Category: initiative, referendum, and recall

Categories
Accountability initiative, referendum, and recall

Ionosphere Laughter

Government is a business — a big business, employing more people than any other. It dominates by regulating, restricting, taxing and subsidizing.

Government is also “too big to fail,” which is why, increasingly, politicians and public employee union bosses have ascended to the top of the heap of a growing army of competing lesser groups, always asking — no, demanding — more money.

This growing sector depends not on the decisions of dispersed customers and donors and investors, but on decisions concentrated in Washington, and, to a lesser extent, the state capital . . . and city hall.

The federal boys splurge far over their revenues — by the trillions, beyond the Ionosphere — courtesy of foreign creditors and the printing press. Governments at the state and local level tend to be more restrained, existing nearly on the same level as the rest of society, in a sort of Stratosphere (if not Troposphere) of finance.

Indeed, they are constitutionally forced to balance budgets, can be limited in their power to tax, and are not allowed to print money. Often, they must even ask voters for permission to borrow.

Add on the initiative and referendum, and we can gain some control over governments closest to home.

Not so at the federal level, where often the only effective response to government corruption and excess is a sort of recycling program by late-night comedians.

This makes our laughter at national politicians a tad bittersweet. Or just bitter.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

Darn Right, Guys

Initiative rights are under nonstop assault from the political class.

Fortunately, most voters know the value of being able to end-run or reverse the bad decisions of lawmakers. And just a few clear-thinking defenders of initiative rights are enough to expose the murky evasions of the politicians and their pals.

One recent example is a Boston Globe column by Jeff Jacoby entitled “Something stinks, but it isn’t voters.” Jacob details an attack on initiative rights by the Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court, Ronald George. I’ve already commented on Georgie’s jumbled judgment, but let me quote Jeff’s summary of how such critics think. He observes that these folk simultaneously “believe that citizens are too dumb to judge the merits of legislation — and that such decisions are therefore best left to the lawmakers they apparently weren’t too dumb to elect.”

Lawmakers are especially annoyed by any citizen-imposed restraint on their ability to tax and spend the electorate into the poorhouse. Like California’s Proposition 13. In another fine column, Jon Coupal of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association recalls that at the time, “people were losing their homes to double-digit annual tax increases.”

Prop 13 gave folks a way to keep what was theirs. Despite the greedy grabbing of the political class. Who’d rather, you know, just have a free hand.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

Dysfunctional Judgment

The Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court recently declared the state’s government “dysfunctional.”

But Judge Ronald George didn’t bother to tell this to his employers, the people of California. Instead, the judge delivered his speech all the way across the continent, in Massachusetts, at his induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Judge George specifically blames Golden State voters as chief culprits in California’s severe budget woes. While admitting that legislators lack the “political will” to make the tough spending cuts or tax hikes that he believes necessary, George nonetheless says there may have to be “some fundamental reform of the voter Initiative process.”

What the judge doesn’t tell his earnest East Coast audience is that less than 10 percent of amendments to the California constitution come through initiatives.

The voters, he claims, are over-influenced by special interests. But he neglects to mention that the much-loved, much-hated tax-cutting Proposition 13 — and Prop 140, the measure placing term limits on legislators — were both heavily outspent by the state’s most powerful lobbies. Both nevertheless prevailed at the ballot box.

Lastly, his Honor bellyaches that he and fellow jurists are “called upon to resolve legal challenges to voter Initiatives” and sometimes “incur the displeasure of the voting public.”

My heart bleeds for them, of course, but isn’t adjudicating disputes sort of expected of judges?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall tax policy

Money, Money, Money

Money. Politicians like to spend it. People — especially special interests — like to get it. And taxpayers really don’t much like having to pay for all that spending.

So our representatives try to procrastinate their balancing of spending and revenue. How? With debt. Hence our yearly unbalanced budgets.

At the federal level, deficits soar. Many states, however, have constitutional spending limitations and balanced budget requirements. What difference do such limits make?

Well, Professor Barry Poulson, of the Independence Institute, points out that a few years before Colorado passed the Taxpayer Bill of Rights (or TABOR), limiting state spending growth to the increase in population plus inflation, California’s legislature was abandoning the GANN Amendment, a similar limit.

Says Poulson, “Over the period since TABOR was passed, Colorado has experienced one of the highest rates of economic growth in the nation, while California has experienced retardation in economic growth.”

Two states — Maine and Washington — have initiatives on their ballot this November that are very similar to Colorado’s TABOR. The special interest opponents to these measures, most notably government employee unions, have raised millions more than supporters. Soon voters will be pummeled with ads claiming that the sky will fall if there is any limit on state spending growth.

Of course, the fiscal sky has already fallen. Voters should support these measures as the best way to pick up the pieces.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

A Friend in Pennsylvania

“Slow, corrupt and expensive is no way to run a state government.” That’s what Pittsburgh Post Gazette columnist Brian O’Neill wrote recently about the Pennsylvania Legislature.

The state budget remains unset three months past deadline. O’Neill bemoaned that for the seventh consecutive year “America’s Largest Full-Time State Legislature has been unable to perform its principal task on time.”

What a mess! What to do?

O’Neill suggests cutting the 253-member legislature down to 201. He points out that this 20 percent cut would translate to savings of $60 million dollars or more a year.

Sounds good: Fewer politicians, less cost. But reducing the number of legislators won’t solve the problem. It may make it worse.

A Pennsylvania senator represents 250,000 citizens, a representative only 61,000. Compare that to California, where a state senator represents more than 900,000 people and a representative 460,000. And California’s budget is a bigger mess.

The math is simple: A single citizen’s voice is more pronounced to a Pennsylvania state legislator. The cost to challenge an incumbent is far less, there, as well.

So don’t cut the size of the legislature. But by all means cut the cost.

The problem Pennsylvanians have in reforming their state is that — shockingly — self-interested politicians are resistant to reform, and the voters lack an initiative process to do the job themselves.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall too much government

Pension Tsunami

A humungous national debt. Growing state federal government budget deficits. Social Security and Medicare, running out of funds. All very frightening. But look out: The costs of public employee pensions are walloping city and state budgets — pushing a number of California cities into bankruptcy.

Though the stock market tumble hasn’t helped, the basic problem lies squarely with politicians. They like to increase future benefits to gain political support from public employee unions; they then underfund their lavish promises, the better to hide the fiscal reality from today’s taxpayers.

Politicians keep running from the problem, but a website called PensionTsunami.com won’t let them hide. The site, run by Californian Jack Dean, offers a steady stream of horror stories:

  • A new report calls the Kansas Public Employee Retirement System “bankrupt.”
  • A Rye, New York, city manager makes $198,000 a year while still collecting a pension for the same job.
  • The chief actuary for the California Public Employees Retirement System admits that current pension costs are “unsustainable.”

All across the country, politicians consistently fail to act. Californians are lucky: They have the voter initiative. The California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility, a group whose board includes Mr. Dean, is planning a statewide initiative to prevent their approaching tsunami.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ballot access general freedom initiative, referendum, and recall

Petition Police

It’s a dangerous world. You never know when someone may be out there . . . petitioning their government?

In the past few months, citizens circulating petitions for an anti-tax referendum have hit Oregon streets. And with those citizens trailed a team of investigators. The Secretary of State had hired them, paying with funds provided courtesy of state legislators — the same politicians who passed the tax increases petitioners are seeking to block.

The surveillance proved almost as amusing as it is frightening. For four-fifths of the time investigators put in — at $40 to $70 an hour — they couldn’t even locate petition circulators to commence their stakeouts.

One government agent secretly infiltrated a training seminar held by Americans for Prosperity. The covert op filed this shocking report: “The training was very thorough and was consistent with the training provided by the Elections Division.”

In the end, investigators found no serious wrongdoing — none of the fraudulent activity that might justify secretive investigations of citizens who just happen to oppose the legislators’ policies.

Oregon politicians claim such tactics are necessary to “to protect the integrity of our electoral system.” But they’ve completely lost touch with basic democratic principles. Without any evidence a crime has been committed, citizens petitioning their government or engaging in other political pursuits should not be subjected to secret witch-hunts.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall insider corruption tax policy

Ballot Box News

With all that’s going on in Washington, don’t forget: There’s a lot happening on state and local ballots. Consider these recent newsline items from Ballot Box News:

Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Alvarez is under fire for giving big-ticket raises to favored insiders while calling for steep budget cuts. A day after a poll found that 58 percent of registered voters favor the recall of Alvarez, another local mayor filed a lawsuit to undo controversial requirements that make it much more difficult to recall sitting politicians.

There’s a link to the rest of the story at the Miami Herald

.Republican lawmakers are lining up against a citizen initiative effort to impose stringent ethics guidelines on the Utah Legislature. Complained the state senate’s majority leader, “If there are people out there who have political intentions they will use this as a club time and time again.”

Uh, sir, that would be the idea. Without people clubbing politicians on ethics, how can we root out corruption in politics? Can we trust you to do it, based on your good word as an incumbent?

Full story in The Salt Lake Tribune.

We’re told California’s cash-strapped state government would be virtually wallowing in piles of cash if a proposed wealth tax makes it to the ballot. And is approved by voters. And survives legal challenge. I don’t support it. Tax-the-rich schemes are unjust, and don’t work.

But I do support BallotBoxNews.com, where you can find out more about this proposed tax, and many other hot-button issues.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

Righteous Recalls

According to Ballotpedia.org, a wiki-based website created by the Citizens in Charge Foundation to track ballot initiatives, referendums and recalls, this year voters have already launched more than twice as many efforts to recall public officials than occurred all of last year.

In Flint, Michigan, voters were set to recall the mayor for corruption, mismanagement and more. Ten days before the vote, the mayor resigned.

In Tuolumne County, California, voters removed an entire school board that failed to account for $16 million in bond revenue.

After failed attempts to remove mayors in Toledo and Akron, Ohio, the Akron city council is now trying to dramatically increase the petition signatures needed to start a recall.

In Kimberly, Idaho, a campaign to recall the mayor and two city councilors for jacking up utility rates fell short of the needed voter signatures. But now the police are investigating whether town officials illegally obstructed the effort.

In Cincinnati, no process yet exists for recalling officials, so the local NAACP is poised to launch a petition drive to establish one. County Republican leaders are “studying” the issue. The county’s Democratic Party chairman opposes recall, saying, “I’d hate to see a situation where the mayor could be recalled any time he made a controversial decision.”

That’s a straw man. Recalls have been used very rarely. Besides, none of our political problems stem from voters demanding too much of politicians.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall tax policy

Pity the Politicians?

In tough times, who get hit hardest? According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “[a]t least 39 states have imposed cuts that hurt vulnerable residents.”

Why? Well, states have been spending at increasing rates for years now. And then came the slump, with less income — and fewer sales — to tax. So of course state revenues plummet.

And politicians must force themselves to do the thing they hate most: Cut.

But, as Steve Chapman argues in his column, “A Hole They Dug for Themselves,” simply by increasing spending no more than the rate of inflation, they would have avoided this. Chapman insists, “governors and legislators might have prepared for drought.”

One thing Chapman doesn’t say is that this spending limit idea has been on many states’ tables for some time. It’s often called TABOR, or the Taxpayer Bill of Rights. Such measures constitutionally limit spending to the rate of inflation plus the rate of population increase. Only voters can break this spending cap.

But politicians hate such measures, oppose them for all they are worth.

So, we may pity the poor, but let’s not shed one drop of sorrow for the politicians.

And, if you live in Maine or Washington state, vote for the TABOR-like initiatives that will be on the ballot this November. Help yourself, help the poor — by forcing politicians to spend as if things could change and tomorrow matters.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.