The Wages of Progressive Elitist Political Sins in California

Progressive elitist political sins have very real consequences.  It is often said that California leads the nation in trends such as progressive elitism.  It is certainly the intent of many of the major Internet media companies based in California, such as Google and Facebook, to lead America into a socialist future.  The California Budget and Policy Center has compiled the data on low wage, mid wage, and high wage workers in California for the last 40 years.  The eye-opening inflation-adjusted, real wages are plotted below:

Apparently, progressive elitist policies only work for elitists and only hurt those the elitists claim they are trying to help.  Over 40 years, low wage workers in California were mostly worse off than they were in 1979 and only the recent expansion of the economy has managed to bring them to a very slight improvement over 1979 of 4%.  Mid wage earners have been very nearly flat in earnings per hour over this entire 40 year period.  The upper 10% of wage earners have done comparatively OK under California progressivism with a 43% real increase, though even this is only a 1.075% increase per year.

In comparison, the national real median personal income is:

Nationwide, real median personal income went up by 39% from 1979 to 2016 and it went up further in 2017.  This median national real income is not on a per hour basis, as is the data above on California workers.  However, in 1980 the average worker worked 38.1 hours a week and now the average worker works 34.4 hours/week, so one could multiply the gains in the national median income by about 1.1 for a comparison with the CA data above, though I am not doing that in the subsequent numbers I discuss.  If the national median personal income data excluded the population of California, whose population is about 12% that of the entire U.S., the increase would have been greater.  In fact, with some simple algebra one calculates that the median non-California worker's real income increased by about 44%, which means that outside of California, median income workers did as well as the top 10% of California workers did over the 40 years since 1979.  And that despite the fact that real incomes in many other states have also been held hostage to the sins of progressive elitist politics.

The wages of California progressive political sins are even worse than is suggested by this data.  The inflation adjustment on California worker wages is a national inflation rate, not a California cost of living adjustment.  California progressive politics has caused housing costs to soar.  Their regulatory state has caused costs on many businesses to soar as well and these costs have to be passed on to the people living in California.  State taxes are high.  The cost of living in California is about 13.4% above the national average, or about 15.2% above the national cost of living excluding California.

The California practice of suppressing individual rights has bad consequences for more than one's economic well-being, but the economics of it are bad enough.  Once again, I will remind my readers that economic growth rates are like interest rates, as they go up they have a most remarkable compounding effect on the size of the economy.  A rapidly growing economy makes a very much bigger pie to benefit everyone over a 40 year period, which is the time that most Americans have to look forward to before they die.  Many of us have even longer time-horizons for our concerns, since we have children and grandchildren we love and want to see flourish in freedom, prosperity, and security.

My youngest granddaughter just celebrated her first birthday.  If the national economy grows at a rate of 3% a year for the next 90 years, it will be 14.3 times as big as it is today.  Such growth rates are very achievable, if our governments do not excessively interfere with the private sector.  A 2% growth rate for 90 years yields an economy only 5.9 times its present size.  I expect the 14.3 times larger economy will have much more to offer my granddaughter as her life comes to a close than will an economy 5.9 times larger.  It might even offer her many more years of enjoyable life.  Of course, a real Progressive Elitist government outcome could be a negative growth rate or a 1% growth rate, where the latter economy in 90 years would be only 2.4 times the size of the present economy.

Fraud and corruption bring big payoffs by Paul Driessen

California judges provide stage for kangaroo court justice over Roundup weedkiller

            

San Francisco area juries have awarded cancer patients some $80 million each, based on claims that the active ingredient in Roundup weedkiller, caused their cancer – and that Bayer-Monsanto negligently or deliberately failed to warn consumers that the glyphosate it manufactures is carcinogenic. (It’s not.) Judges reduced the original truly outrageous awards of $289 million and even $1 billion per plaintiff!

Meanwhile, ubiquitous ads are still trolling for new clients, saying anyone who ever used Roundup and now has Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma or other cancer could be the next jackpot justice winner. Mass tort plaintiff law firms have lined up 18,500 additional “corporate victims” for glyphosate litigation alone.

Introduced in 1974, glyphosate is licensed in 130 countries. Millions of farmers, homeowners and gardeners have made it the world’s most widely used herbicide – and one of the most intensely studied chemicals in history. Four decades and 3,300 studies by respected agencies and organizations worldwide have concluded that glyphosate is safe and non-carcinogenic, based on assessments of actual risk.

Reviewers include the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, European Food Safety Authority, European Chemicals Agency, UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Germany’s Institute for Risk Assessment, and Australia’s Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority. Another reviewer, Health Canada, noted that “no pesticide regulatory authority in the world considers glyphosate to be a cancer risk to humans at the levels at which humans are currently exposed.” Therefore no need to warn anyone.

The National Cancer Institute’s ongoing Agricultural Health Study evaluated 54,000 farmers and commercial pesticide applicators for over two decades – and likewise found no glyphosate-cancer link.

Only the France-based International Agency for Cancer Research (IARC), says otherwise – and it based its conclusions on just eight studies. Even worse, IARC manipulated at least some of these studies to get the results it wanted. Subsequent reviews by epidemiologist Dr. Geoffrey Kabat, National Cancer Institute statistician Dr. Robert Tarone, investigative journalist Kate Kelland, “RiskMonger” Dr. David Zaruk and other investigators have demonstrated that the IARC process was tainted beyond repair.

The IARC results should never have been allowed in court. But the judges in the first three cases let the tort lawyers bombard the jury with IARC cancer claims, and went even further. In the Hardeman case, Judge Vincent Chhabria blocked the introduction of EPA analyses that concluded “glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic in humans,” based on its careful review of many of the studies just mentioned.

He said he wanted “to avoid wasting time or misleading the jury, because the primary inquiry is what the scientific studies show, not what the EPA concluded they show.” However, IARC didn’t do any original studies either. It just concluded that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic,” meaning studies it reviewed found limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans, plus sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in lab animals that had been exposed to very high doses or lower doses for prolonged periods of time. In other words, under conditions that no animal or human would ever be exposed to in the real world.

It is also instructive to look at the three San Francisco area courtroom proceedings from another angle – an additional line of questioning that would have put glyphosate and Roundup in a very different light, and might have changed the outcome of these trials. Defense attorneys could have asked:

Can you describe your family cancer history ... your eating, exercise and sleeping habits ... how much you eat high-fat foods ... how often you eat fruits and vegetables ... and your other lifestyle choices that doctors and other experts now know play significant roles in whether or not people get cancer? 

How many times in your life [Johnson is 47 years old; Hardeman 70; Alva Pilliod 77; Alberta Pilliod 75] do you estimate you were exposed to substances on IARC’s list of Group 1 definite human carcinogens –including sunlight, acetaldehyde in alcoholic beverages, aflatoxin in peanuts, asbestos, cadmium in batteries, lindane ... or any of the 125 other substances and activities in Group 1? Have you ever smoked? How often have you been exposed to secondhand smoke? How often have you eaten bacon, sausage or other processed meats – which are also in Group 1? 

How many times have you been exposed to any of IARC’s Group 2A probable human carcinogens – not just glyphosate ... but also anabolic steroids, creosote, diazinon, dieldrin, malathion, emissions from high-temperature food frying, shift work ... or any of the 75 other substances and activities in Group 2A? How often have you consumed beef or very hot beverages – likewise in Group 2A? 

How many times have you been exposed to any of IARC’s Group 2B possible human carcinogens – including bracken ferns, chlordane, diesel fuel, fumonisin, inorganic lead, low frequency magnetic fields, malathion, parathion, titanium oxide in white paint, pickled vegetables, caffeic acid in coffee, tea, apples, broccoli, kale, and other fruits and vegetables ... ... or any of the 200 other substances and activities in Group 2B? 

Pyrethrin pesticides used by organic farmers are powerful neurotoxins that are very toxic to bees, cats and fish – and have been linked by EPA and other experts to leukemia and other cancers and other health problems. How often have you eaten organic foods and perhaps been exposed to pyrethrins? 

Large quantities of glyphosate have been manufactured for years in China and other countries. How do you know the glyphosate you were exposed to was manufactured by Bayer, and not one of them? 

In view of all these exposures, please explain how you, your doctors, your lawyers and the experts you consulted concluded that none of your family history ... none of your lifestyle choices ... none of your exposures to dozens or even hundreds of other substances on IARC’s lists of carcinogens ... caused or contributed to your cancer – and that your cancer is due solely to your exposure to glyphosate. 

Put another way, please explain exactly how you and your experts separated and quantified all these various exposures and lifestyle decisions – and concluded that Roundup from Bayer-Monsanto was the sole reason you got cancer – and all these other factors played no role whatsoever.

News accounts do not reveal whether Bayer-Monsanto lawyers asked these questions – or whether they tried to ask them, but the judges disallowed the questions. In any event, the bottom line is this:

It is bad enough that the IARC studies at the center of these jackpot justice lawsuits are the product of rampant collusion, misconduct and even fraud in the way IARC concluded glyphosate is a “probable human carcinogen.” It is worse that these cancer trials have been driven by plaintiff lawyers’ emotional appeals to jurors’ largely misplaced fears of chemicals and minimal knowledge of chemicals, chemical risks, medicine and cancer – resulting in outrageous awards of $80 million or more.

Worst of all, our Federal District Courts have let misconduct by plaintiff lawyers drive these lawsuits; prevented defense attorneys from effectively countering IARC cancer claims and discussing the agency’s gross misconduct; and barred defense attorneys from presenting the extensive evidence that glyphosate is not carcinogenic to humans. The trials have been textbook cases of kangaroo court justice.

The cases are heading to appeal, ultimately to the U.S. Supreme Court. We can only hope appellate judges will return sanity, fairness and justice to the nation’s litigation process. Otherwise our legal system will be irretrievably corrupted; products, technologies, companies and industries will likely be driven out of existence; and fraud, emotion and anarchy will reign.

Jackpot-justice law firms and their anti-chemical activist allies are already targeting cereals that have “detectable” levels of glyphosate: a few parts per billion or trillion, where 1 ppt is equivalent to 1 second in 32,000 years. Talc and benzene – foundations for numerous consumer products – are already under attack. Advanced technology neonicotinoid pesticides could be next.

It’s all part of a coordinated, well-funded attack on America, free enterprise and technology, using social media, litigation, intimidation and confrontation. Our legislatures and courts need to rein it in. 

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy and environmental policy.


Comment by Charles Anderson:

Modern society with its rich choices of values and its high level of security is highly dependent on a huge number of chemicals.  There are also an abundance of naturally occurring chemical in our environment.  In many cases, a chemical necessary for the support of human life is beneficial only when it has the correct balance in our complex human system.  Too much of it or too little of it can cause the human system to fail.  Many chemicals will become harmful if they are too concentrated in the human body and many such over-concentrated chemicals are carcinogenic.  Whether a given chemical is beneficial or carcinogenic or otherwise harmful depends highly upon its concentration.  It can be devilishly difficult to establish the bounds within which a chemical is beneficial in the body and beyond which it is harmful.

This has proven very difficult for the FDA for instance in regard to the safety of many widely and commonly eaten foods even.  Study after study has taken a conclusion opposite to that of a prior study once held in high regard by the FDA.

Our ability to measure chemicals in complex mixtures to very low concentrations such as parts per trillion means we can find a host of chemicals in the human body or in the foods we eat.  The fact that a chemical that can be harmful in higher concentration is present does not at all mean that it will cause any harm at a lower concentration.  The toxicity of a chemical, or for that matter of radiation, is highly dose dependent.  For instance, selenium is an element beneficial to the body at a suitably low concentration.  It is often found in multi-vitamin tablets.  Yet, selenium at higher concentrations is very toxic.  There are many other elements which have similar toxicity characteristics.  Examples are potassium, sodium, chromium, iron, molybdenum, and zinc.  Even water is toxic if it becomes too concentrated in the human body.  People have died because they drank too much water too rapidly.

Juries and the courts are often too subject to findings that a chemical exposure has caused the disease that some unfortunate person has suffered.  They are emotionally sorry for the suffering.  They are often biased against for-profit companies.  They ogle the deeper pockets of a company than those of the suffering person as an easy means to help the suffering person.  Unfortunately, much injustice results.  By soaking an often very innocent company with fines and penalties, many people are hurt.  The company management, the owners, the employees, the companies customers, and oftentimes the companies' retirees are all hurt.  The fact that members of a jury, defense lawyers, and judges often do not know very much about science is also a great problem.  Juries and courts need to be much more rational and much more responsible.

I have served as an expert witness on scientific issues involved in court cases, as have some of my Ph.D. scientist employees at my laboratory, Anderson Materials Evaluation, Inc.  I have encountered numerous opposing expert witnesses who were ridiculously creative in the stories they told about the science pertaining to the case.  Unfortunately, juries and judges tend to understand little of what the experts tell them and as is the case with most people and the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis, they make their judgment based on a count of experts on each side.  In a litigation case, the count is usually even, so the scientific testimonies cancel out.  Sometimes they also assume that the company is better able to buy the favorable testimony of an expert and so their expert is more likely to be lying about the science.  The jury decision is then made on the basis of human emotions.  The suffering person is likely to win and the company is likely to lose.  This is not a valid process for achieving a just result.

A Government Fraud - Take a Bonus to Re-enlist for the CA National Guard

Government lawyers in the Pentagon are demanding that California National Guard members who took bonuses to sign up for re-enlistment and future possible deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan ten years ago, now have to pay back those bonuses.  The government was not authorized to make them.

Now, how likely is it that the service members knew that government officials were unauthorized to offer the bonuses that helped the government to solve its shortage of war-fighters?  Of course most people hearing about this wonder how hard it would be for them if the government asked them to pay back $15,000 the government may have given them 10 years ago for any reason.

But worse than that, the government is compounding its mere incompetence with a very dramatic fraud.  Men extended their enlistments knowing they would likely be sent to Iraq or Afghanistan and might lose their lives or their limbs or their minds fighting there. But now they learn that the bonuses were a case of fraud upon their trust in their government!  Effectively, it was just a trick to help the government steal their labor, their lives, their limbs, and their minds.

Well, what can you expect of a government that expects everyone except high politicians and high bureaucrats to obey the laws?  It is government by fraud for the fraudsters laid heavily upon the defrauded.  This is a fine substitute for the Rule of Law.  The People are now no more than fleeced sheep in the hands of these monstrously evil rulers.  There is a multitude of such frauds, but this is one of the more egregious of that multitude.

Update:  Today, 27 October 2016, the policy of recovering the bonus money was revoked due to complaints by some Congress members, at least some of whom recognized the offering of bonuses to be later taken back as fraud.

Freedom in the 50 States Evaluated by Cato Institute

The 2016 report on Freedom in the 50 States by the Cato Institute evaluating the state of freedom through 2014 is now available.  The results of their evaluation of freedom based on fiscal policy, personal freedom, and regulatory policy are summarized in this map:

Cato provides the weightings they used for the evaluation of freedom and one can change those weightings to one's personal preferences to see how the rankings change.  But by Cato's weightings, the top ten freest states are ranked and graded as, with the party of the governor, the senate, and the house of the state added in order either as a D or an R in the year 2014:

1) New Hampshire, 0.3319, D, R, D
2) Alaska, 0.3265, R, R, R
3) Oklahoma, 0.2791, R, R, R
4) Indiana, 0.2778, R, R, R
5) South Dakota, 0.2754, R, R, R
6) Tennessee, 0.2646, R, R, R
7) Idaho, 0.2608, R, R, R
8) Florida, 0.2133, R, R, R
9) Iowa, 0.2048, R, D, R
10) Arizona, 0.1834, R, R, R

The 10 most authoritarian states with their negative scores are:

50) New York, -0.9763, D, D, D
49) California, -0.5026, D, D, D
48) Hawaii, -0.4904, D, D, D
47) New Jersey, -0.4285, R, D, D
46) Maryland, -0.4039, D, D, D
45) Connecticut, -0.2612, D, D, D
44) Illinois, -0.2554, D, D, D
43) Rhode Island, -0.1735, I (really D), D, D
42) Maine, -0.1500, R, D, D
41) Kentucky, -0.1489, D, R, D

It is interesting that the five most authoritarian states, New York, California, Hawaii, New Jersey, and Maryland are all more greatly deviant from the norm of freedom than is the freest of the states, New Hampshire.  If you value your freedom, it is particularly important to avoid these most negatively rated states.  New York is about three times more negative than New Hampshire is positive.  In fact, New York is almost twice as bad as either of the next two worst states, California and Hawaii.

If one were to move from New York to New Hampshire, the freedom score would increase by 1.3082.  Or if I were to move from authoritarian Maryland to where much of my family lives in Oklahoma, my score would improve by 0.6830, which is a substantial increase in freedom.  Or if you live in the Washington, DC area, living in Virginia offers a big improvement over living in Maryland by 0.5080.  If you have to live near New York City, Connecticut is substantially more free than is either New York or New Jersey.

Of the 10 most free states, all are controlled by Republicans, except two which had divided government in 2014.  Of the 10 most authoritarian governments, all were entirely controlled by Democrats in the governorship and the legislature, except the two least repressive of that set of the 10 worst, who had one of the three legs of the state government in the hands of Republicans.  It is not uncommon for libertarians to claim that the Republicans are every bit as anti-freedom as the Democrats, but these rankings make it clear that the Republicans are significantly better than the Democrats in most cases.  Indeed, one of the main reasons that the mean state freedom rankings are so much better than those of the most repressive states is because far more states are controlled by Republicans than are controlled by the more adamant deniers of individual rights found in the Democrat Party.

ObamaVaporCare Website is Not All That is Vapor

So we have learned that the ability to cruise the ObamaCare federal website anonymously was yanked with false claims that it caused problems for the website in testimony to Congress.  Of course it was yanked so that people could not so easily discover that most people were going to face higher premiums and higher deductibles.  I noted with some anger that the need to give all of your personal information including Social Security number up front was to prevent you from assessing how ObamaCare was financially going to affect your family members and your neighbors and fellow countrymen.

In reality, the user has to spend much more time entering such information and then the website goes to numerous federal databases at numerous federal agencies to verify the input information.  This process puts great strains on the website and it is clearly unable to handle those strains.  In addition, when one gets all of one's information in and picks a plan, one may really only be picking it for further evaluation of the doctor and hospital network it has.  In other words, it need not be a final pick, but ObamaCare does not care.  It thinks you are committed.  Of course, the coercive planners behind ObamaCare are the ones who should be committed, though I understand we have a shortage of the needed mental health institutions since Democrats believe the mentally ill should be out on the streets voting and running ObamaCare.

Late last week, the breakdown on so-called sign-ups on the California state exchange, which works better than the federal exchange does, were announced.  Only about 16% of the 30,830 "enrollees" in October were eligible for subsidies or cost-sharing.  56% of them were of the ages from 45 to 64, though only 25% of the California population is in that age range.  So older and sicker people are 2.24 times more likely than their population to sign up for ObamaCare.  Those desirable low cost healthy people 34 or younger only signed up at a 28% rate, though they are 49% of the California population.  So, just as expected by the many rational critics, ObamaCare assumptions that many young and healthy Americans are going to happily subsidize the health care of older and less healthy Americans is already proving wrong.

Some have tried to explain this as being simply because the federally run website does not work.  They say that when it works, then the young will sign up in droves.  But the California website works better now than the federal website is likely work by the end of the year when people must sign up to have health insurance in 2014.  Yes, we shall see soon what will happen.  But, my money is on this is continuing to be a total disaster.  Health premiums for ObamaCare health insurance will be much higher for 2015 insurance.  As though it is not too high now!

In 2014, participating insurance companies are going to take a bath in cold water and many are going to drown.  Making money was posited by them on the assumption that many more people would have insurance and many of the new insurance holders would be young and healthy.  They assumed the websites would work and send them correct personal information.  Instead they are having to put much more manpower into checking that information than they expected.  This is raising their operational costs and ObamaCare put a very low upper limit on what they can spend on administrative costs.  Those insurance companies that trusted ObamaCare to deliver are going to be big losers.

We also learned late last week that there is as yet no means in the federal website for the insurance companies to be paid for policies that people might think they had signed up for.  No policy actually exists until the insurance company is paid.  The Obama Regime claims they will have this part of the software working by the end of the year.  Of course, the rational observer must have his doubts about this claim.  What is more, even if the claim comes true, can you imagine the chaos on the site as millions of such payment transactions occur within days of the start of policies beginning on 1 January.  Can you imagine the chaos at the insurance companies if they receive a flood of such payments within a few days?

It is not just the federal website that is ObamaVaporCare.  No, it is all of ObamaCare that is VaporCare.  It is exploding and releasing nothing but noxious gasses.  Unfortunately, the medical care industry will suffer, the health insurance industry will suffer, the tens of millions of Americans who are losing their health insurance will suffer, and everyone will suffer with fewer choices and lower quality medical care.

Such is the whirlwind the American People created in selecting a heavily socialist House of Representatives and Senate and President in 2008 and their failure to oust them from the Presidency and Senate in 2012.  Irrational choices have very bad consequences.

Government-Run-Down Education in California

The Progressive Elitists love to wax eloquent about how much they care for children, especially for their education.  California is a state well-controlled by the Progressive Elitists.  True to their stated values, they spend mightily on K-12 government-run education.  Falsely, their children have become nearly the worst educated in the nation.

Conn Carroll in the Washington Examiner wrote an excellent piece on the lessons of government-run education in California.  In 1975, when Gov. Brown was first governor, he pushed the Rodda Act that allowed government worker unions to directly withhold union dues from organized worker paychecks.  The California Teachers Association used the massive sums collected to mount political campaigns to get more money for the government-run schools and for teacher pay and benefits.  In 1988, they helped pass Proposition 98 that required the state to spend at least 39% of the state budget on K-12 education.  The results:

• An average teacher salary of $69,434 a year.  This is third highest in the nation.
• A doubling of unionized teachers.
• Union contracts requiring teacher pay be based on longevity, not teaching quality.
• In 1992, California ranked next to last in reading proficiency for fourth-graders.
• In 2011, California 8th graders were 48th in reading and 48th in math.  They did outperform Mississippi in both!
• California has one of the highest student to teacher ratios in the nation, despite the huge spending.  The national average ratio is 15.5 and California is 20.9.
• California once had among the highest percentages of college-educated people and still is #6 in college degrees for those over 65 years old!  But, its 25 - 34 age group is 1% below the 31.5% national average in college degrees.  It is sinking fast.
• The exodus of companies out of California will have to continue not just due to high taxes and over-regulation, but because they will not be able to find enough college graduates to hire.  There is a projected shortfall of 1 million jobs requiring a college education by 2025.  [College feedstock from the 48th worst elementary schools in the nation must almost certainly lead to a particularly dire grade inflation in college, making many college degrees from California colleges quite bogus.  This is not to mention that high school graduates who cannot read and do simple math proficiently are not suitable for many jobs one might think a high school graduate could handle.]

The Progressive Elitist program for government-run education is not only failing the children of California, but it is also resulting in many young adults losing earning power relative to the past in California.  Indeed, it is causing the entire middle class that Progressive Elitists also pretend to champion to fall behind in income equality, another goal supposedly dear to the Progressive Elitist's heart.  The middle-earning 20% is faring much more poorly against the upper 20% of earners in California to the point that it is now the ranked 49th among the states by this criteria.  The Progressive Elitist control of education in California is a clear object lesson that they cannot, will not, and do not want to accomplish what they say their goals are.  They are con artists, pure and simple.

Over and over, I have made the point that quality education, for many reasons, must be private education, not government-run education.  California is a great object lesson in the failure of government-managed education.  One of the reasons it cannot fix itself is because its government-run schools are excellent at one thing -- indoctrinating the young with a belief in big government and a fear of the private sector.

California Cities Cool in Last Decade

Meteorologist Jan Null compared the temperature and precipitation records of the National Climatic Data Center for many California cities for the earlier period of 1971-2000 to the period from 1981-2010.  The later period generally was cooler, with increased precipitation.  The temperature records of rural areas commonly do not show the temperature increases commonly seen in cities due to the urban heat island effect.  When even the temperature of cities is going down on most of our West Coast, this is a dramatic event.  It must have been an especially unwelcome outcome for Jan Null, who is an ardent catastrophic man-made global warming booster.  The results of his study were published in the San Francisco newspaper The Chronicle on 6 July with a very nice graphic by Todd Trumbull.

Null claimed that man-made global warming caused the warming in Redding and Fresno and the warmth there caused cool air to be drawn in from the sea to cool the coastal cities.  Why they would have a cooling effect on Los Angeles and San Diego is surely unclear.  Indeed, warm temperatures in the Central Valley usually are caused by high pressure systems that actually cause winds along the coast to go out to sea and the warming of the coastal areas.  Null was apparently desperate to null out the use of his analysis of the data as a refutation of man-made global warming.

One also has to wonder why the data sets used have a 20-year period of overlap.  That 20-year overlap with only 10 years on the earlier end or on the later end, should cause any net cooling effect from 2001 to 2010 compared to the start period for the last cycle of warming claimed generally from 1971 to 1980 to be minimized.  Perhaps that was the point of the long overlap.

Given California's problems with insufficient water supply, the increased precipitation in most of the areas ought to be a positive thing, rather than a catastrophe.  I will not claim the drop in temperatures is a good thing, but it sure does take some wind out of the sails of the catastrophic man-made global warming alarmists who are always using temperature increases, either real or due to urban heat island effects, as evidence that CO2 emissions are going to kill the planet.

Actually, if the increased precipitation is raising the humidity enough, it is possible that the lowered temperatures do not actually mean a reduction of heat energy.  This is because more humid air can hold a lot more energy at a given temperature than drier air.  But, the man-made global warming alarmists do not take note of this when they use any warming of air to claim that it was caused by man's CO2 emissions.

Third-World Property Rights in California

California is well-known for its high taxes, high deficits, never-ending regulations, its coddled government employees, its poor schools despite spending twice the national average per student, its building restrictions and high property costs, its high level of domestic out-migration to other states, and its third-world property rights.  California is one of the states that still allows governments to seize private property for private use virtually without restriction.  National outrage following the Supreme Court decision to allow New London, Connecticut to seize the Kelo home and neighborhood for proposed private use brought reforms in many states and local governments to reign in such abuse of property rights recognized in our Constitution.  The land seized from its rightful owners in the Kelo case is now a vacant wasteland.  Similar vacant wastelands have resulted in troubled California owing to similar eminent domain abuse of private property for private, connected company gain.

Third-world property rights are one of the worst impediments to economic growth and the standard of living in third-world countries.  California, with all its woes, has opted for property rights uncertainty to replicate those destructive effects upon ownership and investment right here in our most populated state.  Tim Cavanaugh gave some examples at reason.com:

But the acres of south Los Angeles wasteland generated by the Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles (CRA/LA), the state’s largest and wealthiest RDA, are a grim testament to failure. The agency’s Normandie 5 Redevelopment Project has generated zero development. Its 107-acre Watts Project area, which has been in effect since 1968, boasts nothing but a Food 4 Less that hardly required government help to come into being. The massive $163 million Marlton Square project has stagnated, unbuilt, for nearly 20 years as a shady developer with friends in City Hall looted taxpayer funds. The two-block project area at the corner of Vermont and Manchester Avenues is a vacant lot. So is the long-fallow Central/Slauson project, where the CRA used eminent domain to shut down a metal works that was the only functioning business in the area.

 He also notes that the people attracted to such government property seizure schemes are not the best people:

Maybe the most important factor is the tendency of public-private partnerships to attract the worst elements of society: union goons, neighborhood activists, reverends, public-trough developers, political appointees, city planners, and so on. The Marlton Square project came close to breaking ground in 1999 under the legendary Lakers point guard and successful developer Magic Johnson—until itinerant local politician Mark Ridley-Thomas forced Magic out and turned the project over to a developer with a history of bouncing checks and cheating on his taxes, who went on to make millions of city dollars vanish before going bankrupt.

One of the more notable characteristics of these ignoble schemes is that they usually victimize the poor or the lower middle class for the comfort and profit of unscrupulous well-off people with good connections to government.  Fortunately, these would-be victims have a resolute champion in the Institute for Justice, which is making a point of becoming a nemesis for such low-life dispossession in the rascal-ridden state of California.  An example of the work the Institute for Justice does is its defense of a community youth athletic center against the out-of-control use of eminent domain by National City near San Diego.  A cavalier declaration of blight has been issued to 700 properties so that the city can exercise eminent domain over any of the properties over the next ten-year period.  The property owners must successfully fight off the blight rulings within a limited time to save their property from some potential exercise of the eminent domain claim in later years.  This means considerable expense and effort to prevent the loss of their property which may or may not happen.  This arrangement is a most cunning way to cause many property owners to fail to get the blight ruling overturned, especially when they are people of limited financial resources.  This is a plague upon the unwealthy for the future benefit of unscrupulous wealthy developers.

The Institute for Justice and some brave would-be victims have something to say about that however:



You can read more about this worthy case here.  Please consider becoming a supporter of the Institute for Justice while you are there.

Building the Progressive Socialist Train from Nowhere to Nowhere

California has long wanted to build a 500-mile long high speed passenger train, a so-called bullet train, from San Francisco to Los Angeles, through the Central Valley.  California voters approved a bond ballot measure for $9.95 billion in 2008 for the project, ten years in the planning, which they were told would:

• Cost $40 billion.
• Have a ticket cost of $55 to travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
• Transport 94 million passengers a year.
• The time of travel would be 2.5 hours.
• The rail line would operate with a surplus and no subsidies would be needed.
• 450,000 sustainable jobs would be created.

The Progressive Socialist federal government of the first half of the Obama administration has approved money to assist California in this effort.  The federal and state monies presently approved will build a 65-mile long segment of the railroad for $4.15 billion.  It will go from Corcoran, CA, with a population estimated to be about 25,000, to Borden, CA.  Borden is a tiny suburb of Madera, whose population is about 57,000.  Corcoran is on the less populated side of the Central Valley with complete desolation to its south and west and the small city of Tulare, population 58,000, about 19 miles to its northeast.  Corcoran is best known for the state prison there.  It probably needs bullet train service so the prisoners released from California prisons, because California cannot afford to keep them in prison, can leave the area quickly.

With the Republicans about to take over the money appropriations control in the House of Representatives, there will be no more federal tax money going to this project for quite some time.  I think we can be sure there will be no more for at least the next 6 years, if not for the next 10 years.  The short segment of the rail to be built will not be operated until more is built.  This is likely to help guarantee that if a bullet train is ever built from San Francisco to Los Angeles, the short segment will be obsolete and the route may well be changed.  It will be better if it were never built even in part.  It will be good if it is abandoned even after this segment from nowhere to nowhere is built.  The California authority that planned this line and two years ago made the claims above before the voters approved the bond measure, now says in the best bait and switch fashion:

•  The cost will be $42.6 billion.
•  The one-way ticket cost has increased to $105.

More realistic estimates are:

• The construction cost will be somewhere between $62 billion and $213 billion.
• The one-way ticket cost will be about $190.
• At least $19 billion of federal money will have to be provided if there is to be any hope that the train will not have to be subsidized by California taxpayers, even though the authorizing legislation forbids that.
• The 450,000 sustainable job workers are twice as many as the California government's active work force.  How realistic is it that so many jobs might be created by this rail line? 

The only bullet train railroads in the world having substantial segments of their systems able to operate without subsidies are in Japan and France.  Both are in much more densely populated areas than the comparatively low density Central Valley of California with its farming industry.  As we can see, California's Progressive Socialist central planning bureaucrats are about as competent as central planners always are.  They have done an excellent job of setting California's taxpayers up for a huge fall.

Meanwhile, the Central Valley of California has suffered from severe water shortages for the last several years.  Central planners have a lot to do with this problem also.  California has two major water projects controlled by central planners.  The Central Valley Project of 1933 is a creature of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.  The State Water Project of 1960 began under Democrat Gov. Pat Brown.  These two programs caused agricultural land use to increase from 4.9 to 8.6 million acres.  This huge increase in agricultural water use was based on water subsidies, water user fees rather than prices that fluctuate with supply and demand, water monopolies by the government, and a lack of water property rights.  All of these factors cause the uneconomical use of water.  This generally means that water will of course be used carelessly and wasted.  The effect is not unlike the use of the hard-earned money of California and American taxpayers to pay for a short bullet train track segment from Nowhere to Nowhere which will never be used.

Meanwhile, it is worth our noting that the newly elected Republican governors of Ohio and Wisconsin, have announced that they were returning the high speed train grants given to their states by the Progressive Socialists.  The returned Wisconsin money was for a train route from Milwaukee to Madison and the Ohio line was to go from Cleveland to Columbus to Cincinnati.  Secretary of Transportation LaHood has given the returned $1.2 billion to 13 states that want to build these taxpayer blood-sucking high speed trains.  John Kasich and Scott Walker have no doubt saved the states of Ohio and Wisconsin a fortune in wasted capital expense and subsequent train subsidies.

The returned money is going to the Democrat states of California, Illinois, New York, Washington, Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts, Oregon, North Carolina, and Iowa.  The toss-up states of Florida, Missouri, and Indiana are also getting money.  It is really hard to imagine how Maine, Oregon, North Carolina, Iowa, Missouri, and Indiana will find areas with dense enough populations to make their high speed trains pay.  The otherworldly winner of this nonsense has to be Vermont.  Its high speed train will go from St. Albans in the northwest corner of the state to Vernon in the southeast corner of the state.  St. Albans has a population of 7200 and Vernon's population is 2,000.  The biggest city in Vermont is Burlington, with a population of about 39,000.  Yes, this is the state that gave us Howard Dean and Bernie Sanders.  What can you expect.  The 13 states taking the high speed train money will rue the day they did.  No, not the damn politicians, it is the weary and overloaded taxpayer mules who will do the ruing.  At least most of these non-ruminating mules are Democrat asses.

California's Coming Massive Wealth Transfer to State Retirees

Among the many states which have promised state employees more in retirement benefits than they can reasonably deliver is the very Democrat state of California.  My last post discussed this problem broadly, but it did not examine the huge scale of the problem for California specifically.  That state is piling up future obligations which will come crashing down on the heads of California taxpayers more and more forcefully over the next decade.  It will act to force many more California businesses to relocate to less burdened states, such as Texas, which has created more than half of the new jobs in the country since the Socialist Recession began.

What California government admitted as of 2008 conditions was:

• The California State Teacher's Retirement System is short $40.5 billion.
• The California Public Employee Retirement System is short $35 billion.

Stuart Buck, a Distinguished Doctoral Fellow at the University of Arkansas has found that losses in the pension funds investments since 2008 has left them an additional $44 billion in the hole.  Worse yet, the state has been assuming that their investments for the pension funds will earn 7.75% to 8% per year return.  Given that we have had a decade of virtually no return on the stock market and given the huge problems which continue to plague the economy such as:

• the continuing home foreclosure crisis
• the further cost of bailing out Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac of about $300 billion
• the many states with hugely underfunded state pension funds totaling about $700 billion
• the many union multiemployer defined benefit pension funds with unfunded liabilities of about $700 billion which will destroy many unionized companies
• the much increased costs of ObamaCare which will increase everyone's premiums, increase medical taxes, greatly increase business costs, and put a huge strain on state budgets
• the increased costs of financial transactions due to the Dodd-Franks financial "reform" bill
• the increased costs of energy use planned by the EPA under its declaration that CO2 is a pollutant
• the increased costs of energy use due to ethanol, wind power, and solar power mandates, which California eagerly pushes forward
• government moves to force more unionization onto companies
• the ever increasing costs of more and more government regulations on businesses and those who pay the higher costs for their products and services
• our corporations will have the world's highest corporate tax rates beginning in 2011 and they are going up to help fund ObamaCare

the 7.75 to 8% rates of return imagined by the California accountants is totally unreasonable.  Unless the state of California is going to invest all of its pension funds in China, their wishful rate is much too high!  So, Buck says that using the more realistic rates of return used by private pension funds, the California pension funds will be $282.2 billion short.  This should be corrected for the current market values, so the real shortage is about $326.6 billion.  It turns out that the retiree health benefits program is also underfunded, by $51.8 billion.  The total shortfall for retirees health and retirement is then $378.8 billion.   This is about half the scale of the shortfalls on liabilities that caused the Socialist Recession that has brought down the entire U.S.!  This would be a disaster if the California Gross State Product were half of the GDP of the U.S.A.  It is a large fraction for a single state, indeed the largest state fraction, but it was only 12.7% in 2008.  This would imply that California will suffer for its state pension fund shortfall about 4 times more than it is suffering from the pain of the current Socialist Recession spread over the entire U.S.

When this entire burden falls on the Democrat-dominated state of California, the People of that state will know the Grim Reaper is among them.  Actions and choices have their consequences despite a peoples' refusal to foresee those consequences.  The California perpetual Christmas for retired state employees will have the characteristic of mass destruction for the people and companies of California.  Currently, the state is spending about $180 billion in 2010.  The unfunded pension liability is the equivalent of 2.1 times the annual state budget now.  If the state of California were to try to rectify the shortfall in these pensions it has a legal obligation to pay, it would require a large increase in tax revenues, which it will be hard to come by due to growth since people and companies are fleeing the already over-taxed state now.  Further tax increases will only accelerate the rate of abandonment.  The Democrats have put the people and the companies of the state of California into a very unforgiving vise, thanks to their many vices.

Texas Rewards Success, California Taxes It

California and Texas are 1 and 2 in Gross State Product (GSP), the state equivalent of the GNP. The 2008 GSP of California was $1.847 trillion and that for Texas was $1.224 trillion, with New York not too far behind Texas. From 2005 to 2008, the states with the fastest growth in GSP and their ranking on the personal and economic freedom index of Ruger and Sorens published by the Mercatus Center of George Mason University (dated February 2009) are:

Wyoming, 33.56%, 20
North Dakota, 28.52%, 4
Texas, 24.59%, 7
Utah, 23.17%, 14
Alaska, 21.72%, 47
Louisiana, 21.42%, 28
Oklahoma, 21.14%, 17
Montana, 20.48, 21
South Dakota, 20.34, 1

The corresponding results for California are:

California, 13.40%, 48

An article in the Investor's Business Daily called A Trenchant Tale of Two States points out further contrasts between these two states.  California had lost 1.46 million jobs due to this socialist recession we are in as of August when comparing to the jobs of December 2007.  But, Texas had replaced the jobs that were lost there earlier in the recession.  As of August, California alone accounted for 22.74% of the jobs lost in the nation since December 2007!

The magazine Chief Executive polls CEOs about the business environment in the states and California was ranked 50th of the states each of the last five years.  Texas was ranked #1.  The CEOs blame California's high taxes, its over-regulation, and bias against the profit motive.  On the other hand, Texas is appreciated for not having a personal income tax, not taxing capital gains, and having a more reasonable regulatory burden.  California's capital gains tax is as high as 10.55%.  Its regulations raise labor costs, promote litigation, and put building projects into suspended animation.  The state and local governments make a habit of preying on businesses and property owners with fees and mandates.

As the IBD article graphics above show, Texas over a ten-year period, had a lower personal tax burden, its gross state product growth was higher, personal income growth was higher, its population growth was much higher, and its non-farm payroll employment growth was much higher when compared to California.  Texas also bettered the national averages in all of these categories.  In addition, there was a strong net domestic migration out of California and a strong migration into Texas.  People vote with their feet.

The issue of a state personal income tax is worth looking at more closely.  Texas and the eight other states with no state personal income tax grew their nonfarm payroll by 11.76% from 1999 to 2009.  California and the other eight states with the highest upper personal income tax brackets, grew the nonfarm payroll by only 2.48%.

Some states, such as California, are very highly biased against the profit motive, business, and property owners.  It makes doing business in those states very unpleasant.  Some companies move out of the state, while others simply choose to do their future expansion in other areas.  Sometimes the other area is Texas and sometimes it is in another country.

The IBD article concludes with an interesting anecdote:  California governments love alternative energy.  The City Manager of Brisbane, CA pretends to be enthusiastic about solar power, but this does not stop him from charging $13,510 for a permit to install a 131 kilowatt system.  He claimed it made no sense to allow a commercial firm a break on that fee, since they only wanted a profit.  The bias against profit might as well be a bias against jobs and income growth.  This bias is a characteristic of the more socialist states such as California and they pay a steep price for that bias.

The California State Budget Shortfall

The state of California had disappointing tax revenues in April, which were $3.6 billion or 26% below the estimate.  Earlier, California had expected an $18.6 billion shortfall of revenue for their 2010-2011 budget, but this has now grown to $19.1 billion.  The 2007-2008 budget was $103 billion.  Then California had a $60 billion shortfall on the budget in the 2009-2010 budget.  California increased sales and income taxes on a temporary basis.  It also made "payments" with IOUs.  Gov. Schwarzenegger has called for budget cuts for the last three years and did win some in 2009-2010 after a hard-fought battle.  On Friday, he called for $12.4 billion in cuts and called upon the federal government for much of the remaining $6.7 billion.  Part of that remainder is to be covered with "funding shifts" according to the Wall Street Journal, but other sources claim that federal payments are hoped to be as high as $6.9 billion, though the federal government has so far only guaranteed payments of $3 billion.

Schwarzenegger's proposed cuts will produce a state general-fund 2010-2011 budget of $83.4 billion, which is 81% of the 2007-2008 budget.  Education spending is nearly 50% of the budget.  Health and Human Services spending is 25%, and Corrections and Rehab is 9%.  The Governor wants pension, budget, and tax reform in the new budget.  He is not calling for tax increases, which will only drive more businesses out of the state already known for its high taxes.  He says he wants to eliminate the CalWORKS welfare program to save $1 billion and eliminate child care funding except for pre-school and after-school programs to save $1.2 billion.  Many earlier attempts to save money in the Health and Human Services part of the budget were ruled against by courts.  The Democrats are criticizing the Governor for being anti-child, while claiming he should increase taxes and eliminate $2 billion of planned corporate tax breaks.  Of course, this ignores the fact that children survived before California got heavily into the child care business and that California has a great problem with businesses leaving the state.  Of course, we know that a school voucher program would save California a huge sum of money over the next few years given the post on wasteful government-run schools of 12 April 2010.

California's tax revenues break down as 52% from personal income taxes, 28% from sales and use taxes, and 11% from corporation taxes.  The share of the corporation tax has fallen to about half of what it was in 1981.  Corporations faced with high taxes will find ways to operate that minimize those taxes.  In California's case, this has often meant that corporations have fled the state.  The collapse of the real estate and financial markets has been particularly severe also in California.  As I have often pointed out, this is in good part due to the widespread restrictions on land use and building in California, on which Dr. Thomas Sowell agrees.

All of this is very important, because California is now considered to be one of the top ten most likely to default governments in the world!  Financial experts are saying it has a 20.07% probability of defaulting over the next 5 years.  Their evaluation is given in the table below:

The last time a state of the United States defaulted was in the 1840s!  It might be very chaotic if California defaults.  The Mid Spread rating means that if you hold $10 million of California bonds and you want to fully insure them against loss for 5 years, the annual insurance premium will be ($10 million) (254.1/10,000) = $254,000.  For a much less risky state, the corresponding cost might be about $25,000.  It is a very sad commentary that Hezbollah has not managed to make Lebanon quite as risky as the Democrats have managed to make California.  On the other hand, with so many Democrats admiring Hugo Chavez, they may have their sights set on the lofty 50.79% default probability estimated for Venezuela!

Comments on California's Plight

We have heard a great deal about California's budget and revenue problems at the state government level recently. Government spending is clearly out of control. But there are other problems as well. The 29 August - 4 September issue of the Economist, notes that

Byzantine regulations, high and complex taxes and legislative gridlock are driving out businesses, while high personal taxes are driving out the rich and a disintegrating social safety net is pushing away the poor.

The Milken Institute reports that California is losing its manufacturing industries to such states as Arizona, Nevada, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, Oregon, Texas, and Washington. It says that California would have had to create another 1.2 million jobs between 2000 and 2007 than it did to have maintained its population relative to that of the rest of the United States. Total migration to California has been positive since 1996 due to foreign immigrants, but the state has a net outward migration of U.S. citizens.

The biggest single reason for this is housing affordability, but housing costs are so high because the same socialist/environmentalist cabal that is causing California's other problems is causing the limited land available for housing to rise in cost to unholy heights. The poorer citizens are the most likely to leave the state. 1.73 households paying little in taxes are leaving for each such new low income household entering the state. Among the richest state citizens, 1.09 households are leaving for each household arriving.

Is the real socialist/environmentalist aim to cause the poor to leave your state and move to another state? Environmentalists do seem to be very fond of wishing for population reduction! If so, they are apparently succeeding in California.

The Sense of Taxing Prescription Cannabis

In California, it is legal to buy cannabis for medicinal purposes with a prescription from a doctor. The federal government has previously objected to this and sometimes arrests those who grow and distribute marijuana strictly for this market. The feds have even arrested sick users. Obama, to his rare credit, says the federal government should allow the states to determine their policy with respect to cannabis.

What I find odd is the fact that the state of California levies a sales tax on the marijuana bought with prescriptions for medical purposes. Now, even the city of Oakland is about to levy a sales tax on this prescription medicine. Those who support the legalization of marijuana cultivation and distribution beyond the medical market, are cheering the taxes for making cannabis legitimate. Now, I do think that when marijuana is made available for general use of adults, it is very reasonable to tax that marijuana. It is wrong to tax a prescription medicine, however, and that is the present status of marijuana sales in California. Well, at least of those that are being taxed.

Waxman-Markey Cap and Trade Compared to Smoot-Hawley Tariff

Tom McClintock, Republican Representative of California, gave a speech to the House of Representatives after it had just passed the Waxman-Markey Carbon Cap and Trade taxation scheme to limit CO2 emissions. The speech is posted at IBDeditorials.com. He says it is known what the effects of this law will be because California passed Assembly Bill 32 for the purpose of limiting CO2 emissions and we can examine its effects.

McClintock says they are:

• Before January 2007, CA's unemployment tracked the national average closely. Since, its unemployment has increased at a rate sufficient to cause an increasing divergence with the national unemployment rate. It is now 2% greater than the national rate, the highest it has been since 1941, this despite the fact that Gov. Schwarzenegger promised many new green jobs, just as Obama has.
• The city of Truckee, CA was about to sign a long-term power contract with a coal-fired power plant in Utah, but AB32 prevented it and their electricity costs doubled.

He says the cap and trade bill has

profound implications for agriculture, construction, cargo and passenger transportation, energy production, baking and brewing — all of which produce enormous quantities of this innocuous and ubiquitous compound. In fact, every human being produces 2.2 pounds of carbon dioxide every day — just by breathing.

Then he compares the Waxman-Markey bill to the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff that did so much to bring on the Great Depression:

When you discuss the folly of the Hoover administration — how it turned the recession of 1929 into the depression of the 1930s, the first thing that economists point to is the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that imposed new taxes on more than 20,000 imported products.

Waxman-Markey is our generation's Smoot-Hawley. In fact, it's worse, because it imposes new taxes on an infinitely larger number of domestic products on a scale that utterly dwarfs Smoot-Hawley.

Never forget that this nonsense constraining our lives has been brought to you by the Democrat Party in the name of socialism. The Republicans too often are willing to join in the destruction of the individual's sovereign rights, but they do not do it anywhere near as well as the Party of Mass Destruction.