph.D and Ed.D (55,800).

Of the more than 3 million college degrees for the Class of 2009, women will earn close to 60% of those degrees (1,849,200), or almost 149 degrees for every 100 degrees earned by men.

And it's now official: Women dominate men at every level of higher education, in terms of degrees conferred. Here's the breakdown for graduates of the class of 2009:

Associate's Degrees: 167 for women for every 100 for men.

Bachelor's Degrees: 142 for women for every 100 for men.

Master's Degrees: 159 for women for every 100 for men.

Professional Degrees: 104 for women for every 100 for men.

Doctoral Degrees: 107 for women for every 100 for men.

In fact, the last time men had more degrees than women at any level was the Class of 2006, which had slightly more men than women for both Professional and Doctoral degrees. For the other levels, it hasn't been even close for decades. The last year that men earned more Master's degrees than women was 1984-1985, for Bachelor's degrees it was the Class of 1981, and for Associates degrees it was 1976-1977 when men earned more degrees than women.

For all levels of higher education, women have earned more college degrees than men in every year since the Class of 1982, and the degree gap has widened in every year since then, and is expected to widen in the future through the 2016-2017 year (see chart above).

7. Fools! You could have made a fortune (like me) investing in greedy health care companies. Or not.

RIDER COMMENT: Certain businesses engender reflexive hate from the public – doubtless even from most of my enlightened readers. Oil companies. Loan companies. Banks. Used car dealers.

And insurance companies. Especially health care companies.

Instinctively, we all know that these firms make their living by systematically ripping us gullible consumers off, reaping HUGE windfall profits as a result. But if you can’t beat ‘em, shouldn’t you join ‘em. Better yet, OWN ‘em!

Here’s my response to the usual online commenters denigrating those evil health care companies:

Oh stop whining. Get on the capitalist bandwagon. Surely you were aware years ago that insurance companies are ripping us all off. It's common knowledge. Ask anyone.

Why weren't you bright enough to BUY stock in an insurance company? You'd be fabulously rich from their banditry. Right?

Take my example. I bought Aetna Insurance the first market day of 1982. I paid $5.59 a share. Today the stock is selling (adjusted for splits) at $25.44. I made a killing!

Or did I? Over that timeframe, my annual compounded appreciation comes to 5.65%. Acceptable, but not what one would hope for from a common stock holding.

But wait -- I'm raking in the big dividends too. Eat your heart out!

Let's see -- how much is my annual dividend per share? 4 cents a share. That a 0.17% annual return.

I suspect one would find that similar mediocre returns are the historical norm for health insurance companies. Whatever other problems we have with health insurance and health care (and there are many), the companies "ripping us off" under some supposed conspiracy or cartel action doesn't stand scrutiny.

8. California “only” the 6th worst state? We wish!

RIDER COMMENT: Good news! A new study by the National Journal says that California “only” the 6th worst run state. I feel SO much better. I should have quite reading after the first paragraph or so.

Turns out the bozos putting together this “study” came up with four criteria that they counted equally. Three were tangential, at best – having to do with nebulous state “leadership,” “criminality” of state leaders, and “media circus” surrounding the state capitol.

The only criteria they rated that mattered is this:

“The severity of the state's policy challenges.”

Guess where CA ranked in that category? Numero uno worsto!

http://weblog.signonsandiego.com/weblogs/afb/archives/034965.html

9. Feds’ stimulus often “much ado about nothing.” Their PR departments are working overtime. Naturally at our expense.

RIDER COMMENT: It seems that every federal department is desperately spinning their local activities as part of the stimulus package. Sometimes the fanfare is simply laughable.

Doubtless the following editorial “outing” this nonsense was written by Chris Reed. It has his fingerprints all over it.

http://tinyurl.com/mupe64

Union-Tribune Editorial
Your stimulus dollars at work
July 25, 2009

SAN DIEGO — The announcement from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was downright breathless: “San Diego Unified (is) nation's first to use federal stimulus funding to clean up school buses.”

Of the nearly $1 trillion in stimulus funds (all borrowed money) lavished on the economy by the Obama administration, a few shekels have trickled down to the local level. The result is a case study in how to waste enormous sums of tax dollars while scoring political points for such fashionable causes as greener energy. It certainly has nothing to do with spurring the sputtering economy.

It turns out that Congress added $88 million to the boundless stimulus measure for states to use in cleaning up diesel engines. (The hyperbolic EPA announcement gives full credit for this to the Obama administration, ignoring Congress altogether.) The San Diego Unified School District is getting a minuscule chunk of these dollars to retrofit its diesel buses with a pollution control device.

Now, the school district has 519 buses. Guess how many will be retrofitted with your tax dollars from Washington? A grand total of 10. That's right, 10 vehicles – or 1.9 percent of the fleet. Geez, it's pretty hard to see how that is going to stop global warming or even cleanse San Diego's air of diesel pollution. As it turns out, the school district already has retrofitted, without Washington help, all but 17 of its buses.

No matter. A grand press conference was staged at the school district's fleet maintenance yard with a bevy of federal, state and local officials. The highlight was a touted “white hankie test” demonstrating the “cleanliness of new technology.”

The officials no doubt patted themselves on the back for this popular display of forward thinking with your tax dollars. Never mind about the monstrously profligate nature of the stimulus package. Never mind that the money spent to retrofit 10 school buses will do nothing to stimulate San Diego's economy. Never mind that our children and grandchildren will be hit with higher taxes to repay the borrowed money given to the school district with great fanfare.

10. If Obama disappoints his fans, they will have only themselves to blame.

RIDER COMMENT: While most of my stuff has to do with state and local matters, we must remember that we still have a few niggling problems remaining on the federal level. Even our new messiah President is having a tad trouble solving all these matter. The following article nails our foolish expectations – and why what got Obama elected may ultimately lead to his downfall.

The Obama cult

Jul 23rd 2009
From The Economist print edition

If Barack Obama disappoints his supporters, they will have only themselves to blame

IN JANUARY 2007 Mike Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas, said he was running for president to revive “our national soul”. He was not alone in taking an expansive view of presidential responsibilities. With the exception of Ron Paul, all the serious candidates waxed grandiloquent about their aims. John McCain said he modeled himself on Teddy Roosevelt, a man who “nourished the soul of a great nation”. Hillary Clinton lamented that America had no goals, and offered to supply some. And let us not forget the man they all sought to replace, George Bush, who promised, among other things, to “rid the world of evil”. Appalled by such hubris, a libertarian scholar called Gene Healy wrote “The Cult of the Presidency”, a book decrying the unrealistic expectations Americans have of their presidents. The book was written while Barack Obama’s career was still on the launch pad, yet it describes with uncanny prescience the atmosphere that allowed him to soar.

Mr. Obama has inspired more passionate devotion than any modern American politician. People scream and faint at his rallies. Some wear T-shirts proclaiming him “The One” and noting that “Jesus was a community organiser”. An editor at Newsweek described him as “above the country, above the world; he’s sort of God.” He sets foreign hearts fluttering, too. A Pew poll published this week finds that 93% of Germans expect him to do the right thing in world affairs. Only 14% thought that about Mr. Bush.

Perhaps Mr. Obama inwardly cringes at the personality cult that surrounds him. But he has hardly discouraged it. As a campaigner, he promised to “change the world”, to “transform this country” and even (in front of a church full of evangelicals) to “create a Kingdom right here on earth”. As president, he keeps adding details to this ambitious wish-list. He vows to create millions of jobs, to cure cancer and to seek a world without nuclear weapons. On July 20th he promised something big (a complete overhaul of the health-care system), something improbable (to make America’s college-graduation rate the highest in the world by 2020) and something no politician could plausibly accomplish (to make maths and science “cool again”).

The Founding Fathers intended a more modest role for the president: to defend the country when attacked, to enforce the law, to uphold the constitution—and that was about it. But over time, the office has grown. In 1956 Clinton Rossiter, a political scientist, wrote that Americans wanted their president to make the country rich, to take the lead on domestic policy, to respond to floods, tornadoes and rail strikes, to act as the nation’s moral spokesman and to lead the free world. The occupant of the Oval Office had to be “a combination of scoutmaster, Delphic oracle, hero of the silver screen and father of the multitudes,” he said.

The public mood has grown more cynical since then; Watergate showed that presidents can be villains. But Americans still want their commander-in-chief to take command. It is pointless for a modern president to plead that some things, such as the business cycle, are beyond his control. So several have sought dubious powers to meet the public’s unreasonable expectations. Sometimes people notice, as when Mr. Bush claimed limitless leeway to tap phones and detain suspected terrorists. But sometimes they don’t. For example, Mr. Bush was blamed for the debacle of Hurricane Katrina, although responding to natural disasters is largely a local responsibility. So he pushed Congress to pass a law allowing the president to use the army to restore order after a future natural disaster, an epidemic, or under “other condition[s]”, a startling expansion of federal power.

Mr. Obama promised to roll back Mr. Bush’s imperial presidency. But has he? Having slammed his predecessor for issuing “signing statements” dismissing parts of laws he had just signed, he is now doing the same thing. He vowed to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, but this week put off for another six months any decision as to what to do with the inmates. Meanwhile, he has embraced Mrs. Clinton’s curious notion that the president should be “commander-in-chief of our economy”, by propping up banks, firing executives, backing car warranties and so forth. Mr. Healy reckons that Mr. Obama is “as dedicated to enhancing federal power as any president in 50 years.”

The perils of over-promising

Nonsense, say his supporters. Taking over banks and car companies was a temporary measure to tackle a crisis. When the danger recedes, Mr. Obama will pull back. The restructuring of General Motors, for example, is comfortably ahead of schedule. And far from lording it over Congress, the president has if anything abdicated too much responsibility to it.

These are all fair points. But Mr. Healy’s warnings are still worth heeding. Mr. Obama is clearly not the socialist of Republican demonology, but he is trying to extend federal control over two huge chunks of the economy—energy and health care—so fast that lawmakers do not have time to read the bills before voting on them. Perhaps he is hurrying to get the job done before his polls weaken any further. In six months, his approval rating has fallen from 63% to 56% while his disapproval rating has nearly doubled, from 20% to 39%. Independent voters are having second thoughts. And his policies are less popular than he is. Support for his health-care reforms has slipped from 57% to 49% since April.

All presidential candidates promise more than they can possibly deliver. This sets them up for failure. But because the Obama cult has stoked expectations among its devotees to such unprecedented heights, he is especially likely to disappoint. Mr. Healy predicts that he will end up as a failed president, and “possibly the least popular of the modern era”. It is up to Mr. Obama to prove him wrong.

2009-07-27T16:30:00.000-07:00

RICHARD RIDER RANT 7/24/09

No republic has long outlived the discovery by a majority of its people that
they could vote themselves largess from the public treasury.
Alexander Tytler

1. Spendthrift New York state needs California’s super-majority vote protection

2. Left’s media champion for higher California taxes thoroughly debunked

3. Private prisons crush government prison guards’ pay con job

4. If San Diego city public worker pay is so low, have city employees fled their jobs these past few years? Au contraire!

5. Does Obama want to own the airlines?

6. The Golden State's political class comes unglued in the face of a citizens' revolt.

7. Two Rider comments on why CA voters deserve only small part of blame for runaway spending

8. Fans Flock to Mourn California, 1849-2009

9. The coming federal tax increase(s)

10. How many of California’s 480+ agencies and commissions can you list – let alone recommend dissolving? Here’s one hell of a cheat sheet

11. Liberals love majority rule – except when it works against them

12. The feminist “78 cents on a dollar” myth

13. Thomas Sowell: “You can usually only equalize downwards”

14. Past (and many present) City Managers in San Diego County are the biggest crooks when it comes to the local pension debacles

15. Man bites dog. Rider supports labor union proposition

16. Over half the price of a ticket for international flight can be taxes

17. Tech Corner – Offsite backup – DO IT! Easier and cheaper than ever.

18. Financial tip: How to get extra discounts on online purchases

19. Latest updates to my “California Breaking Bad” article

--------------------

1. Spendthrift New York state needs California’s supermajority vote protection

RIDER COMMENT: Previously I published a “must read” Chris Reed blog item showing how simple majority voting is working in our liberal sister state – New York. http://weblog.signonsandiego.com/weblogs/afb/archives/034073.html

As that blog item showed, in the teeth of this severe downturn, NY politicians are raising taxes left and right while increasing the state budget 8%.

If you didn’t read that item, do it now. If you DID read that item, reread it, commit its essence to memory, and send it to everyone you know – that’s one chain letter that needs to circulate the California Internet.

This Chris Reed follow-up blog item below is almost as valuable. Like California, some in New York are pushing for a constitutional convention to solve their government’s budget problems. But unlike California, they want and need such a convention to ELIMINATE simple majority tax increases – to adopt supermajority requirements for raising taxes!

When it comes to simple majority voting, they’ve been there, done that, and are now through with that.
http://weblog.signonsandiego.com/weblogs/afb/archives/034488.html

CHRIS REED BLOG

New York, like California, ponders constitutional convention -- partly to block tax hikes on simple majority vote!

So in California, things are so dysfunctional that self-styled "good government" groups like the Bay Area Council want a constitutional convention, where job no. 1 would be killing the Legislature's two-thirds requirement for raising taxes and adopting a budget. California may be among the most heavily taxed states in the union, but these "goo goos" somehow think our problem is the budget process, not a refusal to live within our means.

Now for the hilarious twist:

In New York, things are so dysfunctional that perhaps the most popular politician in the state wants a constitutional convention, where job no. 1 would be killing the Legislature's ability to raise taxes by a simple majority vote. Introducing Mr. Rudy Giuliani:
Too often increasing taxes is the first impulse for Albany legislators. Requiring a supermajority for tax increases would provide a powerful check on those who still think we can tax and spend our way out of economic problems. A supermajority would protect already over-burdened citizens and attract businesses, improving our long-term competitiveness.

What led Rudy to this constitution? The appalling 2009-10 New York state budget I wrote about here. Rudy shares my low opinion of it:
There are more New Yorkers unemployed than at any time in 33 years, and the poverty rate is rising. Our combined state and local tax burden is the highest in the nation after New Jersey. Our business tax climate is rated the second worst in the country. And in the face of the worst recession in a quarter-century, the State Legislature decided to increase spending by 9 percent while increasing taxes and fees by $8 billion. No wonder a recent poll showed that more than 20 percent of New Yorkers are thinking of leaving the state in search of lower taxes and fewer government mandates.

Giving the California Legislature the option of behaving like the New York Legislature is what Jim Wunderman and the Bay Area Council want for California? Really? Really? Really?

Thanks to Bruce Kesler for drawing Giuliani's New York Times op-ed to my attention.
Posted by Chris Reed at June 24, 2009 01:05 PM

2. Left’s media champion for higher California taxes thoroughly debunked

RIDER COMMENT: The liberal press got all excited by a Michael Hiltzik column in the LA TIMES claiming that California’s spending problem is just a right wing myth. But the piece has since been crushed by a simple look at Hiltzik’s incorrect math and pathetic research.

Naturally, the TIMES and other liberal publications have failed to give much coverage to this robust rebuttal. Fortunately for you, this blog ain’t the LA TIMES! Here’s the REASON column tearing it to shreds – I had a tiny hand in it.
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/133764.html?success=1#lastpost

LAT Columnist: State Spending Problem a "Myth"...Unless You Count All State Spending
Matt Welch | May 28, 2009, 11:01am

In today's installment of You Californians Are Just Too STUPID, L.A. Times anti-business columnist and recovering sock-puppeteer Michael Hiltzik thunders: "California's problem is spending? That's a myth." Hiltzik's case:
[T]he idea that California's budget has been out of control as measured against inflation and population growth is a deeply cherished talking point in the debate over the state's fiscal deficit.

Unfortunately, it turns out to be yet another infectious myth. The truth is that over the last 10 years, California's spending has tracked population growth and price increases almost to the penny.

This finding comes from the nonpartisan legislative analyst's office, which subjects the state budget to more careful scrutiny than almost anyone else in Sacramento.

Analyzing the 2008-09 budget bill last year, the legislative analyst determined that since 1998-99, spending in the general fund and state special funds -- the latter comes from special levies like gasoline and tobacco taxes -- had risen to $128.8 billion from $72.6 billion, or 77%.

During this time frame, which embraced two booms (dot-com and housing) and two busts (ditto), the state's population grew about 30% to about 38 million, and inflation charged ahead by 50%. The budget's growth, the legislative analyst found, exceeded these factors by only an average of 0.2% a year.
What's missing from this analysis? Hiltzik cops to it a few paragraphs later: Bond spending. Which, as he quotes the state legislative analyst as saying, has amounted to $85 billion in voter-mandated issuances this decade alone.

In what universe does "bond spending" not count as "spending"? Does this mean I am not technically spending when I buy stuff with my credit card? If a "deeply cherished talking point" turns out to be true, can it still be "infectious"? These are the questions.

To see what an honest and complete accounting of California budget data over the past two decades looks like (hint: the phrase "almost to the penny" is not used), consult the Reason Foundation's study [PDF] "California Spending By the Numbers."
UPDATE: The San Diego Union-Tribune's Chris Reed has found what he calls a "Huge, obvious error" in Hiltzik's calculations of population growth.
RIDER NOTE: What Chris Reed discovered is that columnist Hiltzik claimed that CA population grew 30% over a 10 year period. But a check of the numbers shows that the state grew only 13.8% during that timeframe. I brought this point to REASON’s attention, and I think that was the reason for the “UPDATE” to the article (see comments at the REASON website).

3. Private prisons crush government prison guards’ pay con job

RIDER COMMENT: As you may know from my previous rants, the powerful California Correctional Peace Officers Association was instrumental in effectively banning private CA state prisons, driving up the California cost of incarceration. And then they bribed Gray Davis and the legislature to give the guards a 35% pay boost for dessert.

“California Correctional Peace Officers Association” – isn’t that a great name for a prison guard union? “Peace officers”? Uh huh. Funny how “public safety” employees never want to call their unions what they are – labor unions!

As usual, I digress. Below is a comparison of the cost of government vs. private prisons in the U.S. The cost savings from competition can be dramatic. The study is done by a Washington state think tank so it’s geared to that state’s needs, but the lesson available is more universal.

Bottom line of the study – comparing states with more than and less than 20% of inmates in private prisons: The states with less than 20% in private prisons are paying 49.4% more per day per inmate than states with more than 20% in private prisons.

http://tinyurl.com/pnxrjw
Washington Policy Institute
Private Prisons and the Public Interest
Improving Quality and Reducing Costs through Competition
by Paul Guppy, Vice President for Research
2003-06
________________________________________
The cost of maintaining Washington’s state-run prison system is becoming increasingly unsustainable. The state Department of Corrections budget has more than doubled over the last ten years, rising from $502 million in the 1991-1993 biennium to $1,072 million in the current biennium. Corrections costs rose more than 12.3% over the last two years, a rate more than four times faster than inflation. The increasing cost of operating the state prison system has outpaced the rise in total General Fund spending in every biennium in the 1990s, and is now one of the fastest growing areas of state spending.

Mounting prison expenditures are a major cost driver for state government, and are one reason overall state spending is increasing considerably faster than the rising level of tax revenues. State legislators now face a $2.4 billion deficit compared to what they had planned to spend in the 2003-2005 biennium.

Every state prison facility but one is overcrowded, some by as much as 50%. Many of Washington’s 39 county jails are also filled beyond capacity. Together county jails are designed to hold 8,770 prisoners, but instead house an average daily population of around 10,000, resulting in an average over-capacity of just over 113%.

The state’s tight financial situation lends fresh urgency to privatization and competitive bidding as a long-term way to bring rising spending under control. Introducing competition from the private sector would allow state leaders to provide critical prison services at lower cost.

Recent research compares two groups of states over four years, 1997 through 2001. The first group consists of nine states that took strong advantage of competitive forces by devoting at least 20% of their corrections system to privately run prisons. The second group consists of 24 states with few or no private prisons. Washington is one of these. In every rated category, the states in the first group operated a more cost-effective prison system than those in the second group. The results are summarized in the graph.

Comparison of Increasing State Prison Costs Based on Number of Privately Run Prisons

Over the four-year period the states with few or no private prisons experienced significantly faster growth in total spending, higher corrections costs and higher daily prisoner costs than states with a large proportion of privately run prisons.
States that made a greater investment in private prisons enjoyed far lower expenses per day per inmate than other states. These states had an average daily cost of $82.59 per inmate in 2001, compared with an average daily cost of $123.43 for states with few or no privately run prisons.

In Washington, with little prison privatization, per diem costs in 2001 were $104.25. Yet in neighboring Idaho, where state leaders made a significant investment in private prisons, per diem costs were 42% lower, just $60.21.
Other Western states that greatly benefited from lower per day costs because they had significant number of private prisons were Montana ($80.93), New Mexico ($85.89) and Colorado ($67.05).

There is a measurable relationship between states that have invested in private prisons and their ability to control the rise in total structural costs of state government.

States with 20% or more private prisons saw their total spending increase an average of 24.34% over four years, compared with an average increase of more than 32% for non-privatized states.

Concurrently, such states were better able to contain costs in their Department of Corrections budgets. In the states with more private prisons, Department of Corrections costs increased an average of 38.12%, while the states that had neglected privatization opportunities saw their corrections budget soar an average of 50%. Over the same period the populations of the two groups of states rose at similar rates, in the 15% to 18% range.

Details from the study reveal striking examples of the efficiencies states gain from investing in prison privatization:

Utah spends $125.40 per day for each prisoner housed, while neighboring Colorado spends just $67.05 per day for the same service.

Minnesota spends $164.03 per prisoner per day, while Wisconsin spends $93.33 per day, or 43% less.

Tennessee was able to reduce prisoner costs per day by more than 8% over four years, while in neighboring North Carolina per diem corrections costs over the same period increased by 15%.

In Washington per day costs increased almost 25% over four years, while in Idaho they increased at less than one-third that rate, by only 7.4%.

The measurable results of prison privatization have been overwhelmingly positive. While the private prison system is not perfect, the high quality, safety, low cost and management innovations that resulted from competitive pressures have been beneficial to the public interest.

Adopting a policy of prison privatization in Washington could go a long way to relieving prison overcrowding and slowing the growth in the government’s long-term structural costs.

See the full study on “Private Prisons and the Public Interest” here. http://tinyurl.com/q8qdot

4. If San Diego city public worker pay is so low, have city employees fled their jobs these past few years? Au contraire!

RIDER COMMENT: I meant to post this Chris Reed blog item in a March, 2008 Rider Rant. It’s still excellent ammo, so I’m “publishing” it now.
---
http://weblog.signonsandiego.com/weblogs/afb/archives/020735.html
The public employee pay urban myth, part 2: The numbers don't lie

John Kaheny says I don't know what I'm talking about when I mock his claim that constantly improving pay and great benefits are crucial to retaining municipal employees in San Diego. I quoted local government expert Steve Frates saying this claim was an "urban myth" and that there was essentially no market demand for public employees except for police officers.

OK, John, you want stats, here are stats.

"Median occupational tenure" -- the length of time a worker toils for the same employer -- is a very accurate indicator of job satisfaction. (Job satisfaction maybe not in the sense of personal fulfillment, etc., but in the sense of not looking for greener pastures elsewhere.)

"Median occupational tenure" is far higher for public employees than for the average U.S. worker. As this Bureau of Labor Statistics report confirms ...
In January 2006, wage and salary workers in the public sector had almost double the median tenure of private sector employees, 6.9 versus 3.6 years.

Also this:
Federal employees had a higher median tenure (9.9 years) than state (6.3 years) or local government (6.6 years) employees.

Now guess what the figure is in San Diego for general city employees (all but police, firefighters and lifeguards): 12.32 years -- way more than the national average even for other public employees, not just all workers. And this despite years of union leaders telling the rank and file they're being abused by city leaders.

There's more.

Here's the average annual turnover rate the past three fiscal years for general city employees: 3.8 percent.

Cue the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The total separations, or turnover, rate fell to 3.1 percent in December 2007. Separations are terminations of employment that occur at any time during the month.
Got that? The monthly overall job turnover rate for the U.S. as a whole is similar to the turnover rate for the city of San Diego FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR!

Put another way: Over the past six weeks, the total percentage of people who have changed or lost jobs in the economy as a whole is a higher percentage than we saw in the San Diego municipal work force for all of 2007.

Oh, yeah, municipal employees are in high demand, they're eager to leave, an exodus is imminent. City Hall would just be crazy to not jack up pay and benefits.
Bunk.

Case closed. Kaheny and friends will offer anecdotes galore, but the numbers don't lie.

Posted by Chris Reed at March 7, 2008 03:27 PM

5. Does Obama Want to Own the Airlines?

Manny Klausner Comment: Holman Jenkins' column in the Wall Street Journal poses an ominous question, in analyzing the current approach of the Obama Justice Department -- which threatens to undermine the prospects for survival of the chronically troubled U.S. airline industry.

===========================================
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124701148185808655.html
Wall Street Journal
July 8, 2009

Does Obama Want to Own the Airlines?

Welcome to government for the benefit of government officials and their hangers-on.

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

Only luck and falling oil prices saved Washington from having to face mass bankruptcy of the airline industry last year. Now the specter is rising again. Fuel prices are up. Traffic continues to plummet amid a global recession. United Airlines last week mortgaged its spare-parts inventory to raise cash at a usurious 17% interest rate.

Yet the Obama Justice Department has come out of the blocks trying to scuttle a promising experiment to stabilize the chronically unprofitable U.S. airline sector. The new administration seemingly won't let companies fail, and won't let them succeed either.

The airline industry's self-help solution has been an evolving trio of international alliances, partly blessed with "antitrust immunity" by the U.S. Department of Transportation. One, the Star Alliance led by United and Lufthansa, is currently poaching Continental from a rival alliance, SkyTeam. DOT was set to approve their application last week when Justice belatedly intervened with a 58-page complaint about why the pact should be restructured.

To anyone drilled in the antitrust mindset, Justice's argument won't seem outlandish. It frets about reduced competition on this or that international route, and sees little chance of competitive entry by new carriers despite fat profits that presumably would be on offer. It argues, in a fashion typical of antitrust these days, that nonstop flights are a market unto themselves, so connecting flights on the same routes don't count.

But the real fulcrum is Justice's insistence, or plea, that DOT should set a high bar for antitrust immunity, because antitrust enforcement has been such a gosh-darn boon to consumers.

Justice offers no supporting evidence for this proposition, which has resisted academic verification. And in dismissing the "putative" benefits of immunized airline alliances, Justice fails even to acknowledge the one benefit that Obama Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has emphasized: "These alliances are life savers for airlines. That is the premise from which we start. We believe it. The airlines believe it."

In part, such alliances are substitutes for international airline mergers (which are prohibited under U.S. law), but are more interesting than mergers, thanks to the flexibility with which carriers can enter and exit cooperative agreements with each other.

The antitrust mindset naturally sees such cooperation as always harmful, inflating prices and gouging consumers. But then why does organized labor oppose the deals? Shouldn't workers favor alliances if they reduce competitive pressure on wages? Yet Justice's intervention came after United's pilots ran a full-page ad in Roll Call attacking the company's own deal.

And why do carriers lobby against each other's pacts? Shouldn't they favor anything that leads to oligopoly pricing? And what to make of Continental's decision to jilt SkyTeam and jump to Star, shifting the competitive balance on the North Atlantic?

Obama antitrust chief Christine Varney doesn't have much good to say about her Bush predecessors. But she praises their record of cartel-busting. She might examine that record for what it actually says about the incentive to collude.

It shows, for one thing, that companies are inclined to snuggle up mainly to share losses and preserve capacity in a downturn or to curb the free-riding of powerful customers. When profits are available, on the other hand, they quickly go back to competing to maximize their respective shares rather than colluding to limit their individual upsides.

These incentives would very likely prevail in the highly flexible airline alliances. Such alliances are no miracle cure for what ails the domestic carriers, but they would open a window to let us see beyond antitrust's indiscriminate prejudice against cooperative acts by competitors.

Of course, this would fly in the face of Ms. Varney's agenda, which is to expand the bailiwick of the Washington antitrust bar. Even now, she has turned her attention from airlines to the mobile-phone business on the theory that any industry that hasn't collapsed into government receivership must be doing something wrong.

Mr. Obama blabs about the evils of lobbying, but his administration is fast becoming the greatest fillip to lobbying ever seen. Ms. Varney has now horned in on the DOT's action, forcing the airline business and all its camp followers to come and pay tribute. Her choice of targets is obviously designed for political effect. Airlines and mobile-phone operators both touch the public in ways that leave the public frequently annoyed.

What we're seeing here and elsewhere from the new administration is not some rebirth of thoughtful liberalism, but a spastic descent into machine liberalism -- government for the benefit of government officials and their hangers-on. Mr. Obama, however, may not be so pleased with the result if it means he must soon add the airlines to the collection of failed industries being run out of the White House.

6. The Golden State's political class comes unglued in the face of a citizens' revolt.

RIDER COMMENT: Below is an excellent article from REASON magazine that details the huge chasm between the grubby voters and the elitists who think they can direct us towards European socialism. It’s both an instructive and fun read.
Excerpt:

> According to Adam Summers -- a policy analyst at the Reason
> Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this magazine -- the
> state's annual pension fund contribution vaulted from $321 million
> in 2000-01 to $7.3 billion last year. According to public
> databases, more than 5,000 people are drawing pensions in excess
> of $100,000 from the state of California each year.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/134445.html

Reason Magazine
August/September 2009 Print Edition

California Screaming

The Golden State's political class comes unglued in the face of a
citizens' revolt.

By Matt Welch

On May 19, California voters went to the polls to decide whether to pass a package of six tax-and-gimmick ballot propositions. Its supporters—Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Democratic legislative leaders, the California Teachers Association, and the overwhelming majority of the state’s major newspapers—billed it as the last best hope to plug Sacramento’s $24 billion budget deficit. “Either pass it,” warned the Los Angeles Times editorial board, “or risk fiscal disaster.”

Those who believe that either money or the media determine political outcomes should pay close heed to what happened next: Although opponents were outspent by more than 7 to 1, they trounced the state’s political class, rejecting five of the six measures by an average of 30 percentage points. The only proposition to pass was an anger-driven new law that limits elected officials’ salaries.

Faced with such thorough repudiation, California’s best and brightest then did a telling thing. They lashed right back.

The Los Angeles Times headlined its morning-after news analysis, “California Voters Exercise Their Power—and That’s the Problem.” Sacramento columnist George Skelton argued that “voters helped get themselves into this fix” by “passing feel-good ‘ballot box budgeting’ initiatives” and sanctioning “heavy borrowing” for “infrastructure projects.” Business columnist Michael Hiltzik (RIDER NOTE: see item #2 in this Rant to get a better feel for this guy’s credibility) averred that “far more blame for the deficit belongs to California voters” because “year in, year out, they enact spending mandates at the polls, often without endowing a revenue source.” Missing from any of these critiques was the fact that the Times’ own editorial board endorsed more than 90 percent of the very same ballot-box bond measures during the last decade. No matter: A perpetrator had been located.

“Good morning, California voters,” The Sacramento Bee’s post-election editorial began. “Do you feel better, now that you’ve gotten that out of your system?” The Bee, which (like the Times) had endorsed four of the five losing measures, came under immediate attack for its heavy-handed, citizen-blaming sarcasm. (A sample: “So, now that you’ve put those irksome politicians in their place, maybe it’s time to think about this: Since you’re in charge, exactly what do you intend to do about that pesky $25 billion hole in the budget?”) Rush Limbaugh gleefully read passages on his show, San Diego Union-Tribune editorial writer Chris Reed called it “staggeringly juvenile, arrogant and revealing,” and commenters on the Bee’s website were full of reactions like, “What an obnoxious editorial. Nevertheless, it illustrates that the Bee is completely in favor of bigger government and higher taxes.”

Then another funny thing happened: The Bee scrubbed the editorial off its website, replacing it with a much more conciliatory piece, addressed this time to legislators. The original editorial had been posted in “error,” the paper explained, and the new piece was the one that appeared in the print edition. “That [first] article was a draft prepared for internal discussion among members of The Bee’s editorial board,” a brief note said. “Such discussions are a routine part of our work, and frequently lead to editorials that are considerably different from writers’ first drafts.”

This instant airbrushing, normally fodder for such journalism-tracking websites as Jim Romenesko’s Media News, went virtually ignored by all but a few mostly right-leaning websites. So did another colossal gaffe, by the aforementioned Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik, who thundered that the very notion California had a “spending problem” was an “infectious myth.”

Hiltzik claimed that the state government’s budget growth had kept pace “almost to the penny” with growth in population and inflation during the last decade. There were three problems with this analysis: Hiltzik miscalculated population growth (claiming 30 percent instead of 14 percent), he chose a federal inflation rate of 50 percent during that period instead of the California Consumer Price Index figure of 35 percent, and, most important, he excluded from state spending more than $100 billion in bond measures. This whopper was roasted and dissected on local talk radio, but it was unmentioned by more august repositories of public policy and journalism debate, such as the Times-tracking LA Observed.

Rarely has the chasm between elite political discourse and grubby popular opinion been displayed in such sharp relief. The implications of this citizen revolt—and the hostile reactions to it—stretch far beyond Nevada’s western border. California is the Ghost of Federal Government Future.

During the last two decades, the Golden State has been transformed from what was once known as the nation’s most anti-labor outpost to a state essentially run by public-sector unions. Nearly three in five public sector workers are unionized, compared to less than two in five public employees in other states. The Democratic Party, which is fully in hock to unions, has controlled the legislature and most statewide posts, with the notable exception of the governor’s mansion, for more than a decade. That means more government workers, higher salaries, and drastically higher pension costs.

According to Adam Summers—a policy analyst at the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this magazine—the state’s annual pension fund contribution vaulted from $321 million in 2000–01 to $7.3 billion last year. According to public databases, more than 5,000 people are drawing pensions in excess of $100,000 from the state of California each year.

So pervasive is the union influence that big labor doesn’t even try to defend its deleterious effects on California’s finances. Just before the special election, a member of the Los Angeles Times editorial board asked Service Employees International Union chief Andy Stern to respond to charges that unions are the 21st-century equivalent of the railroads that were once all-powerful in California. Stern verbally shrugged: “I think democracy is an ugly thing at times.”

That ugliness has made the California budget, like those in most of the other 49 states, less efficient and more bloated. Government spending, unlike spending in the private economy, is a zero-sum game—especially on the state level, since governors can’t print money. Every dollar spent gilding a pension is a dollar not spent funding an orphanage. Naturally, the same elite outlets that were busy blaming voters after the election spent even more time detailing the horrors of the “annihilating cuts,” as the Los Angeles Times called them in a news article, that were coming down the pike. (In early June, the paper invited readers to be shocked that a high school with 3,200 students would have to make do with just three guidance counselors.) Bloated pension costs and the increasingly inefficient provision of state services received a fraction of the coverage.

The federal government is now run by a president and Congress more responsive to union concerns than any in at least two decades. The same bloat currently bogging down statehouses and city halls is being duplicated in boomtown Washington, D.C. President Barack Obama even brought Andy Stern in to help warn Schwarzenegger that federal stimulus money would not be disbursed to California unless the governor rescinded some proposed state job cuts. Though that threat was later withdrawn, Schwarzenegger at press time was pushing for a measly work force reduction of 2 percent.

But there’s another interpretation of California’s rebellion, one with far sunnier implications for those of us who prefer our governments constrained. Faced with a political class that ignored bureaucratic inefficiency, that demanded higher taxes, that filled the newspapers with scare stories about people who will literally die as a result of budget cuts, the citizens of one of the bluest states in the nation collectively said we just don’t believe you anymore. If even California’s famous fruits and nuts can call the statists’ bluff, there may be hope for the rest of the country.

Matt Welch (matt.welch@reason.com) is editor in chief of reason.

7. Two Rider comments on why CA voters deserve only small part of blame

RIDER COMMENT: I have a foolish habit of commenting on articles online – and verbally sparing with opponents. I can’t help myself!

Well, I’ve decided I should make a greater effort to disseminate such thoughts by posting insightful comments in my Rant when appropriate. Like now.

These two comments were in response to elitists’ claims that it’s the voters who are to blame for our state mess. But much of that is from a lack of understanding of what’s being voted on, and the ramifications. Of course, these same elitists campaigned mightily via the press and through contributions to convince the public to support all these spending measures. But that’s well covered in the REASON piece above.

Here are my two comments:

A. Yes, California voters supported more spending and $100B+ in bonds. But sadly, the average voter doesn't see the connection between these commitments and higher taxes.

When it comes to state bonds, the deception is by design.

A LOCAL bond usually includes a specific tax increase to go with it -- so the voter knows what the measure is going to cost. Furthermore most such bonds require a 2/3 vote majority to pass (55% for most school bonds).

On the state level, no tax is included with the bond -- it seems to be almost free. In addition, the bond can be passed with a simple majority vote. Unsophisticated voters are left to assume that the payments somehow will be magically paid out of the general fund, and proponents are not about to indicate otherwise.

---

B. Voters deserve only a small part of the blame.

Voters didn't decide to ban private jails in California, resulting in our per-prisoner incarceration costs being over 50% higher than the rest of the nation.

Voters didn't decide to give away huge pensions and opulent health care benefits to our "public servants."

Voters didn't decide to pay over $100K annually to age 20-something prison guards with high school educations.

Voters didn't decide to let most highway patrol personnel to retire on bogus disability claims.

Voters didn't vote for most of the state commissions that impede commerce while paying the "commissioners" patronage salaries of $120K or more for at most six weeks work.

Voters didn't decide to give away community college educations at fire sale prices. (The average nationwide community college tuition is 4.5 times higher than California's.)

I could go on (and often do). Enough for now.

8. Fans Flock to Mourn California, 1849-2009

RIDER COMMENT: A sad yet quite humorous report of the demise of California, a la Michael Jackson.
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/
Fans Flock to Mourn California, 1849-2009

LOS ANGELES - Millions of fans from around the globe gathered along Sunset Boulevard to pay final respects to California today, as a slow moving funeral procession transported the eccentric superstar state's remains to its final resting place in a Winchell's Donuts dumpster in Van Nuys. The self-proclaimed 'King of Pop Culture' died last week at 160, in what coroners ruled an accidental case of financial autoerotic asphyxiation. The death sent shock waves across the world and sparked an outpouring of grief by rabid fans.

"I don't care what the tabloids and the Wall Street Journal say," said a weeping Illinois. "I still love you, Cali!"

The 640-mile long funeral parade route was lined with flowers, candles, teddy bears, and IOUs from millions of mourners and debtors who made the somber journey to watch the passing of the state that had once ruled the box office and industrial charts. Among them were current chart-toppers who cited California as a key influence.

"If it wasn't for California, I wouldn't be where I am today," said Arizona of Westside 3, the popular sunbelt trio who recently benefited from the late state's generous gift of fleeing taxpayers and businesses. As a tribute to their mentor, Arizona vowed the group would start spending money "like crack-addled hip hop stars."
"California's financial and musical legacy will never die," said band mates Nevada and Oregon.

At the official funeral service at the LA Coliseum, a grief stricken Washington, who teamed with California on several hit software and wine projects, had to be physically restrained from climbing into the deceased's gold plated casket.

Similar emotional outpourings were the rule of the day. Stories - apocryphal or not - of the late state's bizarre self-destructive behavior and fondness for molesting children did little to dampen the flood of tributes from fans who preferred to remember California as America's Sweetheart.

From a humble beginning as a water-poor remote Spanish mission outpost, California proved to be a precocious and talented child performer. It struck gold with 'Sutter's Mill' in 1849, earning accolades and attracting millions of crusty bearded prospectors. Black gold soon followed with 'La Brea Tar Pits.' Unlike many child acts, California made a smooth transition to adolescence, scoring a major hit with 'Agriculture' in 1891.

Even a frightening bout with tremors did not stop the flow of hits. The 1915 megasmash 'Hollywood' broke all records, as did the wartime favorite 'Aerospace.' More recently, California topped the charts with 'Tourism,' 'High Tech,' and 'Coastal Pretension.'

For a time it seemed as if the superstar could do no wrong, but behind the glittering facade of Disneyland Manor troubling signs of mental instability began to emerge. The state developed a well publicized drug problem during filming of 1967's 'Summer of Love,' and briefly dabbled in strange religious cults. Under the influence of spiritual guru Jerry Brown, it began wholesale experimentation in exotic spending programs, eventual resulting in a traumatic 1979 stay at the Prop 13 Rehab Center.

During the 80's and 90's California enjoyed a brief career renaissance with hits like 'Olympics,' 'Real Estate' and 'Dot Com Boom,' but personal problems plagued the reclusive star once again. During the recording of the 'OJ' and 'Rodney King' albums, friends and visitors expressed concern over its recurring tremors and penchant for self-mutilation.

"California used to be so happy and beautiful," said a horrified Ohio. "I hardly recognize it any more."

During that period, camp insiders say the increasingly psychotic state began driving away its long time professional management team and support crew. In its place, it assembled an entourage of con men and embezzlers, some of whom stoked California's increasingly bizarre environmental paranoia. It was seldom seen in public without a breathing mask to ward off imagined pollutants.

Worse, the hits began drying up; the huge 2001 flop 'Dot Com Bust' put a huge crimp into California's once unlimited cash flow. Despite the setback, insiders say the superstar was unwilling to change its lavish lifestyle, and retreated once again into spending abuse. Personal expenses skyrocketed, propelled in part by California's 8 million adopted foster children. During the 90's sensationalistic accounts of child abuse began surfacing. Eyewitnesses reported California cruising local neighborhoods in school buses, luring unsuspecting kid for sessions of 'public education.' By some estimates hundreds of thousands were left traumatized and severely brain damaged.

The charges were vigorously denied by California camp spokestate Vermont.
"California loves children," said Vermont. "California loves children, because deep inside California is a also a child -- full of innocent wonder, and the belief that any budget wish can come true as long as you just wish hard enough."

True or not, the charges alienated many longtime fans, leaving California in an ever worsening financial position. In 2003 the state rejected suggestions that it was facing bankruptcy, saying that "I can't be out of money, I still have checks left." Amid the maelstrom, though, it fired tour manager Grey Davis who many blamed for California's financial woes. In his place, California hired Arnold Schwarzenegger to help engineer a career-saving comeback tour.
Under the management of the flamboyant Austrian body builder / therapist, California began a rapid descent that ultimately ended in death. Some faulted Schwarzenegger's unconventional therapeutic methods and prescription spending pills, including state pension steroids that some say were powerful enough to kill a Scandinavian industrial power. Schwarzenegger denied culpability, saying that his spending pills "help build de upper financial torso and lats, and deese other sings and so on."

Despite the last minute financial maneuvers analysts say the state died penniless, owing creditors as much as $100 billion. Amid the swirling recriminations between California camp factions, fans chose to mark its passing quietly. Longtime California fan club president Iowa said that despite being the constant butt of the Golden State's insults and jokes, it will remember the late superstar fondly.

"Let's not remember California as a bloated, rotting freakshow corpse hanging above a filthy public pension toilet," it said. "Let's remember the good times. Like my 6-day bender at the '91 Rose Bowl."

"California's pain is finally over, and I like to think that the whole state is going to a better place," Iowa added. "Just look at all those U-Hauls headed to Oklahoma."

9. The coming federal tax increase(s)

RIDER COMMENT: VAT’s an interesting topic. Not to mention a broader income tax increase.

But you greedy citizens can afford it. Just ask Obama and company.

http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/jul/12/awaitinga-taxincrease/?uniontrib

Awaiting a tax increase
George F. Will

THE WASHINGTON POST
2:00 a.m. July 12, 2009

What's your bet on a tax increase? Economic policy, which became startling when Washington began buying automobile companies, has become surreal now that disappointment with the results of the second stimulus is stirring talk about the need for a . . . second stimulus. Elsewhere, it requires centuries to bleach mankind's memory; in Washington, 17 months suffice: In February 2008, President George W. Bush and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who normally were at daggers drawn, agreed that a $168 billion stimulus — this was Stimulus I — would be the “booster shot” the economy needed. Unemployment then was 4.8 percent.

In January, the administration, shiny as a new dime and bursting with brains, said that unless another stimulus — Stimulus II wound up involving $787 billion — was passed immediately, unemployment, which then was 7.6 percent, would reach 9 percent by 2010. But halfway through 2009, the rate is 9.5. For the first time since the now 16-nation Eurozone was established in 1999, the unemployment rate in America is as high as it is in that region, which Americans once considered a cautionary lesson in the wages of sin, understood as excessive taxation and regulation.

“Everyone guessed wrong” about the economy's weakness, says the vice president, explaining why Stimulus II has not yielded anticipated benefits. Joe Biden is beguiling when unfiltered by calculation, as he often is and as he was when he spoke about guessing (“Meet the Press,” June 14) and how everyone “misread” the economy (“This Week,” July 5). To be fair, economics is a science of single instances, which means it is hardly a science. And it is least like one when we most crave certainty from it — when there is a huge and unprecedented event and educated guessing is the best anyone can do.
But before embarking on Stimulus III, note that only about 10 percent of Stimulus II has yet been injected into the economy in 2009. This is not the administration's fault, the administration's defenders say, because government is cumbersome, sluggish and inefficient. But this sunburst of insight comes as the administration toils to enlarge governmental control of health care, energy, finance, education, etc. The administration guesses that these government projects will do better than the Postal Service (its second-quarter loss, $1.9 billion, was 68 percent of its losses for all of 2008) and the government's railroad (Amtrak has had 38 money-losing years and this year's losses are on pace to set a record).

Let's guess: Will a person or institution looking for a place to invest $1 billion seek opportunities in the United States, where policy decisions are deliberately increasing taxes, debt, regulations and the cost of energy, and soon will increase the cost of borrowing and hiring? Or will the investor look at, say, India. It is the least urbanized major country — 70 percent of Indians live in rural areas, 50 percent on farms — so the modernizing and productivity-enhancing movement from the countryside to the city is in its infancy. This nation of 1.2 billion people has a savings rate of 25 percent to 30 percent, and fewer than 20 million credit cards. Which nation, India or the United States, is apt to have the higher economic growth over the next decade?

Yet while government diminishes America's comparative advantages, liberals are clamoring for . . . higher taxes. Partly because of changes endorsed by presidents from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, approximately 60 percent of taxpayers now pay either no income tax (43 percent) or less than 5 percent of their income. Because one cannot raise significant money by that tax without nicking the middle class, or without bringing millions of people back onto the income tax rolls, attention is turning to a value-added tax.

A VAT is levied at every stage of production. Like the cap-and-trade regime being constructed, a VAT is a liberal politician's delight: It taxes everything, but opaquely.

Before he became an economic adviser in the Obama White House, where wit can be dangerous, Larry Summers said: Liberals oppose a VAT because it is regressive and conservatives oppose it because it is a money machine, but a VAT might come when liberals realize it is a money machine and conservatives realize it is regressive.
At the June 29 White House briefing, press secretary Robert Gibbs was asked, with reference to health care legislation, if the president's pledge not to raise taxes on couples making less than $250,000 is “still active.” Gibbs answered: “We are going to let the process work its way through.” What is your guess?

Will can be reached at georgewill@washpost.com .

10. How many of California’s 480+ agencies and commissions can you list – let alone recommend dissolving? Here’s one hell of a cheat sheet

RIDER COMMENT: This is not so much a “must read” entry as a “must scroll through” article.

http://weblog.signonsandiego.com/weblogs/afb/archives/034862.html

CHRIS REED BLOG
July 13, 2009

Arnold is furloughing employees. How about permanently furloughing dozens of these 480-plus state agencies?

This e-mail is going around listing all the state agencies with "California" in their title. It's pretty stunning. Just a scroll of it in a TV ad would be powerful -- the point being, get a load of all these never-heard-of wings of state government. Why can't lots be cut?

Here goes:

* California Access for Infants and Mothers * California Acupuncture Board * California Administrative Office of the Courts * California Adoptions Branch * California African American Museum * California Agricultural Export Program * California Agricultural Labor Relations Board * California Agricultural Statistics Service * California Air Resources Board (CARB) * California Allocation Board * California Alternative Energy and Advanced Transportation Financing Authority * California Animal Health and Food Safety Services * California Anti-Terrorism Information Center * California Apprenticeship Council * California Arbitration Certification Program * California Architects Board * California Area VI Developmental Disabilities Board * California Arts Council * California Asian Pacific Islander Legislative Caucus * California Assembly Democratic Caucus * California Assembly Republican Caucus * California Athletic Commission * California Attorney General * California Bay Conservation and Development Commission * California Bay-Delta Authority * California Bay-Delta Office * California Biodiversity Council * California Board for Geologists and Geophysicists * California Board for Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors * California Board of Accountancy * California Board of Barbering and Cosmetology * California Board of Behavioral Sciences * California Board of Chiropractic Examiners * California Board of Equalization (BOE) * California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection * California Board of Guide Dogs for the Blind * California Board of Occupational Therapy * California Board of Optometry * California Board of Pharmacy * California Board of Podiatric Medicine * California Board of Prison Terms * California Board of Psychology * California Board of Registered Nursing * California Board of Trustees * California Board of Vocational Nursing and Psychiatric Technicians * California Braille and Talking Book Library * California Building Standards Commission * California Bureau for Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education * California Bureau of Automotive Repair * California Bureau of Electronic and Appliance Repair * California Bureau of Home Furnishings and Thermal Insulation * California Bureau of Naturopathic Medicine * California Bureau of Security and Investigative Services * California Bureau of State Audits * California Business Agency * California Business Investment Services (CalBIS) * California Business Permit Information (CalGOLD) * California Business Portal *California Business, Transportation and Housing Agency * California Cal Grants * California CalJOBS * California Cal-Learn Program * California CalVet Home Loan Program * California Career Resource Network * California Cemetery and Funeral Bureau * California Center for Analytical Chemistry * California Center for Distributed Learning * California Center for Teaching Careers (Teach California) * California Chancellor's Office * California Charter Schools * California Children and Families Commission * California Children and Family Services Division * California Citizens Compensation Commission * California Civil Rights Bureau * California Coastal Commission * California Coastal Conservancy * California Code of Regulations * California Collaborative Projects with UC Davis * California Commission for Jobs and Economic Growth * California Commission on Aging * California Commission on Health and Safety and Workers' Compensation * California Commission on Judicial Performance * California Commission on State Mandates * California Commission on Status of Women * California Commission on Teacher Credentialing * California Commission on the Status of Women * California Committee on Dental Auxiliaries * California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office, Junior Colleges * California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office * California Complaint Mediation Program * California Conservation Corps * California Constitution Revision Commission * California Consumer Hotline * California Consumer Information Center * California Consumer Information * California Consumer Services Division * California Consumers and Families Agency * California Contractors State License Board * California Corrections Standards Authority * California Council for the Humanities * California Council on Criminal Justice * California Council on Developmental Disabilities * California Court Reporters Board * California Courts of Appeal * California Crime and Violence Prevention Center * California Criminal Justice Statistics Center * California Criminalistic Institute Forensic Library * California CSGnet Network Management * California Cultural and Historical Endowment * California Cultural Resources Division * California Curriculum and Instructional Leadership Branch * California Data Exchange Center * California Data Management Division * California Debt and Investment Advisory Commission * California Delta Protection Commission * California Democratic Caucus * California Demographic Research Unit * California Dental Auxiliaries * California Department of Aging * California Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs * California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control Appeals Board * California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control * California Department of Boating and Waterways (Cal Boating) * California Department of Child Support Services (CDCSS) * California Department of Community Services and Development * California Department of Conservation * California Department of Consumer Affairs * California Department of Corporations * California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation * California Department of Developmental Services * California Department of Education * California Department of Fair Employment and Housing * California Department of Finance * California Department of Financial Institutions * California Department of Fish and Game * California Department of Food and Agriculture * California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CDF) * California Department of General Services * California Department of General Services, Office of State Publishing * California Department of Health Care Services * California Department of Housing and Community Development * California Department of Industrial Relations (DIR) * California Department of Insurance * California Department of Justice Firearms Division * California Department of Justice Opinion Unit * California Department of Justice, Consumer Information, Public Inquiry Unit * California Department of Justice * California Department of Managed Health Care * California Department of Mental Health * California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) * California Department of Personnel Administration * California Department of Pesticide Regulation * California Department of Public Health * California Department of Real Estate * California Department of Rehabilitation * California Department of Social Services Adoptions Branch * California Department of Social Services * California Department of Technology Services Training Center (DTSTC) * California Department of Technology Services (DTS) * California Department of Toxic Substances Control * California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) * California Department of Veterans Affairs (CalVets) * California Department of Water Resources * California Departmento de Vehiculos Motorizados * California Digital Library * California Disabled Veteran Business Enterprise Certification Program * California Division of Apprenticeship Standards * California Division of Codes and Standard s * California Division of Communicable Disease Control * California Division of Engineering * California Division of Environmental and Occupational Disease Control * California Division of Gambling Control * California Division of Housing Policy Development * California Division of Labor Standards Enforcement * California Division of Labor Statistics and Research * California Division of Land and Right of Way * California Division of Land Resource Protection * California Division of Law Enforcement! General Library * California Division of Measurement Standards * California Division of Mines and Geology * California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) * California Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources * California Division of Planning and Local Assistance * California Division of Recycling * California Division of Safety of Dams * California Division of the State Architect * California Division of Tourism * California Division of Workers' Compensation Medical Unit * California Division of Workers' Compensation * California Economic Assistance, Business and Community Resources * California Economic Strategy Panel * California Education and Training Agency * California Education Audit Appeals Panel * California Educational Facilities Authority * California Elections Division * California Electricity Oversight Board * California Emergency Management Agency * California Emergency Medical Services Authority * California Employment Development Department (EDD) * California Employment Information State Jobs * California Employment Training Panel *=2 0California Energy Commission * California Environment and Natural Resources Agency * California Environmental Protection Agency (Cal/EPA) * California Environmental Resources Evaluation System (CERES) * California Executive Office * California Export Laboratory Services * California Exposition and State Fair (Cal Expo) * California Fair Political Practices Commission * California Fairs and Expositions Division * California Film Commission * California Fire and Resource Assessment Program * California Firearms Division * California Fiscal Services * California Fish and Game Commission * California Fisheries Program Branch * California Floodplain Management * California Foster Youth Help * California Franchise Tax Board (FTB) * California Fraud Division * California Gambling Control Commission * California Geographic Information Systems Council (GIS) * California Geological Survey * California Government Claims and Victim Compensation Board * California Governor's Committee for Employment of Disabled Persons * California Governor's Mentoring Partnership * California Governor's Office of Emergency Services * California Governor's Office of Homeland Security * California Governor's Office of Planning and Research * California Governor's Office * California Grant and Enterprise Zone Programs HCD Loan * California Health and Human Services Agency * California Health and Safety Agency * California Healthy Families Program * California Hearing Aid Dispensers Bureau * California High-Speed Rail Authority * California Highway Patrol (CHP) * California=2 0History and Culture Agency * California Horse Racing Board * California Housing Finance Agency * California Indoor Air Quality Program * California Industrial Development Financing Advisory Commission * California Industrial Welfare Commission * California InFoPeople * California Information Center for the Environment * California Infrastructure and Economic Development Bank (I-Bank) * California Inspection Services * California Institute for County Government * California Institute for Education Reform * California Integrated Waste Management Board * California Interagency Ecological Program * California Job Service * California Junta Estatal de Personal * California Labor and Employment Agency * California Labor and Workforce Development Agency * California Labor Market Information Division * California Land Use Planning Information Network (LUPIN) * California Lands Commission * California Landscape Architects Technical Committee * California Latino Legislative Caucus * California Law Enforcement Branch * California Law Enforcement General Library * California Law Revision Commission * California Legislative Analyst's Office * California Legislative Black Caucus * California Legislative Counsel * California Legislative Division * California Legislative Information * California Legislative Lesbian, Gay , Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Caucus * California Legislature Internet Caucus * California Library Development Services * California License and Revenue Branch * California Major Risk Medical Insurance Program * California Managed Risk Medical Insurance Board * California Maritime Academy * California Marketing Services * California Measurement Standards * California Medical Assistance Commission * California Medical Care Services * California Military Department * California Mining and Geology Board * California Museum for History, Women, and the Arts * California Museum Resource Center * California National Guard * California Native American Heritage Commission * California Natural Community Conservation Planning Program * California New Motor Vehicle Board * California Nursing Home Administrator Program * California Occupational Safety and Health Appeals Board * California Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board * California Ocean Resources Management Program * California Office of Administrative Hearings * California Office of Administrative Law * California Office of AIDS * California Office of Binational Border Health * California Office of Child Abuse Prevention * California Office of Deaf Access * California Office of Emergency Services (OES) * California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment * California Office of Fiscal Services * California Office of Fleet Administration * California Office of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Implementation (CalOHI) * California Office of Historic Preservation * California Office of Homeland Security * California Office of Human Resources * California Office of Legal Services * California Office of Legislation * California Office of Lieutenant Governor * California Office of Military and Aerospace Support * California Office of Mine Reclamation * California Office of Natural Resource Education * California Office of Privacy Protection * California Office of Public School Construction * California Office of Real Estate Appraisers * California Office of Risk and Insurance Management * California Office of Services to the! Blind * California Office of Spill Prevention and Response * California Office of State Publishing (OSP) * California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development * California Office of Systems Integration * California Office of the Inspector General * California Office of the Ombudsman * California Office of the Patient Advocate * California Office of the President * California Office of the Secretary for Education * California Office of the State Fire Marshal * California Office of the State Public Defender * California Office of Traffic Safety * California Office of Vital Records * California Online Directory * California Operations Control Office * California Opinion Unit * California Outreach and Technical Assistance Network (OTAN) * California Park and Recreation Commission * California Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) * California Performance Review (CPR) * California Permit Information for Business (CalGOLD) * California Physical Therapy Board * California Physician Assistant Committee * California Plant Health and Pest Prevention Services * California Policy and Evaluation Division * California Political Reform Division * California Pollution Control Financing Authority * California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo * California Postsecondary Education Commission *=2 0California Prevention Services * California Primary Care and Family Health * California Prison Industry Authority * California Procurement Division * California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) * California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) * California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) * California Real Estate Services Division * California Refugee Programs Branch * California Regional Water Quality Control Boards * California Registered Veterinary Technician Committee * California Registrar of Charitable Trusts * California Republican Caucus * California Research and Development Division * California Research Bureau * California Resources Agency * California Respiratory Care Board * California Rivers Assessment * California Rural Health Policy Council * California Safe Schools * California San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission * California San Gabriel and Lower Los Angeles Rivers and Mountains Conservancy * California San Joaquin River Conservancy * California School to Career * California Science Center * California Scripps Institution of Oceanography * California Secretary of State Business Portal * California Secretary of State * California Seismic Safety Commission * California Self Insurance Plans (SIP) * California Senate Office of Research * California Small Business and Disabled Veteran Business Enterprise Certification Program * California Small Business Development Center Program * California Smart Growth Caucus * California Smog Check Information Center * California Spatial Information Library * California Special Education20Division * California Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology Board * California Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) * California Standards and Assessment Division * California State Administrative Manual (SAM) * California State Allocation Board * California State and Consumer Services Agency * California State Architect * California State Archives * California State Assembly * California State Association of Counties (CSAC) * California State Board of Education * California State Board of Food and Agriculture * California Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) * California State Children's Trust Fund * California State Compensation Insurance Fund * California State Contracts Register Program * California State Contracts Register * California State Controller * California State Council on Developmental Disabilities (SCDD) * California State Disability Insurance (SDI) * California State Fair (Cal Expo) * California State Jobs Employment Information * California State Lands Commission * California State Legislative Portal * California State Legislature * California State Library Catalog * California State Library Services Bureau * California State Library * California State Lottery * California State Mediation and Conciliation Service * California State Mining and Geology Board * California State Park and Recreation Commission * California State Parks * California State Personnel Board * California State Railroad Museum * California State Science Fair * California State Senate * California State Summer School for Mathematics and Science (COSMOS) * California State Summer School for the Arts * California State Superintendent of Public Instruction * California State Teachers' Retirement System (CalSTRS) * California State Treasurer * California State University Center for Distributed Learning * California State Water Project Analysis Office * California State Water Project * California State Water Resources Control Board * California Structural Pest Control Board * California Student Aid Commission * California Superintendent of Public Instruction * California Superior Courts * California Tahoe Conservancy * California Task Force on Culturally and Linguistically Competent Physicians and Dentists * California Tax Information Center * California Technology and Administration Branch Finance * California Telecommunications Division * California Telephone Medical Advice Services (TMAS) * California Transportation Commission * California Travel and Transportation Agency * California Unclaimed Property Program * California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board * California Unemployment Insurance Program * California Uniform Construction Cost Accounting Commission * California Veterans Board * California Veterans Memorial * California Veterinary Medical Board and Registered Veterinary Technician Examining Committee * California Veterinary Medical Board * California Victim Compensation and Government Claims Board * California Volunteers * California Voter Registration * California Water Commission * California Water Environment Association (CWEA) * California Water Resources Control Board * California Welfare to Work Division * California ! Wet lands Information System * California Wildlife and Habitat Data Analysis Branch * California Wildlife Conservation Board * California Wildlife Programs Branch * California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids (CalWORKs) * California Workers' Compensation Appeals Board * California Workforce and Labor Development Agency * California Workforce Investment Board * California Youth Authority (CYA) * Central Valley Flood Protection Board * Center for California Studies * Colorado River Board of California * Counting California * Dental Board of California * Health Insurance Plan of California (PacAdvantage) * Jobs with the State of California * Judicial Council of California * Learn California * Library of California * Lieutenant Governor's Commission for One California * Little Hoover Commission (on California State Government Organization and Economy) * Medical Board of California * Medi-Cal * Osteopathic Medical Board of California * Physical Therapy Board of California * Regents of the University of California * State Bar of California Veterans Home of California
Arnold is furloughing state employees. He should start permanently furloughing dozens of the 480-plus agencies listed above. This is ridiculous.
Thanks to reader Bob C. for passing that to me.
Posted by Chris Reed at July 13, 2009 12:05 PM

11. Liberals love majority rule – except when it works against them
RIDER COMMENT: Recently Democrats have been decrying Prop 13’s 2/3 majority vote requirement, claiming that it’s undemocratic. Here’s an online riposte I wrote to counter such complaints:
---
Liberals' love of majority rule is pure hypocrisy. After all, it was a simple majority California citizen vote that IMPOSED the 2/3 majority rule on raising some taxes.

IF you progressives are serious about bowing to the rule of the majority, we can settle this once and for all. Liberals, put a statewide prop on the ballot to repeal the 2/3 majority vote rule for new taxes -- returning to a simple majority vote requirement.

If it passes by a simple majority vote, it becomes the law of the state. If not, gracefully accept defeat.

Of course, you scheming hypocrites won't put such a measure on the ballot, because you know you'd lose -- AGAIN.

And not by some close vote either. And not from a lack of spending -- your unions would spend over $100 million to support such a measure. You'd outspend opponents at least 20 to 1. All for naught.

Be honest. You simply want to make it easier to raise taxes -- REGARDLESS of the will of the citizens.

12. The feminist “78 cents on a dollar” myth

RIDER COMMENT: One oft-repeated claim by women is that for every dollar a man gets paid for doing a job, women get paid only 78 cents for the same work. Obama recently repeated this canard at a recent ceremony signing of more bad legislation (you don’t wanna know). But this claim assumes that business owners (all male, I guess) are more chauvinist than greedy – an odd position indeed, as explained below.
---
Columnist Ilana Mercer was not at the ceremony, but asked the kind of economically-informed question that rarely percolates up through discussions of pay equity: If women with the same skills as men were getting only 78 cents for every dollar a man earns, wouldn't men have long-since priced themselves out of the job market? The fact that men haven't done that might mean that different abilities and experiences are at work, Mercer guessed, "rather than a conspiracy to suppress women."

13. Thomas Sowell: “You can usually only equalize downwards”

RIDER COMMENT: Thomas Sowell probably offers more pithy insights on economics and society than anyone I know. Here’s a recent gem, followed by my online comment on the topic.

http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2009/07/you-can-usually-only-equalize-downwards.html

You Can Usually Only Equalize Downwards

The problem with trying to equalize is that you can usually only equalize downward.

If you are going to try to equalize the chances of women getting jobs as firefighters then you are going to have to lower the physical requirements of height, weight and upper body strength. That means that you are going to have more firefighters who are not capable of carrying an unconscious person out of a burning building.

If you are going to have these lower physical requirements be the same for both women and men, that means that you are not only going to have women who are not capable of carrying someone out of a burning building, you are also going to have men who are likewise incapable of carrying someone to safety.

Most activities do not exist for the sake of equality. They exist to serve their own purposes-- and those purposes are undermined, sometimes fatally, when equality becomes the goal.

~Thomas Sowell

RIDER COMMENT: What is sometimes not appreciated is that too often the physically sub-par "worker" in strenuous jobs is a threat to their coworkers.

For instance, it's not too important how fast (as in sprint speed) a military ground-pounder can run -- it's important how LONG and fast they can move with their full combat gear to advance or retreat. If a grunt is slow and/or weak, the others have to carry their load for them, or slow their movement as a unit to the least mobile grunt, or leave the laggards behind and have less firepower when conflict arises -- not good choices.

Firefighters don't want a relative weakling as a coworker on a fire, but are often pressured not to say so. To complain about the "weaker sex" is to risk charges of sexism and sexual harassment.

Not to say women can't do such jobs -- but the standards should be rigorous for whoever applies, regardless of gender. No double standard -- and no dropping of the standards for all to accommodate the unqualified.

14. Past (and many present) City Managers in San Diego County are the biggest crooks when it comes to the local pension debacles

RIDER COMMENT: Recently the SD UNION-TRIBUNE and local TV stations publicized the names and pensions of CalPERS recipients in the county. Most local cities put their pension funds with CalPERS – the city of San Diego is the only one that doesn’t, as far as I know.

As it turns out, some of the highest pensions in the county are for city managers who pushed for the retroactive pension increases for city workers -- including for themselves. How objective was their fiscal advice concerning the pensions to their gullible city councils? What do YOU think?

Sometimes these senior city bureaucrats would push these retroactive pension increases through, and then retire within the year – before the magnitude of the disaster became apparent. The previous Vista city manager for one followed this path, if memory serves me.

So just what does "retroactive" entail? Example:

A city manager's pension is unilaterally raised from $100K to $150K. But the city manager has been paying only into a formula based on a $100K pension. If the city employee retires in a year, then they make only one year's contribution at the $150K level, but they get a lifetime $150K pension payout, plus annual (limited) COL increases.

Assuming that as an employee these city managers even have to make ANY contribution to their pension. For instance, La Mesa and Chula Vista don’t charge their employees a DIME for their 90% of salary pensions for 30 years “service.” The hapless city taxpayers pay both the city and the employee CalPERS contribution. And I’m sure that’s due in large part to the “impartial” advice of their greedy city managers.

Our city politicians are woefully inept when it comes to financial matters. In my experience, most quite literally could not balance their own checkbooks. So naturally they turn to “staff” for guidance in such fiscal matters. No one seemed to want to raise the issue of the HUGE conflict of interest facing “their” city managers.
From what I can see, a successful city manager’s most important skill is ingratiating himself or herself to the politicians – smoozing seems to be these bureaucrats’ greatest asset.

Generally city managers are loved and revered by their city council critters. Councils too often generously boost their manager’s salary just before retirement to further bulk up the managers’ obscene pensions.

15. Man bites dog. Rider supports labor union proposition

RIDER COMMENT: I support the unions' efforts to let the voters vote on term limits for San Diego County Supervisors.

Indeed, to be more accurate, they now support MY efforts. We tried without success a few years ago to put term limits for the Sups on the ballot, but our funding fell through. I'd guess that today it would cost about $200K to gather the needed signatures to put the prop on the ballot.

Not that it will be hard to GET the needed prop signatures. Such measures are popular with voters. If term limits makes it on the ballot, it will surely pass, even without union support.

Judging from the reader comments posted for a SD U-T article detailing this effort, it appears that paradoxically the labor union support for this measure is the biggest reason it might fail. Over and over, readers say something to the effect that “normally I support term limits, but if the unions are pushing this measure, then I’m against it.”

And I must sympathize with that viewpoint. Indeed, it’s great that unions’ support for ANY measure is now a big negative with the voters. Increasingly it seems that voters are looking to vote against the candidates the labor unions support – a welcome sea change.

In this case, the Supervisors can rightly claim that the unions are striking back for the Sups not being not quite as subservient to union demands as in previous years. But all in all, I doubt the union involvement will keep voters from passing the initiative.

Voters know that we've got an aristocracy ruling the county. With their $11 million annual slush fund explicitly designed to buy votes, our elected County Supervisors have become impossible to dislodge. It's time to end this DE FACTO reelection guarantee.

Let's not forget that the current batch of Supervisors gratuitously raised the public employee pension benefits and then issued over a BILLION DOLLARS worth of muni bonds to pay for the increase. We are still paying for those bonds, and will be for many years.

And note that these "pension obligation bonds" were issued without a vote of the electorate, thanks to friendly judicial rulings. But the ruling did not PROHIBIT such bonds from going to a vote of the citizens -- the Sups made that decision to avoid a public election (and public debate).

Remember, our Sups get the same fabulous pensions that our county workers get. Gee, I wonder if that might have influenced their decision to vote for the unsustainable, retroactive pension increases.

Ya think?

Time to turn 'em out to pasture. PAST time, actually.

16. Over half the price of a ticket for international flight can be taxes
RIDER COMMENT: We’ve all seen domestic ticket fees and taxes rise after 9/11, but it’s the international flights where madness prevails. If you manage to score a well-discounted international ticket, then over half the price you pay can be for taxes.

http://www.openmarket.org/2009/07/15/flying-is-a-taxable-event/

Flying Is a Taxable Event

Posted by Ryan Young on July 15, 2009 @ 5:18 pm

The potential specter of federal carry-on bag size restrictions [1] has not deterred me from flying. But my jaw nearly hit the floor recently when I saw that I had paid more in taxes and fees than for actual airfare for an international flight.
Click here [2] to see a list of 17 taxes we pay for flying. The September 11th Fee. International Departure Tax. International Arrival Tax. And those are just the direct taxes.

Indirect taxes are also legion. They’re harder to see. But they’re still there. And they, too, increase the price of flying. Airports have to pay an electricity tax to keep the lights on. Airlines have to pay a corporate tax on any profits. Pilots and crew have to pay income taxes. All these also affect the price of airfare. There is far more to taxation than meets the eye.
________________________________________
Article printed from OpenMarket.org: http://www.openmarket.org
URL to article: http://www.openmarket.org/2009/07/15/flying-is-a-taxable-event/
URLs in this post:
[1] restrictions: http://spectator.org/archives/2009/07/07/unnecessary-baggage
[2] here: http://www.airlines.org/economics/taxes/excisetaxes.htm

17. Tech Corner – Offsite backup – DO IT! Easier and cheaper than ever.

RIDER COMMENT: I’ve written before about this matter. This post is an update.

Assuming you don’t keep all your computer files, address book, emails, photos, music, etc. online at a server such as Gmail, you need offsite backup. It’s gotten easier – and cheaper.

Try to imagine what life would be like if today someone stole your computer – along with your backup external hard drive or memory stick. Or imagine a fire burned down your home or office with all your computer data. Or an earthquake swallowed it all up. Or a nuclear blast vaporized your computer (along with you, of course).

Don’t dwell on the thought. Too depressing (at least for me!).

Use an offsite backup service. It’s safe, heavily encrypted and usually backed up at more than one offsite location. And it can be quite reasonably priced.

Some offsite services are free for small amounts – 1 to 5 gigs. For many people, that might be enough. And you can use more than one free service – maybe one for your docs, and another for your photos.

But if your home or office computers need more, get more. The price is quite reasonable – especially for home/personal use.

Not that you shouldn’t have ONSITE backup as well. It’s FAR easier and much faster to retrieve files from your external hard drive (or a networked computer, or a flash drive) than to download gigs of backup files via the Internet.

In the past, I’ve used Mozy for online backup, but I think I’ve found a significantly better service – MemoPal. www.MemoPal.com

Perhaps its best feature is that, for home use, you can sign up to 10 computers and have an aggregate 150 gigs of backup – for $50 a year. Mozy cost $60 annually and could be used by only one computer.

MemoPal also provides real time incremental backup (backs up your file every time you save it WHEN you save it), has good backup software for selecting and maintaining your backup procedures. It’s highly rated by computer mavens, and rightly so, from what I can tell.

If you have large files – a gig or more – it also can be very useful in sharing files with friends that you normally can’t send as attachments. You designate who you want to be able to access certain files, and they can download them online.

With the proper codes, your backup files are accessible from any computer – while you are traveling, for instance.

I should be selling this stuff!

18. Financial tip: How to get extra discounts on online purchases

RIDER COMMENT: Sometimes when one is buying something from a commercial vendor online, there’s a box to put in a “Promotion code.” What does that tell you? It tells you that some people may be getting the same item as you for less cost!

“But,” you say, “I don’t HAVE a promotion code.” Probably not, but there’s a reasonable chance you can get one if it’s out there. For instance, for my purchase of the MemoPal backup service, I got an amazing 30% off the annual $50 price by using a promotion code.

Like you, I didn’t have the code, but I figured I’d Google “MemoPal promotion code.” Bingo!

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. And hardly a time consuming online exercise.

19. Latest updates to my “California Breaking Bad” article

RIDER COMMENT: As my veteran readers know, I keep updating my Breaking Bad article with the latest stats – comparing California with the other states. It’s also available as a Word file, which prints out as a fine two page flyer. Ask and ye shall receive. It’s a powerful sharing document, and to a degree has gone viral.
To make it easier for previous readers, I’m going to try to highlight the CHANGES from the last Rant version, so that you can quickly see what’s different, and what’s been added.

Here are the changes first – with comments:

A. Highest gasoline tax (averaging 64.5 cents/gallon) in the nation (July, 2009) – up from #2 in last report. When gas hits $3.00/gallon, we are numero uno – because unlike many states, we charge sales tax on gasoline purchases (built into the price). And boy, do we have a sales tax!
http://www.api.org/statistics/fueltaxes/

B. Sixth highest unemployment rate in the nation. (June, 2009) 11.6%. National rate 9.5%. This is good news and bad news. The good news is that we’ve dropped from 4th to 6th worst, our best showing in some time. The bad news is that our unemployment rate STILL went up – it’s just that some other states are doing even worse.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/laus.nr0.htm

C. California has 12% of the nation’s population, but 36% of the country’s TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) welfare recipients – more than the next 7 states combined. Unlike other states, this “temporary” assistance becomes much more permanent in CA.
http://weblog.signonsandiego.com/weblogs/afb/archives/034662.html

------
Breaking Bad: California vs. the Other States

by Richard Rider, Chairman, San Diego Tax Fighters
Version 1.47 Revised 18 July, 2009

Here’s a depressing comparison of California taxes and economic climate with the rest of the states. The news is breaking bad, and getting worse (I keep updating this article):

California has the 2nd highest state income tax in the nation. 9.55% at $48,000. 10.55% at $1,000,000

By far the highest state sales tax in the nation. 8.25% (not counting local sales taxes)

Highest state car tax in the nation – at least double any other state. 1.15% per year on value of vehicle.

Corporate income tax rate is the highest in the West. 8.84%

2009 Business Tax Climate ranks 48th in the nation.
http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/topic/15.html

Fourth highest capital gains tax 9.55%
http://www.thereibrain.com/realestate-blog/capital-gains-tax-rates-state-by-state/109/

Highest gasoline tax (averaging 64.5 cents/gallon) in the nation (July, 2009). When gas hits $3.00/gallon, we are numero uno – because unlike many states, we charge sales tax on gasoline purchases (built into the price).
http://www.api.org/statistics/fueltaxes/

Sixth highest unemployment rate in the nation. (June, 2009) 11.6%. National rate 9.5%.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/laus.nr0.htm

California’s 2009 “Tax Freedom Day” (the day the average taxpayer stops working for government and start working for oneself) is again the 4th worst date in the nation – up from 28th worst in 1994.
http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/387.html

To offset lower state revenues, 29 states are proposing 2009 state tax and fee increases totaling $24 billion. California, with 12% of the nation’s population, is proposing 47% of that increase (6/5/09).
http://money.cnn.com/2009/06/04/news/economy/states_budget_crises/index.htm

1 in 5 in LA County receiving public aid.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-welfare22-2009feb22,0,4377048.story

California has 12% of the nation’s population, but 36% of the country’s TANF welfare recipients – more than the next 7 states combined. Unlike other states, this “temporary” assistance becomes much more permanent in CA.
http://weblog.signonsandiego.com/weblogs/afb/archives/034662.html

California prison guards highest paid in the nation.
http://www.caltax.org/caltaxletter/2008/101708_fraud1.htm

California teachers easily the highest paid in the nation.
http://www.nea.org/home/29402.htm (CA has the second lowest student test scores)

California now has the lowest bond ratings of any state, edging out Louisiana.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/19/BA7F16JLKH.DTL

California ranks 44th worst in “2008 lawsuit climate.”
http://www.instituteforlegalreform.com/component/ilr_featured_tools/29/item/LAI/19.html

In 2005 (latest figures), for every dollar Californians sent to D.C. in taxes, we got back 78 cents – 43rd worst.
http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxdata/show/22685.html

America’s top CEO’s rank California “the worst place in which to do business” for the fourth straight year (3/2009). But here’s the interesting part – they think California is a great state to live (primarily for the great climate) – they just won’t bring their businesses here because of the oppressive tax and regulatory climate.
Consider this quote from the survey (a conclusion reflected in the rankings of the characteristics of the state): “California has huge advantages with its size, quality of work force, particularly in high tech, as well as the quality of life and climate advantages of the state. However, it is an absolute regulatory and tax disaster.”
http://tinyurl.com/cyvufy

California, a destitute state, still gives away college education at fire sale prices. Our community college tuition is by far the lowest in the nation. How low? Nationwide, the average community college tuition is 4.5 times higher than California CC’s. This ridiculously low tuition devalues education to students – resulting in a 30+% drop rate for class completion. In addition, 2/3 of California CC students pay no tuition at all – filling out a simple unverified “hardship” form that exempts them from any tuition payment, or receiving grants and tax credits for their full tuition.
http://www.sacbee.com/static/weblogs/capitolalertlatest/020722.html
http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/jun/29/1n29fees225829-two-year-colleges-fees-likely-rise-/

On top of that, California offers thousands of absolutely free adult continuing education classes – a sop to the upper middle class. In San Diego, over 1,400 classes for everything from baking pastries to ballroom dancing are offered totally at taxpayer expense.
http://www.sdce.edu

California residential electricity costs an average of 35.4% more than the national average. For industrial use, CA electricity is 56.2% higher than the national average (2007).
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/fig7p5.html
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table5_6_a.html

It costs 38% more to build solar panels in California than in Tennessee – which is why European corporations have invested $2.3 billion in two Tennessee manufacturing plants to build solar panels for our state.
http://www.foxandhoundsdaily.com/blog/jack-stewart/more-solar-companies-producing-elsewhere-sell-california

Consider California’s net domestic migration (migration between states). From April, 2000 through June, 2008 (8 years, 2 months) California has lost a NET 1.4 million people. The departures slowed this past year only because people couldn’t sell their homes.
http://www.mdp.state.md.us/msdc/Pop_estimate/Estimate_08/table5.pdf
These are not welfare kings and queens departing. They are the young, the educated, the productive, the ambitious, the wealthy (such as Tiger Woods), and retirees seeking to make their pensions provide more bang for the buck. The irony is that a disproportionate number of these seniors are retired state and local government employees fleeing the state that provides them with their opulent pensions – in order to avoid the high taxes that these same employees pushed so hard through their unions.

As taxes rise and jobs disappear, we lose our tax base, continuing California’s state and local fiscal death spiral. This spiral must stop NOW.

NOTE: If you would like to receive my free periodic “Richard Rider Rant” e-newsletter with more of this type of information and analysis, just drop me an email at RRider@san.rr.com. To see the latest version of this “Breaking Bad” column, plus samples of my free “Richard Rider Rant” e-newsletter, go to my blog at http://www.RichardRiderRant.blogspot.com/.

2009-07-04T19:37:00.000-07:00

RICHARD RIDER RANT Fourth of July, 2009
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety,
deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Benjamin Franklin

1. My Baltic Sea cruise confirms that government employees are the New Aristocracy
2. Government spending has REVERSE “multiplier” effect
3. Congress covers up EPA study debunking global warming to approve cap and trade madness
4. High school graduates can’t pass basic U.S. citizenship test
5. To provide free Internet, subsidize Internet cafes, not libraries
6. An analysis of Supreme Court Ricci decision overturning firefighter affirmative action – and Sotomayer’s ruling
7. The climate change climate change – global warming scientist proponents are changing their minds
8. Media doing more data mining – great news for the public
9. Canooks come to U.S. for timely medical care – where will we be going for ours if ObamaCare passes? Plus comments on the bogus reports of high U.S. infant mortality rates.
10. Amid budget mess, CHP could get raise
11. Obama blowing hot air concerning California energy efficiency policies
12. Case study of a bloated pension -- complete with details
13. The NEW YORK TIMES bloviates on CA budget problems

1. My Baltic Sea cruise confirms that government employees are the New Aristocracy
RIDER COMMENT: Diane and I recently returned from a Baltic Sea cruise. We visited Copenhagen, Germany, Estonia, St. Petersburg, Helsinki, Stockholm and back to Copenhagen. It’s our third cruise – previously we did Alaska and the Mediterranean.
This time there was too much rain, it was too cold, and I caught the plague, but otherwise an interesting two weeks. Boy, am I glad to be back!
Back from our future, apparently. Denmark had perhaps the worst taxes. In addition to a 26% VAT (sales) tax and extra taxes making cars and other luxuries cost triple what they cost here, they have what our tour guide described as a “progressive” income tax system. According to her, after an exemption, working people pay a 52% income tax. If you are rich, you go up into the 62% bracket. Gee, that sounds more like our vaunted “flat tax” to me!
But to my point. On my two previous cruises, I started to notice something rather odd, but didn’t look into it at the time. It seemed to me that many people we met on past cruises were government employees, or their spouses.
This trip I decided to be a bit more scientific in delving further into this tendency. We chose to do “open seating” dining, which means we usually had different dinner companions each evening – and new audiences for my one-liners.
When it seemed appropriate (and sometimes when it didn’t), I would ask my companions about their livelihood. Most were open with their replies. I got 22 responses from families or individuals.
Counting my retired teacher spouse and myself as one of the family units, I found that 15 of the 23 “groups” at our dinner table had one or two government employees – working or retired. Two were retired Canadian firefighters in their mid-fifties. One was a British bureaucrat. The rest of the government employees were All American.
Most folks would be surprised to find so many government employees on such a 5 star cruise. Most would have expected to find businesspeople and professionals composing the bulk of the patrons. Maybe in the past, but no more.
While this is admittedly a small sample size, the results are consistent with what I anecdotally found on my previous two cruises.
It’s like I’ve been saying – government employees are the new aristocracy.

2. Government spending has REVERSE “multiplier” effect
THE GOLDWATER INSTITUTE
The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco recently published an article summarizing research on economic multipliers. http://tinyurl.com/pwxbo2

It turns out that a dollar of government spending results in 70 cents of job-creating activity after two years. A dollar in tax cuts results in $1.30 to $3 of job-creating activity after two years. Put another way, a $1 cut in spending cuts job-creating activity by 70 cents. A $1 increase in taxes cuts job-creating activity by as much as $3.

3. Congress covers up EPA study debunking global warming to approve cap and trade madness
RIDER COMMENT: This story has gotten belated play, but it ain’t over yet. The enviro-wacko juggernaut will be hard to reverse. If you can’t see the little graphic at the bottom of the article, go to the link to view it. It’s important.
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=330911757213432#
INVESTORS BUSINESS DAILY
Carbongate
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, June 26, 2009 4:20 PM PT
Climate Change: A suppressed EPA study says old U.N. data ignore the decline in global temperatures and other inconvenient truths. Was the report kept under wraps to influence the vote on the cap-and-trade bill?
________________________________________
Read More: Global Warming

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This was supposed to be the most transparent administration ever. Yet as the House of Representatives prepared to vote on the Waxman-Markey bill, the largest tax increase in U.S. history on 100% of Americans, an attempt was made to suppress a study shredding supporters' arguments.
On Friday, the day of the vote, the Competitive Enterprise Institute said it was releasing "an internal study on climate science which was suppressed by the Environmental Protection Agency."
In the release, the institute's Richard Morrison said "internal EPA e-mail messages, released by CEI earlier in the week, indicate that the report was kept under wraps and its author silenced because of pressure to support the administration's agenda of regulating carbon dioxide."
Reading the report, available on the CEI Web site, we find this "endangerment analysis" contains such interesting items as: "Given the downward trend in temperatures since 1998 (which some think will continue until at least 2030), there is no particular reason to rush into decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data."
What the report says is that the EPA, by adopting the United Nations' 2007 "Fourth Assessment" report, is relying on outdated research by its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The research, it says, is "at best three years out of date in a rapidly changing field" and ignores the latest scientific findings.
Besides noting the decline in temperatures as CO2 levels have increased, the draft report says the "consensus" on storm frequency and intensity is now "much more neutral."
Then there's one of Al Gore's grim fairy tales — the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and glaciers the size of Tennessee roaming the North Atlantic. "The idea that warming temperatures will cause Greenland to rapidly shed its ice has been greatly diminished by new results indicating little evidence for operations of such processes," the report says.
Little evidence? Outdated U.N. research? No reason to rush? This is not what the Obama administration and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were telling us when they were rushing to force a Friday vote on Waxman-Markey. We were given the impression that unless we passed this cap-and-tax fiasco, polar bears would be extinct by the Fourth of July.
We have noted frequently the significance of solar activity on earth's climate and history. This EPA draft report not only confirms our reporting but the brazen incompetence of those "experts" that have been prophesying planetary apocalypse.
"A new 2009 paper by Scafetta and West," the report says, "suggests that the IPCC used faulty solar data in dismissing the direct effect of solar variability on global temperatures. Their report suggests that solar variability could account for up to 68% of the increase in Earth's global temperatures."
The report was the product of Alan Carlin, senior operations research analyst at the EPA's National Center for Environmental Economics (NCEE). He's been with the EPA for 38 years but now has been taken off all climate-related work. He is convinced that actual climate observations do not match climate change theories and that only the politics, not the science, has been settled.
Thomas Fuller, environmental policy blogger with the San Francisco Examiner, wrote Thursday in a story developed in conjunction with Anthony Watts' Web site wattsupwiththat.com: "A source inside the Environmental Protection Agency confirmed many of the claims made by analyst Alan Carlin, the economist/physicist who yesterday went public with accusations that science was being ignored in evaluating the danger of CO2."
All this is particularly interesting because of the charges by Al Gore, NASA's James Hansen and others that the Bush administration and energy companies actively suppressed the truth about climate change.
One of the e-mails unearthed by CEI was dated March 12, from Al McGartland, office director at NCEE, forbidding Carlin from speaking to anyone outside NCEE on endangerment issues such as those in his suppressed report.
Carlin replied on March 16, requesting that his study be forwarded to EPA's Office of Air and Radiation, which directs EPA's climate change program. Carlin points out the peer-reviewed references in his study and points out that the new studies "explain much of the observational data that have been collected which cannot be explained by the IPCC models."
For saying the climate change emperors had no clothes, Carlin was told March 17: "The administrator and the administration have decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. . . . I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office."
In other words, the administration and Congress had their collective minds made up and didn't want to be confused with the facts. They certainly didn't want any inconvenient truths coming out of their own Environmental Protection Agency, the one that wants to regulate everything from your lawn mower to bovine emissions and which says the product of your respiration and ours, carbon dioxide, is a dangerous pollutant and not the basis for all life on earth.
The problem the warm-mongers have is they now are in a position of telling the American people, who are you going to believe — us or your own lying eyes? Forget the snow in Malibu, the record cold winters. Forget that temperatures have dropped for a decade.
In April, President Obama declared that "the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over." Apparently not, for as he spoke those very words his administration was suppressing science to advance a very pernicious ideology.

4. High school graduates can’t pass basic U.S. citizenship test
RIDER COMMENT: Only 3.5% of Arizona high school graduates can get just 60% of the basic civics questions right on the citizenship exam. Augghhhhh!
It is indeed important to remember just how uneducated today’s electorate is. Perhaps that was always true, but I think it has deteriorated since, well, since I graduated from high school in 1963 (the world revolves around me). The other bit if info to keep in mind is that all these folks’ votes count every bit as much as yours.
Previously I published another study showing that college graduates know even less about U.S. civics than high school graduates – college grads forget what little they learned in K-12, or are mistaught in college. Couple this second study with the survey described below, and that is VERY bad news.
GOLDWATER INSTITUTE
Why aren't Arizona high schools teaching civics?
by Matthew Ladner, Ph.D.

Just in time to celebrate Independence Day, the Goldwater Institute will release its new report, "Freedom from Responsibility: A Survey of Civic Knowledge Among Arizona High School Students." It reveals that only 3.5 percent of Arizona high school students have learned the basic history, government and geography necessary to pass the U.S. Citizenship test.
To conduct the survey, we hired a firm to interview 1,140 Arizona high school students and ask 10 questions drawn at random from the exam given to applicants for United States citizenship. Applicants for citizenship must get six out of 10 questions correct to pass. A recent trial found that 92.4 percent of citizenship applicants passed the test on the first try.

Below are the survey questions, the correct answers, and in parentheses the percentage of public school students providing the correct answer for each question.

1. What is the supreme law of the land?

Answer: The Constitution (29.5%)

2. What do we call the first 10 amendments to the Constitution?

Answer: The Bill of Rights (25%)

3. What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress?

Answer: Senate and House (23%)

4. How many Justices are on the Supreme Court?

Answer: Nine (9.4%)

5. Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?

Answer: Jefferson (25.3%)

6. What ocean is on the East Coast of the United States?

Answer: Atlantic (58.8%)

7. What are the two major political parties in the United States?

Answer: Democratic and Republican (49.6%)

8. We elect a U.S. Senator for how many years?

Answer: Six (14.5%)

9. Who was the first President of the United States?

Answer: Washington (26.5%)

10. Who is in charge of the Executive Branch?

Answer: The President (26%)

Only 3.5 percent of traditional public high school students passed the test. That's 40 students out of a sample of 1,134 district high school students.

Arizona's 8th grade social studies standards require that students learn about everything from John Locke to the Mayflower Compact to the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution before high school. It isn't clear what, if anything, Arizona students are learning in these classes, but it is abundantly clear what they are not learning--U.S. civics, history and geography.

In the report, I recommend that all Arizona high school students be required to pass a version of the U.S. Citizenship exam in order to graduate. Since then, one of our supporters came up with an even better idea: Make the exam a requirement for receiving a driver's license. Interesting thought...

Dr. Matthew Ladner is vice president for research at the Goldwater Institute.

5. To provide free Internet, subsidize Internet cafes, not libraries
RIDER COMMENT: One of the many rationales for a new monster central San Diego downtown library is more free computer access for the “poor” – and particularly the pungent homeless. The progressives won’t be happy until all folks not only have Internet access for free, but they must be using it regularly. If they are NOT using the Internet, then somehow that’s the taxpayers’ fault for not making it attractive/easy/accessible enough.
It’s just another in the ENDLESS subsidies liberals mandate from taxpayers. Redistribution is the name of the game – one small bite at the time.
That being said, IF we want taxpayers to pay for widespread free Internet access for the disadvantaged (in case it’s not obvious from my rants, I oppose this goal), then we should look to – of all places – the US Post Office for guidance. The post office contracts with local stores to serve as mini post offices, making such service far more convenient to the public.
Similarly the city could contract with cafes, coffee shops, etc. to provide such service -- paying maybe $15,000-$20,000 per year per location (including buying and maintaining perhaps 10 basic computers). These small struggling businesses benefit from the steady core revenue, plus the ancillary revenue from the computer users making other purchases.
The computers can be geographically positioned in the areas where such service is most needed -- not housed in a giant central library building that only relatively few can get to.
The results? FAR cheaper, and FAR better service. At $20K per coffee shop, a million dollars would provide 40 such locations. Furthermore, this business model would entail little in the way of operating costs or liabilities – unlike the library, where overpriced city employees are expected to help patrons navigate the Internet (or play games, view porn, or whatever).
The downside? No ribbon-cutting photo op for the politicians comparable to the grand opening of a quarter billion dollar library.

6. An analysis of Supreme Court Ricci decision overturning firefighter affirmative action – and Sotomayer’s ruling
RIDER COMMENT: The US Supreme Court’s Ricci decision that disparate racial results on firefighter written tests not being grounds for affirmative action bodes well for limiting further racial preferences (a.k.a. quota systems). Here’s a good article on the decision, and how Sotomayer’s overridden ruling can be viewed.
The article is prefaced by cogent comments from Thomas E. Wood, moderator of AADAP, a free email service on affirmative action. Wood is quite interesting, as he is a liberal opposed to affirmative action.

It has been suggested that New Haven could have certified the test results and found "alternative ways to deal with these issues in the future." Does this mean that every test that does not achieve the desired demographic result should be tossed out?

At some point, in some cases, the liberal argument places diversity above the skill level of a workforce. It is exactly this thinking that contributes to the decades of distance between Democrats and working and middle class whites.

For Sotomayor in particular, her role in the Ricci case is hardly radical. She upheld precedent. So-called "judicial activism" is not a tool exclusive to the right or left. Sotomayor's view on affirmative action was in the mainstream of liberal thought. But on this policy, liberal thought is not in the mainstream.

A Quinnipiac University poll recently detailed the Ricci case and found that seven in ten Americans, including 53 percent of blacks, believed the Court should compel "the city to promote" the firefighters even if no blacks "scored high enough to qualify."

Blacks overwhelmingly support affirmative action. But when given a specific example of the negative side of the policy, even a majority of blacks changed their mind.

Yet the liberal justices hid from these moral issues. The minority opinion sought to stay within the safe confines of precedent. It focused on defending the city's effort to avoid a civil rights lawsuit. The deeper issues that liberal justices ache to confront on other occasions, questions of fairness and equality, went ignored.

The liberal justices sought sanctuary in the legalese of the case. They argued for the continued use of unequal actions to attain an equal outcome and thereby undercut the roots of liberalism, the right to equal opportunity. Those who once fought for equality, and stood on the shoulders of that fight, are reduced to justifying inequality to combat inequality. In this era of Obama, it's the measure of what remains unchanged that is sometimes most striking.

________________________________________

www.realclearpolitics.com/printpage/?url=http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/06/30/left_dodges_moral_debate_on_ricci_case.html

June 30, 2009

Left Dodges Moral Debate on Ricci Case

By David Paul Kuhn
It took the story of one firefighter to expose the tension between fairness and affirmative action.
The nation's four most prominent liberal justices ignored that tension Monday. By consequence, the liberal justices decided that equal outcome should trump equal opportunity, when the two values compete. And in that decision, supported by a chorus of liberal analysts, American liberalism continued decades of thinking that places diversity, not fairness, as its first principle.
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that white and Hispanic firefighters were unfairly discriminated against when the city of New Haven discarded a promotional exam because no blacks, or not enough minorities in the city’s view, earned a sufficient score to be promoted.
The ruling concludes one of the most widely debated discrimination cases of the past decade. Much of that attention is based on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's involvement in the case. Sotomayor, as an appellate judge, upheld the initial decision siding with New Haven.
In the end, the Court's conservative majority prevailed in yet another 5 to 4 vote. But it's the minority's dissent--a view supported by the Obama administration in its brief submitted to the Court--which stirs up liberalism's ongoing avoidance of affirmative action's "real-world" negative consequences.
The uniform liberal Court view on affirmative action takes on a heightened resonance today. Democrats hope President Obama marks the beginning of an enduring political majority. A primary aim of either party, when seeking sustained dominance, is to shift the Court to their side. Had today's Court been left leaning, liberals should be troubled to know, it would have almost certainly upheld a policy that denied a promotion based on the color of those promoted.
The Ricci case gets to the core of the American ideal of "the pursuit of happiness" as an "inalienable right." This right was most egregiously denied to blacks through slavery. It was not until the 1960s that the nation finally confronted and outlawed discriminatory practices. Affirmative action was instituted to correct past inequality.
Nearly a half-century later, liberalism faces new questions. In the time of the first black president, when white men's unemployment rate increases at twice the rate of black women in this recession, liberal thought has remained hinged to an earlier era.
Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibited discrimination based on disparate treatment or disparate impact. In 1960s and 1970s America the tension between the two principles was mitigated by the need to right history.
The liberal opinion, written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on behalf of all four left-leaning justices, argued Monday that the "purpose" of Title VII's disparate-impact provision "is to ensure that individuals are hired and promoted based on qualifications manifestly necessary" and "do not screen out members of any race."
The liberal justices refused to reckon with the instances when the desire for "manifestly necessary" skills creates an unequal racial outcome, as was the case in New Haven.
The conservative majority addressed this tension Monday. It decided New Haven's actions amounted to disparate treatment, what the rest of us call overt discrimination.
An Illiberal Argument
Liberals now find themselves bunkered down beneath illiberal logic. Conventional affirmative action supporters effectively back discrimination for the sake of diversity. The driving role that class and culture play in endemic inequality is ignored. Affirmative action has become an entitlement supported despite consequence or context.
Whites overwhelmingly support a move toward class-based affirmative action that would still disproportionately aid minorities. But liberals remain seemingly vested in defending affirmative action as it was conceived, in a time far different than today.
The liberal opinion on the Ricci case upheld the city's effort to find any means to hold fast to conventional affirmative action. The city, after extended deliberation, decided that it was legal to discard the test results if no one was promoted.
Ginsburg echoed earlier decisions when she wrote that the city policy was "race-neutral in this sense" because "‘[A]ll the test results were discarded, no one was promoted, and firefighters of every race will have [the opportunity] to participate in another selection process to be considered for promotion.'"
The liberal argument feels like the cold legal judgment opposed by Barack Obama, in his criteria for nominating new liberal justices.
"She understands that upholding the rule of law means going beyond legal theory to ensure consistent, fair, common-sense application of the law to real-world facts," the White House wrote when Sotomayor was nominated.
Consider the well known details of the case's lead plaintiff, Frank Ricci. He gave up a second job and spent a third to half of his days studying over a period of months. He paid an acquaintance more than $1,000 to read textbooks onto audiotapes to overcome his dyslexia. He passed the test. Earned the promotion. But he was denied that promotion because diversity took precedent over qualification.
As I wrote in an earlier article on Ricci and concepts of "white male privilege," Ricci personifies the negative impact of so-called "positive discrimination." It's precisely this impact that liberalism must confront. The liberal argument ignored issues of harm, the loss of time or additional income suffered by Ricci and his fellow plaintiffs.
Ginsburg wrote that the majority opinion ignores firefighters' "long history of rank discrimination against African-Americans." It's an important consideration. But Ginsburg ignored the decades of distance from that history.
The liberal opinion goes on to write of the city's "unlikely" desire to exclude white firefighters from promotion because "a fair test"--fair, in this sense, meaning equal outcome--"would undoubtedly result in the addition of white firefighters to the officer ranks." This line of argument would have us believe that a “fair” system would promote some deserving white applicants while denying other white applicants. This illiberal liberal reasoning places disparate impact over disparate treatment. It argues, at best, that subtle discrimination is preferable over its more overt form. This is the inverse of our common hierarchy of justice. Common sense dictates that intentional harm is worse than accidental.
The test was created by a firm specializing in employment exams and met legal requirements, such as a review by independent experts. It was not the test but the color of those who passed it that led the nation’s top liberal legal minds to determine it was not "fair." This view defines quality by demographic result. It consequently upholds the outdated use of quotas.
The city claimed that it trashed the test only because it was afraid of being sued for discrimination by the minority applicants. But practical consequences also matter in law, as Obama has said.
Liberals continue to argue today that affirmative action is the result of employers impeding the progress of minorities. But the Ricci case captures how affirmative action improves the position of minorities often by impeding the progress of whites. And it's the most vulnerable whites who often pay the price of affirmative action, those men who lost blue-collar jobs and know nothing of privilege.
Mistaking Cure for Disease
Sotomayor has commendably acknowledged that affirmative action played a critical role in her admittance to Ivy League universities. And to be sure, diversity has its practical benefits. One needs Spanish speaking social workers or black police officers patrolling black neighborhoods. Whites can be ill served by a homogenous education. But when diversity is emphasized solely for its own sake, the cure becomes the cause rather than the true cause--curing the disease of discrimination.
It has been suggested that New Haven could have certified the test results and found "alternative ways to deal with these issues in the future." Does this mean that every test that does not achieve the desired demographic result should be tossed out?
At some point, in some cases, the liberal argument places diversity above the skill level of a workforce. It is exactly this thinking that contributes to the decades of distance between Democrats and working and middle class whites.
For Sotomayor in particular, her role in the Ricci case is hardly radical. She upheld precedent. So-called "judicial activism" is not a tool exclusive to the right or left. Sotomayor's view on affirmative action was in the mainstream of liberal thought. But on this policy, liberal thought is not in the mainstream.
A Quinnipiac University poll recently detailed the Ricci case and found that seven in ten Americans, including 53 percent of blacks, believed the Court should compel "the city to promote" the firefighters even if no blacks "scored high enough to qualify."
Blacks overwhelmingly support affirmative action. But when given a specific example of the negative side of the policy, even a majority of blacks changed their mind.
Yet the liberal justices hid from these moral issues. The minority opinion sought to stay within the safe confines of precedent. It focused on defending the city's effort to avoid a civil rights lawsuit. The deeper issues that liberal justices ache to confront on other occasions, questions of fairness and equality, went ignored.
Imagine the opposite of the Ricci case. A test is tossed out because not enough whites earned a promotion and too many blacks did. Would liberals support the city's action then?
"We are not unsympathetic to the plaintiffs' expression of frustration," Sotomayor and her fellow appellate justices wrote last year. The Supreme Court liberal justices wrote in their opinion that the firefighters denied a promotion "understandably attract this Court's sympathy."
Sympathy is exhibited not in words but actions. The liberal justices sought sanctuary in the legalese of the case. They argued for the continued use of unequal actions to attain an equal outcome and thereby undercut the roots of liberalism, the right to equal opportunity. Those who once fought for equality, and stood on the shoulders of that fight, are reduced to justifying inequality to combat inequality. In this era of Obama, it's the measure of what remains unchanged that is sometimes most striking.

7. The climate change climate change – global warming scientist proponents are changing their minds
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124597505076157449.html#mod=rss_opinion_main

•
• OPINION: POTOMAC WATCH
• JUNE 29, 2009
The Climate Change Climate Change
The number of skeptics is swelling everywhere.
• By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL
• Comments (537)
Steve Fielding recently asked the Obama administration to reassure him on the science of man-made global warming. When the administration proved unhelpful, Mr. Fielding decided to vote against climate-change legislation.
If you haven't heard of this politician, it's because he's a member of the Australian Senate. As the U.S. House of Representatives prepares to pass a climate-change bill, the Australian Parliament is preparing to kill its own country's carbon-emissions scheme. Why? A growing number of Australian politicians, scientists and citizens once again doubt the science of human-caused global warming.
Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as "deniers." The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.
In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country's new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country's weeks-old cap-and-trade program.
The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world's first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion." A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists' open letter.)
The collapse of the "consensus" has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.
Credit for Australia's own era of renewed enlightenment goes to Dr. Ian Plimer, a well-known Australian geologist. Earlier this year he published "Heaven and Earth," a damning critique of the "evidence" underpinning man-made global warming. The book is already in its fifth printing. So compelling is it that Paul Sheehan, a noted Australian columnist -- and ardent global warming believer -- in April humbly pronounced it "an evidence-based attack on conformity and orthodoxy, including my own, and a reminder to respect informed dissent and beware of ideology subverting evidence." Australian polls have shown a sharp uptick in public skepticism; the press is back to questioning scientific dogma; blogs are having a field day.
The rise in skepticism also came as Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, elected like Mr. Obama on promises to combat global warming, was attempting his own emissions-reduction scheme. His administration was forced to delay the implementation of the program until at least 2011, just to get the legislation through Australia's House. The Senate was not so easily swayed.
Mr. Fielding, a crucial vote on the bill, was so alarmed by the renewed science debate that he made a fact-finding trip to the U.S., attending the Heartland Institute's annual conference for climate skeptics. He also visited with Joseph Aldy, Mr. Obama's special assistant on energy and the environment, where he challenged the Obama team to address his doubts. They apparently didn't.
This week Mr. Fielding issued a statement: He would not be voting for the bill. He would not risk job losses on "unconvincing green science." The bill is set to founder as the Australian parliament breaks for the winter.
Republicans in the U.S. have, in recent years, turned ever more to the cost arguments against climate legislation. That's made sense in light of the economic crisis. If Speaker Nancy Pelosi fails to push through her bill, it will be because rural and Blue Dog Democrats fret about the economic ramifications. Yet if the rest of the world is any indication, now might be the time for U.S. politicians to re-engage on the science. One thing for sure: They won't be alone.
Write to kim@wsj.com
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A15

8. Media doing more data mining – great news for the public
RIDER COMMENT: The SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE is spearheading the establishment of a nonprofit to do “data based investigative journalism.” See the article below.
As I’ve pointed out often in the past, most journalists are poorly prepared to do such analysis, so they avoid it, or get it wrong because they cannot analyze government propaganda releases. But I think that some of the media is discovering that this data area is a treasure trove waiting to be mined.
Media people are usually poorly armed when it comes to number crunching, but they are NOT stupid. They can learn, and some ARE back-learning about this neglected aspect of their liberal arts education.
Here are my comments to the U-T staff – an open letter praising the effort.
Perhaps more important, I present two potential areas for data mining.

FROM: RICHARD RIDER
TO: SD U-T STAFF

Interesting new venture -- data based investigative journalism. Kudos to the U-T for spearheading this effort.
http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/articles/2009/06/30/this_just_in/053loriehearn062909.txt

GREAT IDEA! It's been the neglected area of reporting. It's often a daunting area in which to drill, but with Pulitzer Prize results awaiting the drillers.

Here's my suggestion for two difficult projects that can provide critical information the public desperately needs to understand. These projects are easy for me to suggest, but difficult to do -- especially the first suggestion.

A. Look at public vs. private sector pay.

The stereotype of public employment is that it's a tradeoff -- low pay and modest benefits in exchange for solid job security and a stately work pace. The public employee unions perpetuate this myth.

It might have been true 30-40 years ago, but not today. Most of today's public employees receive salaries considerably HIGHER than the equivalent jobs in the private sector. The benefits are literally unbelievable. Meanwhile the job security is as good as ever. The work pace comparison is harder to define.

What is missing in this data comparison is a current, accurate comparison of public vs. private sector salaries for the same work. NO ONE has yet done this work -- and it's a Herculean task.

Police and firefighters are hard to compare with the private sector, but most of the rest of government work is indeed comparable.

The trick is to compare NOT just with other government agencies. This is the public employee unions favorite gambit -- where every government jurisdiction is the opposite of Lake Woebegone -- every government's pay is below average.

Instead the comparisons should be with the local PRIVATE sector. And not just with the big rich corporations and utilities (the usual comparison by government bureaucrats). A full range of private firms should be surveyed, down to the small businesses which are be primary employers in San Diego.

I'll tell you what I'm confident that you'll find: The pink and blue collar government jobs (the vast majority of the public sector jobs) pay 25%-50% higher than the average private pay of sector workers doing the same tasks -- and that's not counting the opulent public employee benefits, health care and early retirement. The technical and professional jobs will be closer to parity, and in some specialty areas the private sector pays more -- while the companies are still in business.

Managerial jobs are not equivalent. Private sector managers are supposed to MAKE the company money. Public sector managers are tasked only with SPENDING taxpayer funds. It's a huge difference in responsibility and accountability.

B. Look at the percentage of government employees who take disability retirement.

One old study I recall noted that public employees become disabled 28 times more frequently than private sector employees. And no area is more prone to disability than police and firefighters.

It's not just the "chief's disease" scandal of recent years. For instance, many and perhaps most firefighters try to go out with some sort of disability, yet they are healthier than the general population of similar age.

The city of San Diego has made some effort to rein in this problem, but it's an area ripe for further investigation -- for the city, the county and the other cities in the county.

9. Canooks come to U.S. for timely medical care – where will we be going for ours if ObamaCare passes? Plus comments on the bogus reports of high U.S. infant mortality rates.
RIDER COMMENT: The following column describes where the Canadians go who need timely health care. They go South!
More and more, perhaps the same will be true for U.S. citizens if ObamaCare is implemented (and I think it will be). Maybe we won’t go South. Perhaps East – like to India. Indeed, this overseas treatment trend is already growing at a brisk clip.
One aspect of the story deserves more attention. It completely debunks one canard by the single payer plan supporters – the claim that the infant mortality rate in the U.S. is high compared to a lot of countries. But these are not apples to apples comparisons. Many other countries have decided that if a baby dies within 24 hours, it was never born. Not so in the U.S. However weak, premature or deformed a newborn is, if it dies, it’s a death on our records.
And there is another factor. Cuba ranks well in health care. But how do we acquire the stats from Cuba? Why, the Cuban government tells us! Simply put, they lie.
Cuba has a handful of showcase hospitals (“showcase” by THEIR standards), but the rest of the country’s medical care is appallingly bad. The health numbers they report are literally unbelievable, yet are taken as fact by the U.N. and socialized medicine supporters.
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=331254362316405#
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Canada's Single-Prayer Health Care
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, June 30, 2009 4:20 PM PT
Health Reform: A critically ill premature baby is moved to a U.S hospital to get the treatment she couldn't get in the system we're told we should emulate. Cost-effective care? In Canada, as elsewhere, you get what you pay for.
________________________________________
IBD Exclusive Series: Government-Run Healthcare: A Prescription For Failure
________________________________________
Ava Isabella Stinson was born last Thursday at St. Joseph's hospital in Hamilton, Ontario. Weighing only two pounds, she was born 13 weeks premature and needed some very special care. Unfortunately, there were no open neonatal intensive care beds for her at St. Joseph's — or anywhere else in the entire province of Ontario, it seems.
Canada's perfectly planned and cost-effective system had no room at the inn for Ava, who of necessity had to be sent across the border to a Buffalo, N.Y., hospital to suffer under our chaotic and costly system. She had no time to be put on a Canadian waiting list. She got the care she needed at an American hospital under a system President Obama has labeled "unsustainable."
Jim Hoft over at Gateway Pundit reports Ava's case is not unusual. He reports that Hamilton's neonatal intensive care unit is closed to new admissions half the time. Special-needs infants are sent elsewhere and usually to the U.S.
In 2007, a Canadian woman gave birth to extremely rare identical quadruplets — Autumn, Brooke, Calissa and Dahlia Jepps. They were born in the United States to Canadian parents because there was again no space available at any Canadian neonatal care unit. All they had was a wing and a prayer.
The Jepps, a nurse and a respiratory technician flew from Calgary, a city of a million people, 325 miles to Benefit Hospital in Great Falls, Mont., a city of 56,000. The girls are doing fine, thanks to our system where care still trumps cost and where being without insurance does not mean being without care.
Infant mortality rates are often cited as a reason socialized medicine and a single-payer system is supposed to be better than what we have here. But according to Dr. Linda Halderman, a policy adviser in the California State Senate, these comparisons are bogus.
As she points out, in the U.S., low birth-weight babies are still babies. In Canada, Germany and Austria, a premature baby weighing less than 500 grams is not considered a living child and is not counted in such statistics. They're considered "unsalvageable" and therefore never alive.
Norway boasts one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world — until you factor in weight at birth, and then its rate is no better than in the U.S.
In other countries babies that survive less than 24 hours are also excluded and are classified as "stillborn." In the U.S. any infant that shows any sign of life for any length of time is considered a live birth.
A child born in Hong Kong or Japan that lives less than a day is reported as a "miscarriage" and not counted. In Switzerland and other parts of Europe, a baby is not counted as a baby if it is less than 30 centimeters in length.
In 2007, there were at least 40 mothers and their babies who were airlifted from British Columbia alone to the U.S. because Canadian hospitals didn't have room. It's worth noting that since 2000, 42 of the world's 52 surviving babies weighing less than 400g (0.9 pounds) were born in the U.S.
It must be embarrassing to Canada that a G-7 economy and a country of 30 million people can't offer the same level of health care as a town of just over 50,000 in rural Montana. Where will Canada send its preemies and other critical patients when we adopt their health care system?
As we have noted, in Canada roughly 900,000 patients of all ages are waiting for beds, according to the Fraser Institute. There are more than four times as many magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) units per capita in the U.S. as in Canada. We have twice as many CT scanners per capita.
Expensive? Wasteful. Just ask the Jepps or the parents of Ava Isabella Stinson.

10. Amid budget mess, CHP could get raise
RIDER COMMENT: Thank goodness the government keeps reminding us why tax increases are NOT needed. When the politicians and their labor unions refuse to control public employee cost but rather provide raises, that puts the dagger in the heart of liberal claims that tax increases are needed. Indeed, that gives new meaning to the term “bleeding heart liberals”!
http://tinyurl.com/lsz3hn

The Buzz: Amid budget mess, CHP could get raise

Published: Wednesday, Jul. 1, 2009 - 12:00 am | Page 3A
While rank-and-file state employees face as much as a 14 percent pay cut through furloughs, California Highway Patrol officers could well get a raise. The CHP contract adjusts pay based on salary levels at five local law enforcement agencies in the state. The results of this year's survey are expected out soon.

11. Obama blowing hot air concerning California energy efficiency policies
RIDER COMMENT: The following is from the WS JOURNAL’s James Taranto 1 July blog http://online.wsj.com/article/best_of_the_web_today.html :
President Obama was touting California, with its decades-old "energy-efficiency policies," as an example to the nation. After all, the president noted, "Californians consume 40 percent less energy per person than the national average."
As Harvard's Edward Glaeser pointed out in an April New York Times blog post, the "primary reason" California's energy consumption is low is the weather:
January temperature does a terrific job of explaining carbon emissions from home heating and July temperature does almost as well at explaining electricity usage. California has the most temperate climate in the country and as a result, homes use less heat in the winter and less electricity in the summer. In hot, humid Houston or frigid Minneapolis, people use plenty of energy to artificially recreate what California has naturally.
Obama also claimed that California's paucity of power plants is evidence of its success. But California uses more electricity than it generates--some 53 terawatt-hours more in 2007, or just over 20% of total consumption, according to the federal Energy Information Administration--which means it has to import power from other states not subject to California's environmental restrictions.
Moreover, also according to the EIA, Californians pay an average of 14.42 cents a kilowatt-hour of electricity, the sixth-highest rate in the contiguous U.S. and more than the average of any region except New England. Obama, it seems, would like to make the rest of the country pay California prices for energy. It might be worth it if he could guarantee us California weather.

12. Case study of a bloated pension -- complete with details
RIDER COMMENT: This well researched article details how a 51 year old “public servant” making a paltry $221,000 can walk away with a $284,000 pension. Your blood should boil.
The details of this case may NOT apply to your specific local and county jurisdictions, but it’s only the details and degree of taxpayer largesse that change. ALL government employees have extra gains that factor into their pensions over and above just their “highest base salary” – and nowhere is the abuse more rampant than in the public safety jobs.
The one thing that is probably universal is that public safety employees are ALWAYS surprised and sometimes stunned at the total pension they end up receiving.
For instance, in many jurisdictions covered under CalPERS, the taxpayers pay part or all of the employee’s share of the pension contribution. Only when the pension is actually issued does the employee discover that the employer contributions boost their “salary” off which the pension is calculated. Locally cities such as La Mesa and Chula Vista pay the public employee’s 9% contribution. That means that instead of getting a “90% of salary” pension after 30 years, the employee gets 98.1% of salary.
Again, most employees do not know this, and it does not show up in their annual CalPERS statement about their pensions. ONLY when they retire does this come up – and the reckoning comes for the taxpayers footing the bill.
Remember, this unknown windfall is only one of many such windfalls for public employees – especially police and firefighters. Even the folks in the California State Controllers office are usually unaware of many of these giveaways.
Just to repeat my admonition – get a government job. Especially a local government job. And ideally a public safety job – firefighter is best. This is the most lucrative financial advice I can dispense.
http://www.contracostatimes.com/danielborenstein/ci_12265599
CONTRA COSTA TIMES
Daniel Borenstein: Guide to bad pension policy
By Daniel Borenstein
Staff columnist
Posted: 05/02/2009 10:00:00 PM PDT
Updated: 05/03/2009 10:23:02 PM PDT
CRAIG BOWEN'S SALARY during his final year as chief of the San Ramon Valley Fire Protection District was about $221,000 a year. So how did he end up retiring in December with a tax-advantaged annual pension of $284,000?
The answer provides an amazing case study that highlights problems with public employee compensation and reveals tricks that allow workers to spike their pensions at the expense of their fellow employees and taxpayers.
The Bowen story has some similarities to the case I examined last month of Peter Nowicki, the chief of the Moraga Orinda Fire District who was able to turn his $185,000 annual salary into a $241,000 yearly pension. While each public agency has different rules that provide new ways to take advantage of retirement systems, many of the lessons can be applied across the board.
In Bowen's case, residents of the fire district serving Danville, San Ramon, Alamo, Blackhawk and Diablo should pay close attention because they got shafted. The San Ramon district's flawed compensation system and generous rules for pension calculations allowed Bowen to increase his starting pension from about $193,000 to $284,000 a year — a 47 percent increase. The pension will be increased in future years for inflation.
Bowen was only 51 years old when he retired at the end of 2008. If he or his wife lives another 30 years, that bump-up alone would add $2.7 million in today's dollars to his pension. His total retirement payout for the next 30 years would be worth about $8.5 million in today's dollars — far more than most taxpayers have in their 401(k)s when they hit the half-century mark.
Bowen is a beneficiary of a system that merits closer scrutiny. His devotion to the job is not at issue. By all accounts, he was a hardworking guy during his 29-year career. Indeed, it apparently took a toll on his health.
As he told a reporter in December, a medical condition influenced his decision to retire. In March, the board of the Contra Costa County Employees' Retirement Association, which administers the fire district's pension plan, approved Bowen's request for a service-connected disability.
As a result, under state and federal laws, much of his pension payment is exempt from income tax. Moreover, under state rules, if his wife survives him, she will be entitled to 100 percent of his pension for the rest of her life.
The spousal benefit is part of a public employee retirement system that creates pension payments unmatched in the private sector — a system that is financially unsustainable and is excessively sucking away dollars that could otherwise be used for providing public services.
With that in mind, let's look at the factors that make Bowen's pension so lucrative — and the changes that could be made locally to fix the system in the future.
The fire district, like most police and fire agencies across the state, has adopted the retirement calculation known as "3 percent at 50" — meaning that a worker can receive a pension starting at age 50 equal to 3 percent of his highest 12 months' salary multiplied by the number of years of employment. For example, someone who worked 30 years would be entitled to a pension equal to 90 percent of his salary.
While those pension benefits seemed like a good idea to some people in better fiscal times a decade ago when local governments across the state started implementing them, the time has come to reconsider whether taxpayers can afford to fund them.
There are two key variables in the "3 percent at 50" equation: the number of years worked and the highest 12 months' salary. Here are some of the factors that go into each and some rough estimates of how much they increase Bowen's pension annually:
Unused sick leave ($10,700 a year): In addition to work credit for his 29 years on the job, Bowen received credit for more than a year of unused sick leave. As a result, his pension was calculated as if he had worked 30.3 years. The difference means Bowen will receive an additional $10,700 in his annual pension.
The idea of receiving retirement credit for unused sick leave is generally peculiar to the public sector. It's a benefit public agencies could, and should, end. Sick leave is supposed to serve as insurance to provide compensation when a worker is ill; it shouldn't be a tool to bolster retirement.
Standby and management pay ($14,500 a year): In the San Ramon Valley district, managers don't just receive a salary. They have add-ons. There's "standby" pay that adds roughly 5 percent to the salary. This is extra compensation for carrying a pager and being available 24/7 for emergencies. Also, there's "management" pay that adds another 2 percent. This is for a manager to be ... well, to be a manager.
It seems odd that a fire chief would be paid extra to perform duties that are basic to his job. What makes it worse is that the extra money is added to the salary figure used for pension calculations. In other words, even after the chief retired, he continues to benefit from these perks. They live on for the rest of his, or his wife's, life, adding at the start roughly $14,500 a year to his pension.
Auto allowance ($7,600 a year): A couple of years ago, the fire district offered managers the option of a flat monthly stipend in lieu of a car for the job. Bowen chose the stipend, which was $700 a month when he retired. But the salary figure used to calculate Bowen's pension includes the auto allowance, which adds nearly the full amount to his actual retirement check. He received the auto allowance for only two years while on the job — and now he's going to get it in retirement for the rest of his and his wife's lives.
If the standby pay, management pay and auto allowance seem excessive, that's because they are. What makes them worse is that once the district offers them to employees, it must, under state law, include the amounts in the salary figure used for pension calculations. There is, however, a simple solution: Stop offering the benefits. Then they need not be factored into the retirement calculations.
Administrative leave ($17,000 a year): The chief, like other managers, was entitled to administrative leave — time off in exchange for having to work outside normal business hours. In other words, he was paid extra for the additional hours through standby and management pay, and then offered time off in exchange for them as well.
If the chief didn't use his administrative leave of 80 hours a year, he would receive cash payment for the hours at the start of the following year. Bowen, however, played the system well. In January 2008 he received payment for all 80 hours of administrative leave he didn't use in 2007. And then, when he retired on Dec. 31, 2008, he immediately received payment for nearly 80 hours of administrative leave he didn't use in 2008. In other words, he got two years' worth of administrative leave paid in the same 12-month period, the period that was used to calculate his salary for pension purposes.
Timing here was critical. By waiting until the last day of the year to retire, instead of, say, leaving during the summer, he added thousands of dollars to his annual pension payments. All told, by not taking administrative leave those two years and cashing it out instead, Bowen added about $17,000 annually to his pension.
Administrative leave is a costly and unjustified benefit to begin with, especially considering all the other compensation managers receive. In Bowen's case, doubling it up for the pension calculation just adds insult to the taxpayer's injury. Fire district directors should eliminate administrative leave. Then there will be no need to include it in the pension calculation.
Selling back vacation time ($17,000 a year): The fire district allows employees to sell back unused vacation time up to 80 hours a year. The new policy, implemented for the first time to apply to the 2007 calendar year, requires the sell-back to take place in December of each year.
But for the first year, because of delays implementing the contract, the sell-back took place in April 2008. Bowen sold 80 hours then, and 80 more in December 2008. The proceeds from those sales, in turn, were added to the salary used to compute his pension. Because he was able to sell back twice within the final 12 months of his employment, he doubled the effect on his pension. All told, the vacation sell-back boosted his pension by about $17,000 a year.
Vacation buyback is another unnecessary benefit that should be eliminated. Workers should be told to take their time off. Like in most of the private sector, limits should be set on the amount they can accrue. Once those limits are reached, the worker should, as is the case in most of the private sector, be blocked from accruing more vacation.
Cashing out vacation time upon retirement ($25,500 a year): Finally, there's the unused vacation Bowen had remaining when he took retirement. District policy allows employees to cash out up to a year's worth of unused vacation when they leave. That's what Bowen did. The extra income in his final 12 months had the effect of bumping up his annual pension by about $25,500.
This is the single biggest spike to Bowen's pension. It's also the easiest item to fix for future retirees. The state Court of Appeal has been clear that termination payments need not count toward pension calculations. Public agencies should stop giving away this money.
Let's be clear. Bowen deserves a pension. He worked hard and, by all accounts, he performed well. The question is how much is fair for him and the others who come behind him.
There's nothing the San Ramon fire district's board can do to reduce Bowen's pension now. But his case can serve as a road map for fire district directors, and board members of other agencies across the state, looking to end unjustified spiking and bring some sanity to the public pension system.

13. The NEW YORK TIMES bloviates on CA budget problems
RIDER COMMENT: The NEW YORK TIMES Magazine is running a numbing 8,000 word story on California government’s travails.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/magazine/05California-t.html?pagewanted=10&_r=1&ref=magazine
You need not read this tripe. I’ll summarize it for you. The writer’s conclusion is what you’d expect – in a state that consistently ranks in the top four highest tax rate states, California’s problem is that politicians are not easily able to raise taxes even higher and faster (as they can and just did in NY state where “simple majority” literally rules – and both taxes AND spending are now soaring). http://weblog.signonsandiego.com/weblogs/afb/archives/034073.html
Even more fascinating – in the entire 8,000 word article, there is not a SINGLE mention of our state and local public employee overcompensation, bloated pensions, or government labor union lock on the legislature. NOTHING!
The U-T’s Chris Reed covers this well in his blog:
http://weblog.signonsandiego.com/weblogs/afb/archives/034678.html

2009-07-04T09:37:00.000-07:00

Breaking Bad: California vs. the Other States

by Richard Rider, Chairman, San Diego Tax Fighters

Version 1.45 Revised 29 June, 2009

Phone: 858-530-3027 RRider@san.rr.com

Here’s a depressing comparison of California taxes and economic climate with the rest of the states. The news is breaking bad, and getting worse:

California has the 2^nd highest state income tax in the nation. 9.55% at $48,000. 10.55% at $1,000,000

By far the highest state sales tax in the nation. 8.25% (not counting local sales taxes)

Highest state car tax in the nation – at least double any other state. 1.15% per year on value of vehicle.

Corporate income tax rate is the highest in the West. 8.84%

2009 Business Tax Climate ranks 48^th in the nation.
http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/topic/15.html

Fourth highest capital gains tax 9.55%

http://www.thereibrain.com/realestate-blog/capital-gains-tax-rates-state-by-state/109/

Second highest gasoline tax (58.3 cents) in the nation (April, 2009). When gas is $3.00+/gallon, we are surely numero uno – because unlike many states, we charge sales tax on gasoline purchases (built into the price).
http://www.api.org/statistics/fueltaxes/

Fourth highest unemployment rate in the nation. (May, 2009) 11.5%

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/laus.nr0.htm

California’s 2009 “Tax Freedom Day” (the day the average taxpayer stops working for government and start working for oneself) is again the fourth worst date in the nation – up from 28^th worst in 1994.

http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/387.html

To offset lower state revenues, 29 states are proposing 2009 state tax and fee increases totaling $24 billion. California, with 12% of the nation’s population, is proposing 47% of that increase (6/5/09).

http://money.cnn.com/2009/06/04/news/economy/states_budget_crises/index.htm

1 in 5 in LA County receiving public aid.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-welfare22-2009feb22,0,4377048.story

California prison guards highest paid in the nation.
http://www.caltax.org/caltaxletter/2008/101708_fraud1.htm

California teachers easily the highest paid in the nation.

http://www.nea.org/home/29402.htm (CA has the second lowest student test scores)

California now has the lowest bond ratings of any state, edging out Louisiana.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/19/BA7F16JLKH.DTL

California ranks 44^th worst in “2008 lawsuit climate.”

http://www.instituteforlegalreform.com/component/ilr_featured_tools/29/item/LAI/19.html

In 2005 (latest figures), for every dollar Californians sent to D.C. in taxes, we got back 78 cents – 43^rd worst.

http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxdata/show/22685.html

America’s top CEO’s rank California “the worst place in which to do business” for the fourth straight year (3/2009). But here’s the interesting part – they think California is a great state to live (primarily for the great climate) – they just won’t bring their businesses here because of the oppressive tax and regulatory climate.

Consider this quote from the survey (a conclusion reflected in the rankings of the characteristics of the state): “California has huge advantages with its size, quality of work force, particularly in high tech, as well as the quality of life and climate advantages of the state. However, it is an absolute regulatory and tax disaster.”

http://tinyurl.com/cyvufy

California, a destitute state, still gives away college education at fire sale prices. Our community college tuition is by far the lowest in the nation. How low? Nationwide, the average community college tuition is 4.5 times higher than California CC’s. This ridiculously low tuition devalues education to students – resulting in a 30+% drop rate for class completion. In addition, 2/3 of California CC students pay no tuition at all – filling out a simple unverified “hardship” form that exempts them from any tuition payment, or receiving grants and tax credits for their full tuition.

http://www.sacbee.com/static/weblogs/capitolalertlatest/020722.html

http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/jun/29/1n29fees225829-two-year-colleges-fees-likely-rise-/

On top of that, California offers thousands of absolutely free adult continuing education classes – a sop to the upper middle class. In San Diego, over 1,400 classes for everything from baking pastries to ballroom dancing are offered totally at taxpayer expense.

http://www.sdce.edu

California residential electricity costs an average of 35.4% more than the national average. For industrial use, CA electricity is 56.2% higher than the national average (2007).

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/fig7p5.html

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table5_6_a.html

It costs 38% more to build solar panels in California than in Tennessee – which is why European corporations have invested $2.3 billion in two Tennessee manufacturing plants to build solar panels for our state.

http://www.foxandhoundsdaily.com/blog/jack-stewart/more-solar-companies-producing-elsewhere-sell-california

Consider California’s net domestic migration (migration between states). From April, 2000 through June, 2008 (8 years, 2 months) California has lost a NET 1.4 million people. The departures slowed this past year only because people couldn’t sell their homes.

http://www.mdp.state.md.us/msdc/Pop_estimate/Estimate_08/table5.pdf

These are not welfare kings and queens departing. They are the young, the educated, the productive, the ambitious, the wealthy (such as Tiger Woods), and retirees seeking to make their pensions provide more bang for the buck. The irony is that a disproportionate number of these seniors are retired state and local government employees fleeing the state that provides them with their opulent pensions – in order to avoid the high taxes that these same employees pushed so hard through their unions.

As taxes rise and jobs disappear, we lose our tax base, continuing California’s state and local fiscal death spiral. This spiral must stop NOW.

NOTE: If you would like to receive my free periodic “Richard Rider Rant” e-newsletter with more of this type of information and analysis, just drop me an email at RRider@san.rr.com. To see the latest version of this “Breaking Bad” column, plus samples of my free “Richard Rider Rant” e-newsletter, go to my blog at http://www.RichardRiderRant.blogspot.com/.