Perry’s opponents have hit him for signing in 2001 the nation’s first law allowing illegal immigrants to get the in-state tuition break that other Texans who attended high school in-state receive.  Four lawmakers out of 181 voted against the bill, as Perry has pointed out, making the bill uncontroversial at the time.  (Note: as a California lawmaker from 2004 to 2010, I consistently voted against expanding benefits to illegal immigrants.)

Today, 12,138 illegal immigrant students pay in-state tuition in Texas, about one percent of all Texas college students.  By comparison, the Department of Homeland Security estimates that 7.0% of Texas residents are in the nation illegally.

Gov. Perry has pointed out more than once, and with a degree of exasperation, that Texas has spent $400 million of its own taxpayers’ money on border security, hiring additional Texas Rangers to better secure the border.  Perry has also defended his insistence that a fence not be built along the entirety of Texas’ 1,969 mile border with Mexico, citing the fact that a river runs along the border through some very remote and rugged terrain that is best secured with “boots on the ground” and “aviation assets.” I have to agree with Perry on this one, building a fence along a river is costly while the river itself will constantly undermine the fence’s footings.  In addition, Gov. Perry’s Texas has passed a law that requires a photo ID to vote (only 13 other states have photo ID laws on the books) and illegal immigrants cannot obtain a driver’s license in Texas (11 states issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, including Sarah Palin’s Alaska).

Dismissing Texas’ own border security efforts, Perry’s opponents have focused on the in-state tuition, calling the law a magnet for illegal immigration.  Theoretically, that’s true.  But does it actually impact an illegal immigrant’s decision about what state they may decide to live in?  I find it hard to believe a 22-year-old man from central Mexico is going to say to himself, “Hey, I’m going to move to California or Texas because, when my two children become college age in 17 years, I can save some tuition money.”  Rather, the decision to break U.S. law more likely comes down to the availability of jobs and the seriousness with which the Federal government secures the border.

To test this proposition, it is instructive to see where illegal immigrants live in the U.S.  According to the Department of Homeland Security, the largest illegal immigrant population by state in 2010 was:

California: 2,570,000

Texas: 1,770,000

Florida: 760,000

Illinois: 490,000

Arizona: 470,000

Georgia: 460,000

New York: 460,000

North Carolina: 390,000

New Jersey: 370,000

Nevada: 260,000

As one would expect, larger states have larger illegal immigrant populations, and larger states on the border with Mexico have an even larger illegal immigrant population.

But, how do these statistics compare to the size of the state?  What percentage of the state’s population is composed of illegal immigrants?

Nevada: 9.6% illegal

Arizona: 7.4% illegal

Texas: 7.0% illegal

California: 6.9% illegal

Georgia: 4.7% illegal

New Jersey: 4.2% illegal

North Carolina: 4.1% illegal

Florida: 4.0% illegal

Illinois: 3.8% illegal

New York: 2.4% illegal

National average: 3.5% illegal

Next, let’s compare the state’s system of welfare benefits to illegal immigrants as well as the state’s in-state tuition policy.

Nevada: 9.6% illegal; low welfare, no in-state tuition

Arizona: 7.4% illegal; low welfare, no in-state tuition

Texas: 7.0% illegal; low welfare, in-state tuition

California: 6.9% illegal; high welfare, in-state tuition

Georgia: 4.7% illegal; low welfare, no in-state tuition

New Jersey: 4.2% illegal; high welfare, no in-state tuition

North Carolina: 4.1% illegal; low welfare, no in-state tuition

Florida: 4.0% illegal; low welfare, no in-state tuition

Illinois: 3.8% illegal; high welfare, in-state tuition

New York: 2.4% illegal; high welfare, in-state tuition

This analysis tells us that the states with the highest percentage of illegal immigrants, Nevada and Arizona, don’t use many state resources to assist them while Illinois, with an average number of illegal immigrants, and New York, with a below-average number of illegal immigrants, are the most generous.  Thus, data suggests that state assistance to illegal immigrants isn’t much of a magnet.  Other factors must be at work here.

Demand for labor is the driver, with illegal immigrants concentrating in the construction, hospitality, and agriculture sectors.  Until recently, both Nevada and Arizona were experiencing housing booms and 27% of Nevada workers labor in the hospitality industry.  On the other end of the ledger, both New York and Illinois experienced very little population growth; therefore, saw few construction jobs relative to other states.

Lastly, it’s interesting to compare these states’ tax policies to their illegal immigration populations:

The Tax Foundation’s 2011 State Business Tax Climate Index ranks the states with the largest illegal immigrant population as follows:

Nevada: 9.6% illegal; 4^th most-competitive tax policy

Arizona: 7.4% illegal; 34^th most-competitive tax policy

Texas: 7.0% illegal; 13^th most-competitive tax policy

California: 6.9% illegal; 49^th most-competitive tax policy

Georgia: 4.7% illegal; 25^th most-competitive tax policy

New Jersey: 4.2% illegal; 48^th most-competitive tax policy

North Carolina: 4.1%; 41^st most-competitive tax policy

Florida: 4.0% illegal; 5^th most-competitive tax policy

Illinois: 3.8% illegal; 23^rd most-competitive tax policy

New York: 2.4% illegal; 50^th most-competitive tax policy

Perhaps it isn’t a coincidence that Nevada, the state with the most attractive business tax policy on the list, has the highest percentage of illegal immigrants, while New York, the state with the worst tax policies in the entire nation, would have the fewest illegal immigrants as a percentage of its population.

It shouldn’t be a shock to conservatives that, just like the wealthy, illegal immigrants respond to state taxes and the impact those taxes have on the economy.

Perhaps if Governor Perry worked to pass a Texas state income tax, the illegal immigrant population there would plummet (of course, he’d have an even bigger challenge in winning the Republican nomination as a tax-hiker).

This brings us to a final observation.  Other than raising taxes to the bone-crushing New York level, just how much can a state do in the realm of illegal immigration, a basic Federal responsibility?  The answer appears to be not much, given Arizona’s high-profile efforts at curbing illegal immigration and given that Arizona’s per capita illegal immigrant population is greater than that of all states except Nevada.

Having served as a governor is excellent preparation for being President.  That said, a governor has different responsibilities than does a President.

Rather than focusing on what education bill Perry signed into law in 2001, Republicans should be more concerned about what policies their prospective nominee has today on immigration, both legal and illegal.  Do they approve of an amnesty on the scale of the 1986 amnesty that many Reagan Administration veterans later viewed as a huge error? Do they want to change an H-1B visa program that business sees as a way to keep technical labor costs down but that many highly-skilled American workers see as undermining their ability to earn a good living?  How do they propose to better secure the border, and can they do it without eroding Americans’ liberty?  These are proper questions for those who would be President and the sooner we can move beyond “gotcha” debate moments and into substantive policy discussion, the better.

Since the Republican Party’s natural constituency is conservative, more so in this tumultuous Tea Party era, most attacks on Perry will be from the right – the attacks from the left will come after Perry wins the nomination.  That the machinery of the left will aid in the early attacks from the right is a given; it’s all part of winning for them.
The Trans-Texas Corridor is one such emerging line of criticism against Gov. Perry.  First proposed by Perry in 2002, the north-south running road would have also included a railway, petroleum pipeline, power lines, and communications cables.

Some conservatives have linked the planned Texas road with the feared, but as yet theoretical, North American Union or NAU and NAFTA, dubbing it the NAFTA Super Highway.  That Perry would have proposed such a thing is yet more proof to them that Perry is somehow the “Establishment” candidate (never mind his comments about the Fed, the Tenth Amendment, and the fact that the same “Establishment” ran Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison against him for governor last year).

So, what’s the deal with Perry’s proposed superhighway and should conservatives be worried?

There are two basic ways to finance roads: taxes or tolls.  That’s why “freeways” aren’t really free – properly understood, they’re “taxways.”  There are also two basic entities that build and operate roads: government or the private sector.

America has had a long history with these arrangements.  The Federal government built Post roads-Constitution: Article I, Section 8-with eminent domain authority-Constitution: Amendment 5).  States built infrastructure projects such as the Erie Canal, paying back the state treasury with tolls from the users.  But private companies built and maintained the majority of roads, operating them as private turnpikes through the early 1800s.  It wasn’t until 1956 that the Federal government took the lead on major inter-urban road construction.  That was the year Congress approved President’s Eisenhower’s “National System of Interstate and Defense Highways,” funded by the Highway Revenue Act, which levied a $0.03 per gallon tax on fuel (now 18.4 cents per gallon).

Texas’ low taxes and light regulatory burden have driven growth at more than double the national average.  The Lone Star State added 4.3 million residents from 2000 to 2010 – Perry became governor in late 2000.  This massive growth, combined with Texas’ status as the number one manufacturing state, has clogged Texas roads with people and commerce (which is far better than the alternative).

To address these needs, Gov. Perry launched the Trans-Texas Corridor, a $184 billion effort to construct a 4,000 miles of toll ways, rail corridors and utility lines.  The environmental left attacked the plan as did conservatives who somehow saw the road as a building block on the way to integrating Canada and Mexico with the U.S.  Opposition was strong enough that Perry had to abandon the plan in 2005.

But, as candidate Perry said a few days ago in a radio interview, aside from raising the money privately to build the needed infrastructure, “…the alternatives would be to raise taxes, ask Washington for money or wait for ‘the asphalt fairy’ to get needed roads built.”

Attempts to attract private investment to build public roads aren’t new.  In 2006, while a California State Assemblyman, I authored AB 2290, a bill to allow the construction of a truck-only toll road out of the Ports of Long Beach and San Pedro, America’s busiest port complex.  My aim was multi-fold: take large and dangerous container truck traffic off of L.A. regional highways; increase the competitiveness of California’s main port; reduce pollution emissions per ton of freight moved though a reduction in congestion; and do so in a way that the users paid for it, rather than California’s public at large.

Competiveness was a major concern driving my bill.  California’s taxes, regulations, and labor laws were driving up the costs of operating out of the nation’s biggest port.  In addition, Mexico was proposing to build a massive new port on their Pacific coast to compete with America.  Further, Panama wanted to double the capacity of the Panama Canal, allowing larger cargo ships to bypass California and head straight for Texas, then on to destinations on the East Coast and Canada via overland road and rail.

Panama’s canal improvement project will be complete by 2014, likely resulting in a significant shift of cargo traffic from California to Texas.  With more than 11 million twenty-foot container units transiting L.A. annually, compared to almost 1.8 million at Houston, America’s fifth-largest port, even a 10 percent shift of traffic from California could result in more than a 50 percent increase in Texas cargo traffic.

Further, rather than being built and operated by the government, my bill would have provided a choice for private companies to build and maintain the road.  For instance, a large Spanish road building firm had pledged some $4 billion of their own investors’ money for a California project, if they were given the opportunity.  With that sort of money in short supply in the Golden State, I thought my fellow lawmakers would jump at the chance to build a road without tax money (preemptive disclosure – no such firms donated to my campaigns).  I was wrong.  My bill was shot down in the Transportation Committee on a 5 to 8 partisan vote, all liberal Democrats against it, all Republicans for it.  I recall the Chair of the committee saying she opposed toll roads because only the wealthy could afford them (never mind that the users would be commercial trucks and the use of the road voluntary).

Both my AB 2290 and Gov. Perry’s Trans-Texas Corridor represent current, innovative, limited-government, and free-market oriented thought.  The alternatives, as Perry said, are taxes or Washington – roads don’t build and pay for themselves.

Populists have scored Gov. Perry over the proposed used of eminent domain to build the Trans-Texas Corridor.  But, when hasn’t eminent domain been used to build infrastructure?  Unless land is already owned by the government, eminent domain is the proper Constitutional tool to use – Article I, Section 8 foresees eminent domain’s use, and Amendment 5 assures American citizens that they will be justly compensated for their land, rather than the government simply seizing it.  Without eminent domain, virtually none of today’s current interstate system could have been built.  Constitution-believing conservatives can’t have it both ways – eminent domain power is clearly part of the Constitution.

The proper question should be: is the eminent domain applied for a public use?   In the highly debated Kelo v. City of New London decision in 2005, the Supreme Court ruled (wrongly, in my opinion) that the eminent domain taking of land from a private party and subsequent transfer to another private party, solely for the purpose of redevelopment, was Constitutional.  In this case, local government was using condemnation as a tool to boost tax revenues by changing the economic use of the land.  In the case of the Trans-Texas Corridor, eminent domain would be step in the project’s realization regardless of whether it was funded and run by the government or business and regardless of whether taxes or tolls were used to fund it.  Further, unlike Kelo, the benefit of added infrastructure in Texas would accrue to the public at large – truly, a public use.

Lastly, there has also been unfair criticism over the increase of state debt during Perry’s 10-plus years as governor.  States cannot print money to run a deficit, unlike the Federal government, so this attack on Perry is really about Texas’ bonded indebtedness.  As one would expect in a state that has grown more than 20 percent in a decade, bonds are being used to pay for infrastructure.  Perry’s 2010 Democratic opponent attacked him for “doubling” Texas’ bond debt.  True.  But bonds for transportation account for almost all of this debt increase, going from near zero in 2000 to $11.8 billion in 2009.  Tellingly, bond debt to support parks and general government infrastructure (a soaring category in California), actually shrank 6 percent in Texas under Perry’s watch.

Thus, conservatives who criticize Gov. Perry over the proposed use of eminent domain to build a road aren’t just wrong – they’re actually advocating a position that is unconstitutional it its core.  A further irony: such populist-minded conservatives are actually using one of the same arguments that the Sierra Club and other environmental left, anti-growth groups, have used against Perry.

Walking into CPK, I was still mentally processing the implications of the census data that showed what appeared to be a strong link between college educated Americans moving out of high tax states to low tax states (go ahead and laugh, yes, I’m really like that).  When the menus came, my deepening melancholy for California’s self-inflicted tax wounds shifted to sadness due to the Golden State’s penchant for regulating all aspects of life.  Why?  I immediately saw that CPK’s shiny new menus were in violation of the California Health and Safety Code Section 114094, the law that requires restaurant chains to list “…the calorie content information for a standard menu item next to the item on the menu in a size and typeface that is clear and conspicuous.”   Nary a speck of calorie data was next to any item on the menu (not that I cared about it, I don’t go to restaurants to count my calories – the information was available on request, nice, but not legal in California).

A full-blown case of Over Regulation Realization Depression hit me.  California Pizza Kitchen, the quintessential California business, would be forced to reprint thousands of menus for their 67 California restaurants, or risk fines of up to $500 for each location: a $33,500 exposure for each local health inspector visit while out of compliance.

While waiting for my California Club Pizza (it was delicious enough to temporarily lift me out of my bad case of ORRD) my thoughts drifted back to the floor vote on SB 1420, the 2008 bill by Senator Alex Padilla (D-Van Nuys) that sought to impose the calorie counting mandate on business.  I recall arguing against the bill which passed on a largely party line vote, Democrats for it, and Republicans mostly against it (then Senator Abel Maldonado was the sole Republican “aye” vote while some of the more moderate Assembly Republicans, Bonnie Garcia and Todd Spitzer, abstained).

Democrats justified calorie listing mandate by saying that big restaurant chains could afford it (the bill exempted chains with less than 20 locations), that some restaurant meals contained enough calories to feed an entire family for a week (or something along those lines) and that the bill was made less odious than it was initially so as to remove the opposition of the California Restaurant Association.

California’s thirst to proscribe as much as can be written into law is a major driver as to why Forbes magazine has consistently ranked the Golden State as having one of the worst regulatory environment ranks in the nation (in 2010, California was 43^rd, just below Alaska and just above Hawaii).

By the time I got back home, my stomach filled with non-calorie disclosed black market pizza, I was ready to tackle the census data.  As I poured over the information on state growth, I began to see a pattern between state tax policy and population growth.

According to the Tax Foundation, a non-partisan tax policy analysis organization founded in 1937, the states with the best business tax climates are South Dakota, Alaska, Wyoming, Nevada, and Florida.  Texas, the second-biggest state, ranks 13.  All five of the top states for business and Texas have one thing in common: no individual income tax, a tax which hits small businesses the hardest and small business is America’s employment engine.

The five worst states for business, beginning with the bottom, are: New York, California, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Ohio (although the governors of New York, New Jersey and Ohio, a Democrat and two Republicans, respectively, appear to be trying hard to reverse their states’ hostile business climates).  These states are characterized by high and progressive state income taxes.

The 2010 Census showed that the average population growth in the five best states for business was 17.6%.  Texas clocked in at 20.6% growth.  Meanwhile, the five worst states for business from a business tax standpoint showed an anemic growth of 4.6%.   America’s population grew at 9.7% from 2000 to 2010, meaning that the high-tax states grew at less than half of the national average while the low-tax states grew at about double the national average.

People really do vote with their feet (or moving vans).

Additionally, the U.S. Census Bureau tracks business creation.  The worst five states for business saw a net loss of 86,587 in 2007 and 2008, the most recent period for which data is available.  The pace of reported losses will certainly deepen with 2009’s numbers.

Business “Births,” as the Census appropriately names business creation, an act that measures entrepreneurially-minded people’s faith in the future, were strongest in the states with no income tax, with a net gain of 12,672 businesses in 2007 and 2008.

Texas saw the net creation of 19,702 businesses in 2007 and 2008.  This, while California saw a net loss of California saw a net loss of 76,504 businesses in the same period.

These statistics show a strong linkage between the behavior of job creators and state tax policy – while a common sense linkage to most; you can be assured that California’s ruling liberal elite continue to scoff at such a notion.
Adding anecdotal flavor to the narrative, the Sacramento Bee ran a story last Sunday featuring the premise that California faces a brain drain if college graduates can’t find jobs.  This suggests that policy makers who only focus on making college more affordable by boosting taxpayer support for higher education may inadvertently be spending money to educate other state’s future high income earners.  It does little good for California to churn out college graduates who have to find work in Texas because California’s tax and regulatory policies discourage business creation.

California will not solve its current tax revenue challenges by levying even higher taxes on its most-productive residents – nothing is more mobile than a wealthy person and his money.  But Democrats control all levers of California’s government and show little interest in reducing taxes or rolling back regulations.

California must enact tax and regulatory relief.  If it fails to do so, its system of high taxes and even higher spending will drive a stake through the heart of the California dream.

I spoke to Stanhope, as he drove to the hospital for x-rays and treatment for the injuries sustained at the rally, and asked him what happened.  Mr. Stanhope said that he was with a group of about 150 Tea Party activists across the street from the MoveOn.org-organized union rally.  A union man with a bullhorn, Richard Andazola, 28, was yelling across the street at the Tea Party activists, calling them “fascists.”

Then one of the Tea Party activists, also bullhorn equipped, replied, “We pay your salary!”

This enraged Andazola, who, according to Stanhope, rushed the Tea Partiers, chanting “Fascists go home! Fascists go home!”  He violently shoved Stanhope twice, the second time apparently striking Stanhope in the throat:

Somehow in the melee, Stanhope’s hand was also injured

The union thug was later cited by law enforcement:

Police cite a man for battery

Notice the union protester’s Teamster jacket is clearly visible.  The jacket identifies Teamsters Local 439, Stockton.

We will be posting more footage and further coverage once it becomes available.

Stay tuned for an in-depth write up from an eyewitness on the scene.

**

Editors’ note: As always, if you have any insight into this incident or can identify any of the participants, please email feedback@breitbart.com.

The TSA believes that it must view your naked body with a scanner or place a hand on your private parts to safeguard the flying public from terrorists. I have advice for the TSA: you can spend a trillion dollars to make air travel safe and it won’t work. Islamists will simply board an aircraft originating in a nation with weaker security or go after a school or a bus or a subway. By incurring unending costs and eroding our freedoms, the terrorists win and we lose just a bit each day.

We can’t defend everything – and certainly not using processes drawn from the bureaucratic-industrial complex. Consider this: no TSA employee has ever caught or stopped a terrorist but alert passengers and intelligence has. This says volumes about the nature of the threat and our ham-handed response to it.

Rather than invest in costly, privacy-invading machines run by legions of sleepy federal employees, we should look to the Israeli airport security model for ideas. To do so we need to train our TSA force more, pay them more, employ fewer of them and empower them to use their brains to look at each passenger, ask them questions and yes, profile.

With security, the best defense is a good offense. It’s time to rethink our long-running battle with militant Islamism (which has its origins with our fight with the Barbary Pirates from 1801 to 1815). Instead of spending unending sums of money and throwing away our liberty in a vain quest to make us safe from every form of terror, why don’t we simply increase the cost for Muslim nations to host terrorists?

Thomas Jefferson’s response to the Barbary Pirates is instructive. After Islamist forces seized U.S. shipping and held American crews hostage, Jefferson approved a punitive expedition to North Africa. This action saw the U.S. Navy blockading the ports used by the pirate-terrorists while eight U.S. Marines lead a force of 500 Mediterranean mercenaries in a prototypical special forces operation whose object was regime change. The operation was successful and the Marines got the opening line to their hymn: “…to the shores of Tripoli.”

Rather than countenance a federal invasion of privacy of American air travelers, why not issue the following ultimatum to terror tolerating nations?

• If you fund terror we will put a tariff on your oil or other products – call it, the “Terror Tariff” – and we’ll invest the money raised in Predator drones and missiles, special forces, and alternative energy research.
• If you allow terrorists to train on your soil and we will kill them and maybe your leadership too.
• And, if we topple your terrorist-loving government, we won’t spend a dime to occupy your nation and rebuild it – you get to do that.
• If you leave us alone, we’ll return the favor. But, if you, or your terrorist proxies attack us, you may not live to see the morning.

Bottom line: we Americans get to keep our liberty and the bad guys get to lose their lives, which, when you think about it, is doubly satisfying in an especially American kind of way.

It isn’t hard to see where things went awry in California: just look back to the heady years of the historic 2003 recall of Gray Davis.  Davis was swept out of office due a massive deficit brought on by his rapid expansion of state government during the dot com economy combined with his mishandling of the state’s electricity crisis.  Candidate Schwarzenegger won on a platform of “blowing up the boxes” of bureaucracy while “cutting up” the state’s “credit cards” – Schwarzenegger did neither.  Instead, he gave California seven years of uneven leadership, veering from the right to the left while calling his erratic leadership “post-partisanship.” Schwarzenegger pushed through the largest state tax increase in U.S. history, expanded government spending, debt and regulatory hurdles while shrinking the sphere of liberty – curious actions for a self-avowed fan of the late Milton Friedman.  Schwarzenegger’s voter approval rating hit 22 percent this summer, matching Gray Davis’ recall-eve rating – something Davis, if he wishes to indulge in schadenfreude, might see as poetic symmetry.

While the Democrats had a great election night in the Golden State, there are some signs of hope for the majority of Californians who don’t take their ideological cues from San Francisco.

First of all, Prop. 26 passed.  Prop. 26 makes it nearly impossible for Democrats to pass higher taxes by disguising them as fees.  Taxes require a two-thirds majority vote to pass in California.  Fees, usually defined as a payment for a specific government service, just require a simple majority to enact.  The problem is, that prior to Prop. 26, Democrats got quite adept at changing the definition of a “fee” to cover just about anything they wanted it to.  Assuming that Prop. 25 doesn’t allow Democrats to raise taxes with a majority vote by simply inserting a tax increase into the budget bill, Prop. 26 will make it very tough for Democrats to raise enough revenue to pay for all that government they love.

Secondly, Prop. 20 passed and Prop. 27 went down in flames.  Thanks to the foresight and funding of Charles Munger, Jr., a longtime Republican activist and atom smasher (he’s an experimental physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), Prop. 20 will extend the mandate of the independent redistricting commission (created by Munger’s Prop. 11 in 2008) to include congressional seats too.  Prop. 27 sought to repeal Prop. 11 and would have canceled out Prop. 20 if it had received more votes, returning the responsibility of redistricting to legislative Democrats.  That Prop. 20 won with 61.4 percent, the most “yes” votes of any of the propositions, shows that the public remains extremely wary of its politicians.  The practical impact of Prop. 20 is two-fold: first of all, Republicans will likely gain a few more congressional seats in the 2012 election as Democrats lose their gerrymander advantage in California; secondly, legislative districts will be more competitive, causing some currently safe districts, both Democrat and Republican, to be in play in future elections.  This, by itself, is a victory for representative democracy.

Thirdly, Steve Cooley looks set to win the very close race for attorney general. This will mark the first time in 12 years that a Republican has occupied California’s top law enforcement office.  Always an important post, now it is especially so.  First of all, Attorney General-elect Cooley will be able to investigate political corruption.  Given that corruption tends to flower when one party has a lock on power, Cooley will likely be very busy for the next four years.  Next, with the state budget deficit at $14 billion and growing and Prop. 26’s passage limiting Democrats’ ability to hike taxes, there is a looming threat of a massive prison inmate release.  The state prison budget is about $11 billion a year. Rather than cut the $49,000 per year that it costs to incarcerate an inmate in California, more than double the national average of $24,000, Democrats would likely just vote to release violent felons as a way to free up more money for welfare.

Lastly, Republicans showed strength in the hard-hit Central Valley, with Andy Vidak defeating Rep. Jim Costa and David Harmer locked in a tight race with Rep. Jerry McNerney in two widely watched congressional races.

So, what do the results portend?

A lot depends on Jerry Brown’s back-to-the-future act.  As governor in the 1970s, Brown dismantled the merit-based civil service system and erected the public sector employee union system in its place.  Ever since, state employee costs have increased almost as much as the rate of government union donations to politicians.  Gov. Brown has a chance to undo some of this damage, in an “only Nixon could go to China” sort of a way.  In interviews after the election, Brown has broadly hinted that voters showed their opposition to new taxes in their votes for Prop. 26 and against Props. 21 and 24.  The difficulty for Brown will be in finessing the majority’s new power to pass budgets without an single Republican vote with the fact that taxes will be very tough to increase. This in essence gives Democrats all the responsibility for the budget but none of the authority to balance it short of acting like Republicans (cutting spending) and / or irresponsibly releasing 50,000 violent inmates on largely Democrat-voting urban areas.

Of course, there is the possibility that Democrats will move to reopen the historically-late 2010-11 budget, as suggested by Senate President Pro-Tem Darrell Steinberg, and vote to increase spending.  Such an act would accelerate California’s date with insolvency.  In doing this, Democrats would seek to force the hand of Sacramento’s remaining band of legislative Republicans, trying to pin the blame of IOUs and bond defaults squarely on their shoulders unless they vote for a $20 billion tax increase.  This drive-the-car-off-the-cliff blackmail maneuver worked in February 2009 when Republican legislative leaders decided to “responsibly” raise taxes rather than allow California to go broke.

Gov. Brown may be reticent on taxes, knowing that there is little voter appetite for them and perhaps understanding that higher taxes won’t create jobs, but in the area of “green” policy, Brown appears ready to double down on Schwarzenegger’s errors.  A recent L.A. Times Op-Ed by 60s radical and Brown ally Tom Hayden illuminates Brown’s green path.  Hayden lauds California’s coming green era, seeing it as a long-awaited opportunity for centralized government planning to pump billions of dollars into “green” energy while at the same time using it as a mechanism “…to ensure that all Californians benefit from the state’s green energy push.”  Hayden says that this green push must benefit “black and brown” and warns that “the green future cannot be purely white.”  He then links these green jobs for minorities to the prison system, writing that “…it makes far more sense to employ at-risk youth weatherizing homes and installing solar collectors than locking them up in the largest mass incarceration system in the world.”

Given Spain’s utter failure to generate a cornucopia of green jobs – 2.2 old-fashioned, but paying, jobs were destroyed for every “green” job created at the cost of $774,000 per subsidized employee, it’s hard to see how Brown’s green effort will do anything other than serve as just another avenue for wealth redistribution.

The next two years will likely see California mired in recession, increasingly lagging behind the rest of America.  Texas will become the favored destination of hard-working Californians and their jobs-creating capital.  California’s continued economic pain will be compounded by liberal policymakers who never see a problem that government couldn’t make worse.  This will provide an opening for Republicans, but only if they have the moral courage to offer a bold break from the failed Democrat policies.

California remains America’s largest manufacturing state.  The Golden State generates a prodigious amount of new technology.  One of eight Americans call California home.  Should California not reform itself soon, it will remain the misfiring cylinder in America’s economic engine, acting to slow the national recovery.

In politics, nothing lasts forever – including the Democrats’ dominance of California. For California’s sake, and America’s, all Americans should hope California voters catch up with the rest of America in 2012.

A brief perusal of the California Secretary of State’s initiative campaign finance disclosure website shows that some $120 million dollars has been raised by 53 groups supporting or opposing California’s nine November ballot initiatives. By comparison, California’s two major candidates for governor have raised or given to their campaigns $176 million to date, exclusive of independent expenditures and political party spending on both sides.

Initiative spending

What’s common about most of this spending is that it is fairly transparent in that we know the identities of the people, the labor unions and the companies writing the checks. Sure, there are cut-out committees that ship money to each other in an attempt to obfuscate their spending, but, with a spreadsheet and enough patience, a person can figure out who is funding whom.

For instance, you can crack open the disclosure page for the biggest No on Prop. 23 committee and see that they’ve raised more than $23 million. This includes $1 million from Hollywood director James Cameron, $700,000 from America’s richest man, Bill Gates, millions more from rent-seeking Silicon Valley venture capitalists who hope to grow wealthier off the economic pain of average Californians. You can also see that the National Wildlife Federation gave $3 million. Sadly, here is where campaign disclosure gets weak, because the National Wildlife Federation doesn’t have to disclose its donors since contributions on an initiative are considered nonpartisan and thus, not subject to the stringent disclosure rules as money destined to directly influence a partisan campaign.

This oversight is especially egregious when it comes to Prop. 22, a densely written amendment to the California constitution (already the third-largest in the world) that consumes eight pages of fine print to accomplish its purpose: constitutionally lock in redevelopment agency protections to protect them from pressure to reform.

California’s redevelopment agencies are supposed to target so-called “blight.” What they often do instead is use eminent domain to take property from one set of owners and give it to another so as to increase the tax base for a city.

Redevelopment abuse is rampant. It has also resulted in some $100 billion of bonds being issued in California without a vote of the people consuming 12 percent of property tax revenue that’s being diverted from local schools to pay the principal and interest on the development debt.

With so much money and power at stake over the passage of a proposition, it would be nice if the voters and the press could understand who is supporting and opposing the measure. The opposition is easy enough to determine. There is only one committee opposed to Prop. 22. They’ve raised a little over $1 million and their donors are readily seen online.

In distinction, the supporters of Prop. 22 present an opaque picture. Their one committee has raised almost $4 million. Of their 425 contributors, one can see quite a few developers (as one would expect with redevelopment) and bond underwriters and attorneys (debt is big business, after all) – but the largest share of money, $1.67 million, comes from something called the “League of California Cities (Non-Public Funds)” account. The trouble with this account is that we know nothing of where the money originates. The League also gave another roughly half-million dollars for Prop. 22 from their PAC. At least the origins of much of that money is known: mostly trash haulers and other municipal services providers – although I’m sure it was a pure “coincidence” that PG&E donated $150,000 to the League’s political fund on the same day as their deadly San Bruno pipeline explosion.

The League of California Cities is a statewide lobbying group that many California cities pay dues to. As a lawmaker, I’ve tangled with them before, once having one of their lobbyists flat out lie to kill one of my bills (I came back the second year and got my bill to reform local licensing of family daycare centers passed.) After the League killed my bill for a year, I became more curious about where and how the League of Cities got its money to lobby, after all, it’s not like individual mayors and city council members were opening their own wallets to fund expensive Sacramento lobbying operations. This leaves one logical conclusion, the League of Cities mainly uses taxpayer dollars to lobby government – in other words, government lobbying government.

For that reason, I authored AB 1992 in 2008. AB 1992 would have made it abundantly clear that taxpayer funds were not to be used for political purposes. The League of Cities killed the bill in committee. During the hearing on AB 1992, League representatives explained that money for their “Non-Public Funds” account came from things like advertising in their magazine, Western City, as well as conference sponsorships and the like. But, the leaves open the question: who is paying the $1.67 million of freight on the League’s effort to pass Prop. 22?

Restrictions on campaign finance are contrary to our First Amendment free speech rights – that said, we should know who’s paying for the speech. California needs to amend its campaign disclosure laws so we know the origin of the money used to influence the voters in what remains America’s largest and most powerful state. We also need to tighten up the laws governing the ability of government to lobby government using taxpayer dollars.