Yet Another Bad Day for California Haters

That terrible, no-good, rotten, doomed place called California just refuses play its appointed role of conservative whipping boy for all that is wrong with America. The Labor Department is out with a new jobs report and once again California leads the nation, with 25,200 new jobs last month. Over the last year California has added 365,100 jobs, more than the next two states, Texas and New Jersey, combined.

What will the California haters, including Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin make of the news? It will not ruffle them in the least. Once you commit to the politics of fantasy, you can never let facts get in the way.

Reformers Bark Up the Wrong Tree

Joe Mathews, my partner in Crackupery, is going toe-to-toe August 2 in an Olympian debate at the Sacramento Press Club against world champion spinner Dan Schnur. The topic is recent political reform and its effects.

Schnur, a member of that lost tribe known as moderate (dare I say liberal?) Republicans, is a champion of the belief that the rules of the political game need to be changed in California so that the people elected to Legislature are, well, more like him. Okay, that sounds a little crass. It would be oh-so-partisan to rig the rules of the game to favor one particular point of view. So let me be more generous. Reformers believe that California needs political reform to make the Legislature more representative of the views of the people—which would only incidentally result in the election of people more like them.

But that raises a question. Is California state government truly unrepresentative of the voters’ wishes? How does California compare to other states?

The best evidence I’ve found comes from a new paper, “The Democratic Deficit in the States,” by Jeffrey R. Lax and Justin H. Phillips, political scientists at Columbia University.

One task of recent political science research has been to gauge how well state political institutions give citizens what they want. The results have confirmed what most of us suspect from casual observation. State governments don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Governments in states with liberal voters have more liberal policies; governments with conservative voters lean to the right. At least at the basic level of ideological climate, states are democratically responsive.

Lax and Phillips take that research to a deeper level. They look not just at whether the overall trend of state governments’ actions leans in the same direction as average voter ideology. Recognizing that beneath the average lurks a complicated mix of differing views on particular issues, they ask a more difficult question: How often do the particular policies adopted by state governments match the majority voter opinion in the state on that same issue? They compare state government action and majority opinion on 39 specific policy issues across eight different issue areas. And from that data they determine what factors contribute to aligning governments’ decisions with voters’ wishes.

Overall, the news they deliver is less than cheerful. Although state governments are somewhat responsive to voter majorities on particular issues—the bigger the opinion majority on an issue, the more likely state policy will match it—Lax and Phillips found “a rather striking democratic deficit in state policymaking.” Across the nation as a whole, state policies match voter views only 48 percent of the time. “In other words, state governments are on average no more effective in translating opinion majorities into public policy than a simple coin flip,” they write.

At this point, if you are a typical Californian, you are nodding. The approval rating of the Legislature hovers in the low 20s. The last two governors have left office with ratings just as low. Lax and Phillips have just confirmed what we already know, right?

Except for one small thing. According to their data, when it comes to representing, California is Number 1. No other state government does better than California’s at matching policy action to public opinion.

California state policy is congruent with majority opinion 69 percent of the time, well ahead of the national rate. California state government is almost twice as likely as, say, Oregon’s to deliver the policies its voters want. When it fails, it does so moderately. In the cases where California action and opinion don’t match up, policy leans liberal or conservative in almost equal measure, unlike states such as Texas and Florida, which are both less responsive to voter opinion and incongruent mostly to one (the conservative) side.

Why, then, are Californians so unhappy with state government? Part of the explanation may be that they know so little about it, both because they pay notice only when it’s in crisis and because the media cover state government so incompletely and so negatively.

But the larger reason has to do with the state’s ongoing fiscal crisis. Lax and Phillips don’t measure policy congruence on fiscal issues like school spending or tax levels. Yet it is precisely over such issues that state government has foundered in the last decade. Californians’ views on the Legislature and governor have been shaped by budget delays, deep deficits, IOUs, and spending cuts.

And why has state government delivered those unhappy outcomes? It’s not because the people we elected are unrepresentative. It’s because all the super-majoritarian whips and chains in the constitution prevent the majority from doing what the voters send them to Sacramento to do.

If California’s government leads the nation in responsiveness on non-fiscal issues, but gridlocks over money issues because of constitutional constraints, our biggest need isn’t electoral reform. Reformers like Dan Schnur are barking up the wrong tree.

thecaliforniafix

Another Bad Day for California Haters

Apparently the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics hasn’t gotten the word that California is a terrible, no good, rotten place doomed to sink into economic decrepitude. It has reported again that California led the nation in job growth last month and over the last year. As economist Stephen Levy notes, California accounted for half of all the jobs added in the country in May and June.

Let’s be clear. None of this means the economy is fully recovered. An unemployment rate of 10.7 percent statewide is reason to cheer only because the rate was so much higher two years ago. California, like the rest of the nation and the world, still suffers from the fallout from the collapse of the housing bubble, the resulting recession and budget crisis, and huge losses of jobs in construction, government, and education. California, like everyone else, is being held back by the political paralysis of decision makers in the Federal Reserve and Congress. There’s lot of work to do.

But what the numbers do show is that the California haters are full of hooey, and always have been.

As always, the numbers show that there is no such thing as a “California economy.” What people call the California economy is an umbrella term for a collection of regional economies, each with its own mix of industries.

Under the California umbrella fall both the San Joaquin Valley, with its deep poverty and low-wage businesses, and Silicon Valley, with booming companies like Apple and Facebook. The differences in economic performance between regions in California are far larger than the differences between California and the nation as a whole. The jobless rates in the San Joaquin Valley regions are the highest in the nation; the rates in San Francisco, San Jose, and the central coast are now lower than in New York City, Miami, Atlanta, and Chicago, and are falling faster.

If there is something uniquely debilitating about California, as the California haters keep telling us, apparently it’s not strong enough to keep the state’s most vibrant regions from outperforming some of the world’s best cities.

No California Dreaming for Jerry→

California Common Sense has launched a new website, PolicyNook, as a platform for discussion of California’s big issues. My initial contribution discusses the paradoxes of Jerry Brown.

Cops Versus the Schools

In an excellent analysis over at EdSource, Robert Manwaring, a veteran California school policy wonk, asks a deceptively simple question: “If K-12 matters most, why doesn’t state budget reflect this?” Unfortunately, as newspaper folk put it, he buries the lede.

Having been guilty of the same crime here in the past, let me remedy that error for both of us:

California is 47th in school spending because cops, fire fighters, and prison guards have sucked up all the money.

California elected officials say that schools are their highest priority. So do the voters in polls. But that’s not how they act.

And until, as Joe Mathews nicely puts it, “you walk into a police station, and all the cops at the desks are 65,” all that political talk about schools being our highest priority is just hot air.

High-speed rail: A green light for Molly Munger

The morning after the California Senate approved funding for high-speed rail, the Sacramento Bee carried a front-page photo of Senate president Darrell Steinberg giving a double fist pump of victory. As glad as Steinberg appeared to be, though, it’s hard to imagine that Molly Munger, the Pasadena civil rights attorney, wasn’t even happier. By approving high-speed rail, legislative Democrats and Jerry Brown have just given away their best argument against her school-funding measure on the November ballot.

To understand why, you have to get beyond the media’s careless habit of lumping Munger’s proposal with Jerry Brown’s rival budget measure as competing “tax measures.”

Yes, both measures do temporarily raise taxes — Brown’s on everyone, Munger’s on households in the upper half of incomes, both with the heaviest increase put on the very wealthy. But the measures differ sharply in purpose and aspiration.

Brown’s measure is about eating your spinach. It raises taxes temporarily in the hopes of stabilizing the budget at the current austerity levels of state spending. It aims at keeping things from getting worse.

Munger’s measure, on the other hand, injects only a part of the revenue it raises into Sacramento — to help pay down debt and relieve some of the pressure of interest payments on the state budget. Mostly it aims to work a revolution in school funding for the purpose of closing the achievement and opportunity gap that is California’s most pressing challenge.

Munger’s measure would route the new money around state and district bureaucracies, keeping it off the bargaining table, and give it directly to schools, where parents would be given a larger role in deciding how to spend it to benefit their own children. Munger is inviting California, after years of austerity and muddling, to think big.

For months Brown and his union allies have been bashing Munger for irresponsibility. California needed to put first things first, they said. New tax dollars should go to putting the state’s budget house in order, not tackling problems in big and bold ways. Munger’s measure came at the wrong time, they charged, threatening confusion and the defeat of Brown’s more responsible approach.

And now, after the high-speed rail vote, Californians understand they didn’t mean a word of it.

By any reasonable reckoning, the high-speed rail plan approved by the Legislature is not ready for prime time. As both the Legislative Analyst and independent observers have pointed out, the state doesn’t have a clue about how to finance the project. High-speed rail, which will raise greenhouse gas emissions over the next several decades, will compete for funding with the urban transit projects of greater economic and environmental value that California so badly needs to deal both with congestion and its climate goals. It tells you all you need to know about the viability of the plan that the senators most knowledgeable about high speed rail (and among its biggest boosters for years) voted against it.

But reasonable reckoning did not win out. Nor did Brown’s previous call for “a modicum of stoicism.” What carried the day, at least rhetorically, was the injunction to think big.

“I think what we did today,” Steinberg declaimed, “is going to be seen over many years, and many decades, as a turning point in California, a time when we decided to say ’yes’ to hope, ’yes’ to progress, ’yes’ to the future.”

If California can put aside caution and budget restraint to pursue a big and expensive frill like high-speed rail, can there be any doubt about the message the state’s leaders are implicitly sending when it comes to dealing with schools, the state’s (and voters’) highest priority, and to Munger’s call to revitalize them?

To the future! they are saying. Go, Molly, go.

Round 2: What Are We Waiting For?

The June 5 test of California’s reformy new election system, as Joe Mathews points out, didn’t live up to the hype. There’s more to write about it in the future, after all the results come in. But a couple of stray thoughts.

First, let’s settle on a name to call the thing, one that accurately conveys to voters what they are doing.

“Please, do not call it a primary, because it isn’t,” writes Matthew S. Shugart, the UC San Diego political scientist and leading scholar of electoral systems. “In a primary, a political party permits voters to select its candidate for the general election.” But in California’s new system, Big Government now prohibits parties from presenting their nominees to voters in the general election, as they have throughout American history.

So if it’s not a primary, what is it? When I looked at my ballot (image below), one name jumped instantly to mind:

Clusterfuck.

But that name wouldn’t be adopted by the media, for obvious reasons, and Jon Stewart and his Daily Show crew probably hold the trademark.

So we are stuck with something more prosaic. Since the system is a two-round election, with the first round narrowing the field to two candidates to compete in a majority runoff, it makes sense to call the first round the general election, since it is the moment when voters have the most choice, and the second round the runoff. Millions of California voters will be surprised come November to discover that they have only limited party choices—no minor party candidates, and in many legislative and congressional districts, only candidates from one of the major parties. The big choices, they will find, have been made in June, in the low-turnout first round.

Unless the goal of the reformers is narrowing the effective choices of the electorate, it behooves them to campaign for having the first round of California’s system be called the general election, and its date relocated to November, the traditional date for presidential elections, with the runoff to follow soon after.

Since the California system bears some resemblance to the French system of having a majority runoff (although France, being more realistic about the essential role of parties in the life of a democracy, grant them a larger role), it’s instructive to note that France will conduct the runoff in elections for the National Assembly on Sunday, June 17, one week after first round was held.

Not so in California. We will have to wait a crazy 154 days between the June 5 general election first round and the runoff. Voter attention and knowledge about the candidates will wane, and will have to be refreshed with a huge new infusion of campaign cash collected from boodlers, bundlers, and PACs. If the French can figure out how to conduct elections in back-to-back weeks, sparing their democracy a deluge of fund-raising and endless campaigning, why can't we?

Politics is Hard

If it’s not one damn thing, it’s another. Second-day analysis of the June 5 jungle primary from Rough and Tumble:

Take your pick.

How to Fix Prop 29

Proposition 29, the tobacco tax measure on the June 5 ballot, makes for a hard choice. I have no problem with raising tobacco taxes. California needs the revenue, and higher tobacco taxes would save lives by discouraging smoking. But using the new revenue for cancer research makes no sense at all. America already spends billions on that research, and California has higher priorities.

What to do? Here is where the Legislature could help us out, and at the same time show a bit bipartisanship.

Lawmakers may disagree about taxes, but I doubt a single member of the Assembly or the Senate believes that cancer research is a higher priority than funding schools and colleges. After all, what is the sense of funding cancer research in a state where you can't even educate children about science or produce the next generation of scientists?

So let the Legislature put a new measure on the November ballot. Call it the Tobacco Tax Recovery and Education Restoration Act of 2012. Let it provide for shifting all of the tobacco taxes enacted in the three initiatives of the last several decades—Props 88, 10, and 29—to the general fund. Let it state the Legislature’s intent to use the money to restore funding for schools and colleges cut over the last several years.

Such a measure would have several important effects.

First, it would let voters have the choice Prop 29 doesn’t provide: of raising tobacco taxes but sending the money to their most important priority.

Second, it would send a cautionary message to potential sponsors of ballot-box budgeting initiatives. It would tell them that they cannot loot the California revenue base with impunity, that the Legislature will fight back to assure the voters have a choice about how new revenues should be used. That’s a message that should appeal to Republicans and Democrats alike.

Radio Whisperer

For people within radio listening distance of San Jose, I’ll be talking about California’s various crises on Friday night, May 4, 7:00 p.m., as Russell Hancock, President and CEO of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, interviews me on Inside Silicon Valley on KLIV 1590. The show repeats at noon on Sunday, May 6.

Update on 2012-05-07 19:31 by Mark Paul

The interview is now available as a podcast at Joint Venture Silicon Valley’s website.

Talking Head

I’ll be joining David Watts Barton on Capital Public Radio’s Insight, Wednesday, February 29 at 10:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m, 90.9 FM on the Sacramento area radio dial, to talk about the arena deal and Sacramento’s fiscal crisis.

UPDATE: They switched hosts on the show; Beth Ruyak took the microphone (you can hear the podcast here). And if we needed any evidence of the stakes as I explained them, take a look at what I ran across in the neighborhood on the way home.

The police wouldn’t come

The owner lost a couple of thousand worth of tools and some new, uninstalled appliances. When he reported the crime, the police told him it’s policy not to investigate unless guns or explosives were stolen. And remember, this is before a financially strapped city spends $250 million to subsidize the NBA.