One of the biggest targets of liberal acrimony in California is Proposition 13, the 1978 ballot initiative that capped property taxes at 1% and requires 2/3 of legislative approval to increase most tax rates. It also caps the reassessment of real estate value by 2% per year, barring new construction or a change in...
Read More »

California’s state budget is now facing a $16 billion shortfall, much larger than it appeared in a January forecast. In a recent post I compared California’s recent budget growth with Florida’s, and noted that while California’s budget has grown by 5.6% since 2006, Florida’s state budget shrank by 5.3%. If California’s budget shrank during...
Read More »

Water shortages and poor water quality are looming threats in many developing countries. By contrast, water supplies and water quality have increased in much of the United States due to a specific policy innovation: water markets and market-like exchanges. The growing participation of wildlife agencies and conservationists in water markets and exchanges is especially...
Read More »

One effect of the ongoing recession is that it reduces tax revenues. That’s one reason the federal deficit is as large as it is. But not all governments have responded the way the US government has. I live in Florida, where total state appropriations (that is, state government expenditures) peaked in 2006, prior to...
Read More »

How has the vision of our forebears—of men and women, black, white, and every other complexion, standing tall, shoulder to shoulder, in free and full access to equal opportunities and enjoying the blessings of equal rights in the sanctity of our persons and property—devolved to skirmishes among dependent subjects of the state over the...
Read More »

Capitalism without bankruptcy is like religion without hell, the saying goes. The grain of truth here is that we depend on markets for error-correction; “people are fallible, but competition selects”, as Adam Smith well noted. But many who fail in the marketplace seek a way out via politics. This includes bail-outs, as well-documented in...
Read More »

The Secretary of Education, representatives for the Civil Liberties Union, and others are rightly outraged by the recent release of a report from the Department of Education, showing that overall, black students are three and a half times more likely to be suspended or expelled from school than their white peers. How can a...
Read More »

This front-page headline from Friday’s San Francisco Chronicle brings to mind the old adage about democracy being two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner: “Voters Willing to Tax Wealthy.” The article goes on to detail the not-surprising results of a poll in which voters were asked to choose between...
Read More »

This week, SCOTUS decided Messerschmidt v. Millender, which greatly stretched the probable cause standard. This is not a good case for those seeking to limit state power. The facts are pretty simple. Shelly Kelly was attacked by her former boyfriend Jerry Ray Bowen. Kelly reported the attack to the police and stated that Bowen...
Read More »

Residents of Hawaii were dismayed to see this recent front-page headline: “Hawaii Solar Savings Spark Higher Electric Bills.” Since so many consumers have sought electrical savings from installing solar panels, the state-monopoly electric utility is losing revenue and now needs to make it up in higher rates. At least Hawaii’s perennially sunny weather will...
Read More »