California Rule Does Not Protect “Airtime”

/by

Earlier this week the California Supreme Court ruled in the case CalFire vs CalPERS. The case challenged one of the provisions of California’s 2014 pension reform legislation (PEPRA) which had eliminated the purchase of “Airtime.”

This was the practice whereby retiring public employees could purchase “service credits” that would lengthen the number of years they worked, which would increase the amount of their pensions, even though they hadn’t actually worked those additional years. While the amount these retirees would pay was always estimated to cover how much they’d eventually get back, with interest, in their pensions, in practice these estimates were always too low.

The plaintiffs in the case argued that airtime was protected by the “California Rule,” which, the argued, prevents pension benefits from being reduced unless some other benefit of equal value is offered in return. But the court found that the California Rule wasn’t applicable in this case, setting an interesting precedent for other pending cases.

According to attorney and pension law expert Jonathan Holtzman, this ruling is a breakthrough.

“This is the first case in which, ever, where the court has attempted to define a principled basis for vesting doctrine – to analyze in a rigorous manner the legal basis of the vesting doctrine,” Holtzman said, “Although it does not resolve the issue, the case leaves wide open the question whether vesting protects prospective benefits of current employees.  It takes a narrow view of what constitutes a pension benefit. The Unions’ position has been that every part of the pension benefit is vested.  It is very clear [from this ruling] that is not valid.

Holtzman went on to explain that this ruling will make it harder to argue that many retirement benefits are protected by the California Rule.

“The court recognizes that the only potential basis for a benefit that does not constitute deferred compensation to become vested is as a matter of contract.  And the court points out in clear terms that there is a presumption against benefits created by statute from becoming vested.  The Court also strengthens the requirement that the legislative intention to “vest” a benefit must be unmistakable. They are saying you have to have explicit legislative intent that a benefit is contractual before you can say it is subject to the California Rule.”

“Vesting is always an implied question. The court will ask ‘did you unambiguously intend that the benefit would last forever?’ The promise that a benefit will last forever doesn’t have to explicit, but it does have to be ‘unambiguously intended.’ That is a tough standard for any benefit to meet.”

There are several pension related cases working their way up through California’s courts. The next big one is the Alameda County Deputy Sheriffs’ Assn. v. Alameda County Employees’ Retirement Assn. But in the wake of the ruling in CalFire vs CalPERS, it is possible the California Supreme Court will throw this one back down to the appellate court. Again, from Jonathan Holtzman: “After you get a major decision like this it is not unusual for the court to remand those cases to give the courts of appeal another shot at those cases in light of the decision.”

The Alameda case is similar to the CalFire case in that it is a challenge brought by unions representing public employees affected by the PEPRA legislation. In this case, what is at issue is not purchases of airtime, but the practice known as pension spiking, whereby various forms of ancillary pay are included in determining an employee’s final compensation. Just as airtime increases the years worked, which increases a pension, spiking increases the final pay, which also increases a pension. But it is likely that the CalFire ruling strengthens the possibility that spiking will not be considered subject to the California Rule, and therefore having the California Supreme Court consider this case would be redundant.

At this point, there is no active case, anywhere in California, that concerns the third and biggest variable affecting pensions, the “multiplier.” When pensions are calculated at the end of a public employee’s career, the formula used goes like this: Years worked, times final salary, times the “multiplier.”

The multiplier is a percent, always in the low single digits, that represents the amount of pension that is earned for each year of work. For example, if someone had worked 10 years, had a final salary of $100K, and a multiplier of 2.0 percent, upon becoming eligible for retirement, their pension would be $20K. If their multiplier were 3.0 percent, their pension would be $30K.

As a matter of historical fact, the significance of the multiplier was demonstrated in a financially visceral manner in the years between 1999 and 2005. During this six year period, pension multipliers were raised across virtually all government agencies in California. It started during the boom of 1999, then once the market crashed, it continued anyway because it wouldn’t be fair to deny one agency the perk that had been awarded to some other agency. The impact was a financial catastrophe in slow motion, still unfolding.

Public safety employees, for example, had their multiplier raised from 2 percent to three percent. Overnight, the amounts of their future pensions increased by 50 percent. And in an act that is astonishing for many reasons, one of which is its absolute indifference to financial caution, this increase to the multiplier was awarded retroactively. If you don’t know about this, or don’t yet appreciate what it meant, pay close attention.

Prior to the pension benefit perks of 1999-2005, if you worked for 30 years in public safety, you would earn a pension equivalent to 30 (years) times your final salary, times a 2 percent multiplier. One would expect that if that multiplier were raised, it would be raised for work from now on. That is, if you’d worked for 15 years through 1999, then worked another 15 years from 2000 through 2014, your pension would now be calculated as follows: 15 years times final salary times 2 percent, plus, 15 years times final salary times 3 percent. That would be a financially prudent way to increase a benefit. But the experts at CalPERS and the other pension funds, plus the union leaders they goaded into demanding all this, were not financially prudent.

Instead they changed everything affected by the multiplier, forward and backward in time. If you retired in 1998 after a 30 year career, you’d get a pension equal to 30 times final salary times 2 percent. If you retired in 1999 after a 30 year career, you’d get a pension equal to 30 times final salary times 3 percent. The collective impact of this change, because it was retroactive, is far more than 50 percent. It is possibly the biggest single factor as to why pension contributions have become an unaffordable burden on cities, counties, the state, and the taxpayers who support all of it.

The other reason that the retroactive pension increases of 1999-2005 are astonishing – and a moral outrage – brings us back to pension reform efforts today. To restore solvency to public sector pensions without raising taxes and cutting services, the multiplier has to be reduced. It is important and helpful to eliminate purchases of airtime that artificially increase years worked. It is also helpful to eliminate pension spiking that artificially increases pension eligible final compensation. But without lowering the multiplier, we can’t get there. Here’s the moral outrage: Nobody wants to reduce the pension multiplier retroactively. They only want to reduce it for future work. But even that supposedly violates the California Rule.

How is it right, that the single biggest determinant of how much a pension will cost, the multiplier, was permitted to be boosted retroactively back when financial fantasy manifested itself in the form of an internet stock bubble, but now that financial reality has struck, it is impermissible to lower it, and only prospectively? The reason is the California Rule. Or is it?

It is possible, and only perhaps a stretch, to argue that even the multiplier is not a core benefit destined to last forever. It can be argued that raising the pension multiplier in legislation does not mean it cannot be lowered in the future unless it is, at the least, “unambiguously implied,” in the text of that legislation. One might therefore argue that even the multiplier is not subject to the California Rule.

These are the questions that have been opened up by the CalFire vs CalPERS ruling. At first glance, it appeared the court sidestepped the question of the California Rule. But they created a standard for invoking the California Rule that is likely to mean most of the current court challenges to PEPRA will probably be rejected. And they guarantee that if and when a case truly does challenge the California Rule, it will not be an incremental reform that is at stake.

The larger question at this point, is where would such a transformative reform come from? Here in California, the alliance between the pension bankers and the government unions is more powerful than ever.

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Policy Center.

 *   *   *

America’s High Frontier

/by

On May 25, 1961, in a speech before Congress, President John F. Kennedy announced the goal of sending an American to the moon and back before the end of the decade. Eight years, one month, and twenty-five days later, on July 20, 1969, American astronaut Neal Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface, joined a few moments later by Buzz Aldrin.

To fully appreciate how much the Americans accomplished in just over eight years, consider the situation in mid-1961. On April 12th, the Russians had embarrassed the U.S. by blasting cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into space. And while American astronaut Alan Shepard followed Gagarin into space a few weeks later on May 5th, his mission was only a 15 minute suborbital flight. Gagarin’s flight lasted 108 minutes and completed a full orbit around the planet. We were way behind.

Moreover, compared to what eventually became the Apollo lunar spacecraft, these early forays into space were extremely primitive. Basically the entire Mercury program, designed to achieve spaceflight in low earth orbit while keeping an astronaut on board, consisted of putting an aerodynamic pressure vessel atop a souped-up intercontinental ballistic missile. By contrast, the many modules and maneuvers required to safely deliver three astronauts to the moon and back, was orders of magnitude more complex. Yet America made all that progress in just over eight years.

Back in 1969, if you told anyone that nobody would return to the moon for another fifty years, they would have laughed. The nation had high expectations for the high frontier. But while progress in manned spaceflight since Apollo has been impressive, it’s been slow. Skylab was launched, using left over Apollo boosters, in 1973, tumbling back to earth in 1979. In 1981, the first of five space shuttles were launched. After 135 missions, including two ending in catastrophe, the last shuttle flight took place in 2011. Since 1998 the U.S. has been a partner in the International Space Station, but for the last eight years our astronauts have been getting there and back on Russian rockets.

The Case for Aggressive Spending on Space Development

Back in the days of the Apollo program, there was no budget request that was denied. It was a top priority of the federal government, and through setbacks including the deadly capsule fire during a test in 1967 that killed three astronauts, the spending never slackened and the commitment never wavered. Was it worth it?

By nearly all accounts, yes. To build a craft capable of leaving earth, delivering humans to the moon, then getting them home again, within eight years, is probably the greatest human engineering achievement of all time. An excellent summary of the most significant spin-offs coming out of the Apollo program is a Computer World article from 2009, which focuses on the IT advances. We have the Apollo project to thank for the integrated circuit, dramatic advances in rocketry, “remarkable discoveries in civil, electrical, aeronautical and engineering science,” complex software, lightweight and incredibly durable composite materials, and, for a few specifics – everything from CAT scanners to liquid cooled garments to freeze dried food.

Needless to say, all these innovations would have eventually been made, with or without Apollo. But they would have been made years later, and quite likely by some other nation. The technological spin-offs that would accrue to a new 21st century national endeavor pursued with the fervor of the Apollo program would help America immeasurably in its possibly existential race to stay technologically ahead of powerful rising nations, China in particular.

The Military Urgency of Space Development

In 1984, during the heyday of President Reagan’s promotion of a Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”), James Oberg, writing for Omni Magazine, published an article entitled “Pearl Harbor in Space.” He explained how a single enemy spacecraft, launched from earth around the moon to slingshot back to earth in order to achieve a retrograde orbit (counter to earth’s rotation), could in a few days destroy every geosynchronous satellite.

A killer satellite in a retrograde orbit, would circle towards what are now hundreds of geosynchronous satellites stationed at 22,300 miles above the earth – which is the only orbital altitude at which they remain positioned perfectly stationary, moving at the same exact orbital speed as the earth – like “a car hurtling the wrong way on a superhighway.” Because the cross section of the geosynchronous great circle is only about 100 kilometers, a killer satellite in retrograde orbit could easily identify and destroy everything in its path, one by one, using optical or radar guided missiles, or maneuverable kinetic energy “brilliant pebbles,” or a laser, or a particle beam, or an electromagnetic pulse. Within days, communications across the planet would be crippled.

This is just one vulnerability that national space defense has to counter. China and Russia have already tested ground based and airplane hosted weapons to take out America’s other layer of space based communications and surveillance satellites in low earth orbit. The impact of one major EMP burst over the North American continent would likely fry what remained of land based communications assets. In all three instances, space based military defense is the only countermeasure.

A recent American Greatness article by Angelo Codevilla further explains the urgency of creating an American Space Force. He mentions protecting our satellites, and for defense against ballistic missiles. He correctly emphasizes that space is the new high ground in warfare, and that “we are not seeking it even as China and Russia reach for it.”

Codevilla also notes that “for a variety of tactical reasons, their needs for satellite protection are not as great as ours.” One of these tactical reasons bears note: the U.S. is a maritime power. Our vital national interests are served by maintaining open sea lanes and air traffic corridors across the planet. Russia and China, by contrast, are land based powers, between them controlling most of the Asian continent, with interior land lines for control and logistics.

Establishing military supremacy in space should be an explicit goal of the United States, but this effort, which has hopefully been ongoing for decades via classified programs, can be furthered by a new wave of exploration and commercialization.

Other Reasons for Space Development

Where NASA has faltered, private concerns have stepped up. Entrepreneurial billionaires are racing to bring tourism and commercial development into outer space. Richard Branson has founded Virgin Galactic, building a spaceport in New Mexico and expecting to operate private space tourism flights “within the next few years.” Jeff Bezos has founded Blue Origin, for purposes of space tourism as well as build rockets to launch cargo into orbit. Most ambitious of all, Elon Musk has founded SpaceX, which after operating for several years has just successfully tested the Falcon Heavy, capable of launching 63,800 kilograms into low earth orbit. The Falcon Heavy’s payload capacity is more than twice that of any active rocket, yet is less than half what the Apollo Saturn V could lift into orbit, 140,000 kilograms. While today’s rockets are mostly reusable and far more sophisticated, when it comes to raw lifting capacity, we still have a long way to go, just to get to where we were.

Space tourism, space exploration, and space colonization are reason enough for America to expand operations in space, but there’s much more. With the cost to place a kilogram into low earth orbit down to $5,000, compared to $30,000/kg during the Space Shuttle era, many types of zero gravity manufacturing are being tested. Among the mind-boggling new possibilities are using 3D cellular printers to build replacement human hearts and other organs. Another zero gravity innovation is cost-effective production of exotic fiber optic cable that is extremely difficult to manufacture on earth. In zero-gravity environments gallium-arsenide semiconductors can be built, or grown, in layers one atom thick, with no distortions, yielding solar power at efficiencies that could be as high as 60 percent. Zero-gravity combined with high temperature smelting available on demand using solar thermal collectors makes high-quality metallurgy feasible in outer space.

It may also be possible to generate solar electricity in orbit and beam the power to receivers on earth, potentially delivering inexhaustible clean energy. With the advances in robotics and AI, along with steadily decreasing costs to deliver payloads into orbit, it is likely that by the end of this century an entire self-sustaining economy will be in space, much of it automated, mining the moon and asteroids for materials, and constructing manufacturing facilities and power stations to create great wealth.

The Synergies of Commercial and Military Initiatives in Space

The high ground of space will eventually render most conventional military assets obsolete. Weaponized satellites in orbits with perigees as low as 125 miles will be able to release swarms of robotic, intelligent drones, or brilliant pebbles, or fire lasers or particle beams. Ships, planes, and land based weapons systems including missiles, will be no match for a military that controls space.

Not only will military assets in space protect national interests on earth, but they will be increasingly necessary to protect national interests in space. The commercialization of space to the point where it becomes an economic engine of vital benefit to the earth-bound economy is not a question of if, but when. It could happen within a few decades.

America needs a bold vision for space that incorporates exploration, industrialization, and militarization. The cross-pollination of technologies developed in each of these three areas will catalyze development in the others. The technological spin-offs will more than rival those of the Apollo project. Satellite solar power stations. Orbiting industrial parks. A moon base. A Mars expedition. And a Space Force. We need to do it all, ASAP.

Or someone else will.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

 *   *   *

How to Make California’s Government Agencies Far More Transparent

/by

Last year, California’s state Senate and Assembly passed 1,217 pieces of legislation. Governor Brown signed 1,016 of them into law, and most took effect January 1st. Included were predictable acts of liberal zealotry – sanctuary for the undocumented, gender equity on corporate boards, gun control, “me-too” inspired laws, a mandate to move California to 100% “clean” energy by 2045, laws to protect government unions, reduce mandatory criminal punishment, and, of course, a ban on plastic straws.

To be fair, most of these issues aren’t black and white. But what’s notable is a complete lack of legislation that might reflect some kind of ideological balance. Where were the laws to rebuild our highways, fast-track the construction of the Sites Reservoir, open land for housing development, license new nuclear power plants, or permit drilling for natural gas? As Tony Soprano would say, “fuggedaboutit!”

There’s one law pending in this year’s legislative session, however, that could do a world of good. It’s probably the best new proposed law that nobody’s ever heard of. It’s utterly bipartisan, and wouldn’t cost much at all to implement.

That law is SB 598, the Open Financial Statements Act, sponsored by Senator Moorlach. It’s fitting that Senator Moorlach is the author of this bill, because Senator Moorlach is the only certified public accountant serving in a state legislature that, in general, is quite likely the most financially illiterate group of state legislators in America.

This isn’t idle speculation. An recent analysis by the California Policy Center analyzed the 2019-2020 class of senators and assemblymen in California’s state legislature, examining each legislator’s background. It found that 75 percent of the Democratic legislators had no experience in private business. Since the Democrats control over 75 percent of the seats in California’s legislature, that means that as a collective body, these legislators do not really understand what it takes to run a business – or read a financial statement.

This economic idiocy is evident in the laws California’s legislature has passed, or is contemplating. Apart from their ideological uniformity, some of them have epic financial repercussions. They approved retroactive pension benefit increases during a stock market bubble, unaware of the slow motion catastrophe they unleashed as markets returned to reality. They approved high-speed rail, blithe to the project’s failure to pass even the most rudimentary cost/benefit analysis. They’ve got their eyes on universal health care and free pre-school, apparently unaware of the stupefying cost. Examples of Democratic innumeracy are endless.

When the legislators don’t have the training to understand the economic and financial impact of the laws they pass, somebody else has to do it for them. In-house, that would be legislative staff and the massive state bureaucracy, and on the outside, journalists, watchdogs, activists, credit agencies, bond underwriters, and investors. But unfortunately, the information they get to work with is trapped in obsolete 20th century formats.

This is where SB 598 ascends from accounting geekville and represents a real opportunity for reform-minded, financially responsible Californians to take back their state. Today, while financial statements for California’s state and local agencies are available online, they exist only in PDF format. That is, these reports are printed on paper, and the “electronic copies” that are saved and uploaded are little more than image files. SB 598 will take these online reports into the 21st century.

Applying 21st Century Technology to Transparency Mandates

When an online financial statement is just an image file, it is opaque. That is, if you want to take the numbers reported on that image and do any sort of analysis, you have to manually enter all the numbers over again onto a spreadsheet. As it is, every year, California’s various government agencies upload annual financial statements in PDF format for review by, for example, credit agencies. Meanwhile, similar data is required by the state controller, but these reports are hand entered into an online system. Local governments have trouble keeping their respective PDF and controller reports in sync, giving rise to data errors. SB 598 solves this problem.

What SB 598 will require is for all of California’s state and local government agencies to use XBRL, or “Extensible Business Reporting Language.” This proven technology is similar to HTML, and like HTML, is used to create web pages. But XBRL web pages are formatted so that entire tables of numbers can be copied and pasted in Excel spreadsheets. They are also “machine readable,” which means that data mining programs can automatically extract all of the numerical information on them, pouring it into a database, or onto a spreadsheet.

In the private sector, the Securities and Exchange Commission already requires publicly traded corporations to use XBRL on their posted quarterly and annual financial statements. Among government entities, XBRL has already been adopted by the State of Florida, and is being adopted in Utah. Insofar as California is the birthplace of high technology, and remains its epicenter, it should be a bipartisan slam-dunk for California’s legislators to adopt XBRL here.

The benefits of having XBRL are many, and deserve explanation, because it’s easy to acknowledge and promptly forget about something that, while transformative, flies way under the radar. The challenge of properly analyzing and exposing many of California’s most serious fiscal challenges, using today’s reports, is nearly insurmountable. Examples abound.

California has 83 independent pension systems, nearly all of them woefully underfunded and nearly all of them planning to roughly double the amount they’re requiring their client employers to pay them. How will this affect California’s cities, counties, special districts and state agencies? What is the collective impact of these payment increases on California’s taxpayers? With XBRL, an analyst can unleash an automated program that will download the financial statements of all 83 pension systems, producing a consolidated report showing the exact financial condition of those systems if they were a single entity. With this information, it would be a simple matter to assess and report, among other things, the total unfunded liability, and the total required payments.

There are very immediate financial challenges facing Californians that would be far easier to understand and cope with if XBRL were implemented. Two timely examples are the Los Angeles Unified School District, and one its counterparts up north, the Oakland Unified School District. In both cases, these school districts are in deep financial trouble. Despite these difficulties, their unions have successfully negotiated increases in pay and headcount. LAUSD confronts $14 billion in debt for retirement healthcare, and $7 billion in debt for unfunded pensions. Their net position on their balance sheet is a negative $7 billion. If it were easier to collect these financial facts, more people would look them up, and maybe LAUSD would be cutting non-teaching positions and selling off underutilized school properties, instead of handing out raises and hiring new staff.

Finance is the analytical glue that makes it possible to understand the viability of public policies. It is the indispensable language that describes why a public endeavor succeeds or fails. By adopting XBRL, California’s state and local governments will make it possible for more people, including people who need to know, able to speak this language. As Senator Moorlach has said with respect to SB 589, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

 *   *   *

 

California Poised to Lower Voting Age to 17

/by

Expect 17 year olds to be voting in California’s 2020 election. A new bill, ACA 8, just introduced by Assemblyman Evan Low, will amend the state constitution to lower the voting age from 18 to 17. Having kids vote is ridiculous, but in California these days, ridiculous is the new normal. And it’s easy enough to understand what’s really behind this: California’s youth tend to vote for Democrats, so lowering the voting age means more Democrats get elected. The youth vote made the difference in several close races in California last November.

For example, in Orange County, 45th Congressional District incumbent Republican Mimi Walters was upset by 12,523 votes. Nearly half of that margin of victory came from just six precincts in and around UC Irvine, where Democratic challenger Katie Porter received 93 percent of all votes cast, 5,300 votes more than Walters received.

It should come as no surprise that college students favor Democrats. For a taste of what they’re perpetually exposed to, have a look at this “electionlawblog,” authored by a UC Irvine professor, “generously supported by” the UCI School of Law. Amid post after post with anti-Trump, anti-GOP headlines, you’ll scroll long and hard to find content critical of Democrats.

Back in August, 2018, the Sacramento Bee ran a story entitled “Billionaire, unions have a plan to tip California’s closest congressional races.” That title says it all. Billionaire donors in California – Tom Steyer in this case – don’t just give more money to Democrats than Republicans, their money is supplemented by the infrastructure of the public employee unions, invariably supportive of Democrats. These government unions, just in California, collect and spend over $800 million per year, enough to pay for a standing army of political operatives. These professionals are deployed statewide, backed up by politically active union volunteers who, if they’re Democrats, are recruited and plugged into the machine. The Republicans aren’t just outspent, they have no comparable organization.

As for that plan to “tip California’s closest races,” it’s hard to imagine how the Democrats could have done any better. In November 2018, California Democrats flipped seven Congressional Seats, and saw their supermajority (holding 2 out of every 3 seats) in both houses of the state legislature grow to a “mega-majority” (holding 3 out of every 4 seats). In the higher state offices, Democratic candidates ran the table.

Critical to the Democrat strategy was reaching out to young voters. On college campuses across California, turnout was up, padding the Democratic victories. Overall, the youth vote in California tripled compared to the most recent midterm election, moving from 8 percent in 2014 to 27 percent in 2018.

The Democrats have done a lot to rig elections in their favor in California. If there is a constituency that leans Democrat, the Democratic machine will find them. That’s why the Democrats who control the state legislature passed three laws in advance of the 2018 election, all designed to stack the deck against Republicans.

First came the Motor Voter law. This meant that as soon as any California resident acquired or renewed their driver’s license or state ID, they would be registered to vote automatically. Second, the state legislature authorized counties to automatically send absentee ballots to voters, even if they had not requested those ballots. Third, the rules governing ballot custody were changed so that anyone could turn in absentee ballots, not just the actual voter.

Democrats Rule the Universities, Now They’re Going for the High Schools

Along with harvesting the votes of every thoroughly indoctrinated college undergraduate, California’s Democrats now intend to harvest the votes of high school students. These 17 year olds are the perfect targets. Their entire K-12 experience in the public schools has been exposure to a nonstop tirade against “rich, racist, sexist Republicans.” With even less life experience than college students – who themselves often have yet to experience the real world – they are ideal candidates to become new Democratic voters.

Democrats have already paved the way for minors to turn out to vote in great numbers. They have already legalized pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds. And just in case these youthful voters exercise youthful irresponsibility and don’t remember until the last minute to vote, California’s legislature has passed a law that requires a mailed ballot merely to be postmarked by election day.  They have also permitted “conditional ballots,” wherein an unregistered voter can decide on election day to vote, and they will be simultaneously registered and handed a ballot.

One has to wonder why the Democrats care. They already have their mega-majorities in California. But they’re not done. Party insiders reveal Democrats are setting their sites in 2020 on unseating another half-dozen Republican incumbents in the state senate and state assembly, and at least three more Republican Congressmen, Doug LaMalfa (1st District, northeast corner of CA), Tom McClintock (4th District, Central Sierra and foothills), and Paul Cook (8th District, Southern Sierra and southeast).

Here’s a counter-proposal to Assemblyman Low’s new proposal. The chances anyone in the state legislature will consider this counter-proposal are zero, but it’s worth putting out there because it’s just so sensible. Why not raise the voting age to 21? After all, Californians must be 21 in order to buy alcohol and tobacco. And just last year, California’s state legislature raised the age from 18 to 21 to buy rifles (federal law already restricts handgun purchases to people 21 and older).

What’s Worse, a Kid With a Gun, or a Kid With A Ballot?

It’s worth wondering: what would do more harm, letting 18 year olds purchase rifles, or letting 17 year olds vote? The younger a voter gets, the less life experience they have. How many 17 year olds have held a job, paid taxes, or run a company? For that matter, how many 17 year olds have taken an unbiased civics class? In this age of participation trophies, where the average teenager spends most of their waking hours immersed in a Pavlovian love affair with their smartphone, being fed leftist globalist pablum by the soft censors of the social media giants, shouldn’t we demand an older voting age? Wouldn’t that be the responsible thing to do for the health of the republic, starting with California?

There’s big money behind this move to lower the voting age to 17 in California. From advocacy caravans descending on the capitol in Sacramento to sit-ins at Senator Feinstein’s district office, the kids are being mobilized, and that takes adult supervision, and money. The stakes are high. In 2017 there were an estimated 520,000 17 year olds living in California. If half of them vote – a gross underestimate, since they’ll probably set up voting registration and polling places inside the high schools, and the union operatives among the teachers will push the kids hard to cast their votes – that will result in a quarter million more votes.

When 17 year olds vote in 2020, will Democrats get 93 percent of them, the way they did at UC Irvine? Why not? There is virtually nothing reaching these kids that isn’t Democratic propaganda, from everything they see online, to every television show and movie, to everything they learn in the classroom.

Never was the famous quote, wrongfully but frequently attributed to Winston Churchill, more apt: “If you’re not a liberal when you are 25 [or 17], you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative at 35, you have no brain.”

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

 *   *   *

The Politics, the Science, and the Politicized Science of Climate Change

/by

“Pushing through the market square, so many mothers sighing
News had just come over, we had five years left to cry in
News guy wept and told us, earth was really dying
Cried so much his face was wet, then I knew he was not lying”
– David Bowie, Five Years, 1971

One has to wonder if the shock and despair described in David Bowie’s 1971 hit, “Five Years,” would be the preferred collective mentality for humanity, at least if the relentless propaganda campaigns of climate change activists are successful. And one must admit they have powerful allies at their disposal. A climate alarm consensus informs America’s entire educational, entertainment, and media establishments, along with most corporate marketing, and most political platforms from the local city council to the United Nations.

Climate alarm shouldn’t be a hard sell, and it isn’t. The horror of natural conflagrations taps into primal, instinctual fears; when vividly imagining terrifying acts of nature, even the most hardened skeptic might have a moment of pause.

California’s horrifying wildfire that incinerated the town of Paradise in November 2018 is a good example. Later that month, retired Governor Jerry Brown appeared on Face the Nation, and predicted, “in less than five years even the worst skeptics are going to be believers.”

Taking shameless advantage of every natural disaster to stoke fear of global warming has become normal. In October 2018, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a special report predicting imminent global climate catastrophe. A month later, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released a grim “Fourth National Climate Assessment.” In both cases, news reports included cataclysmic images designed to tap our deepest, most unreasoning and terrifying species memories; tsunamis, hurricanes, floods, fires.

And every time there’s a hurricane, or a flood, or a wildfire, we’re reminded again by the consensus establishment; we caused this. We are to blame. And nothing, absolutely nothing, is too high a price to pay to stop it.

Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish economist and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, puts the cost of the U.N.’s climate recommendations at over $100 trillion for a reduction of 0.5 degrees centigrade. But rarely explored, and difficult to find, is data on how much it costs to adapt to climate change, vs. how much it costs to stop climate change. Equally hard to find is information on to what extent climate change might actually benefit humanity.

Political Categorizing of Today’s Eco Intellectuals

In 2014, Matthew Nisbet, a professor of communications at Northeastern University, in a paper entitled “Disruptive ideas: public intellectuals and their arguments for action on climate change” made an interesting attempt to classify influential activists and experts on climate change into three categories: Ecological Activists, Smart Growth Reformers, and Ecomodernists. The focus of Nisbet’s analysis was how these public intellectuals “establish their authority, spread their ideas, and shape public discourse.”

While retaining Nisbet’s framework, it is useful to speculate as to what mass political ideologies and major political movements in 2019 America would most closely align with each of Nisbet’s three categories. After all, how “climate action” is implemented, now and in the future, is arguably the most significant variable determining how Americans and everyone else in the world will cope with challenges relating to energy development, economic growth, technology deployment, individual freedom, property rights, national sovereignty, international cooperation, and, of course, environmental protection.

Making this leap, a plausible match for each of Nisbet’s categories would be as follows: The “Ecological Activists” are mostly socialists, the “Smart Growth Reformers” are mostly liberals, and the “Ecomodernists” are mostly libertarians. It is important to reiterate that this only roughly overlaps with the influencers Nisbet has characterized in his three groups. Moreover, there is a fourth important category that Nisbet ignored (or dismissed), which might be defined as practical skeptics. More on that later.

Here is Nisbet’s chart depicting his three categories of environmental influencers:

Socialist Environmentalists

The first of Nisbet’s three categories are the Ecological Activists. Based on how they are described by Nisbet, their political ideology is most likely socialist. This group has the most negative perspective on climate change, seeing it as a consequence of capitalism ran amok. They argue that the carrying capacity of planet earth has reached its limit and that only by radically transforming society can the planet and humanity avoid catastrophe.

This group is Malthusian in outlook, and the solutions they advocate – returning to small scale, decentralized infrastructure, “smaller scale, locally owned solar, wind and geothermal energy technologies, and organic farming” – are not practical or even internally consistent for several reasons.

“Ecological Activists argue on behalf of a fundamental reconsideration of our worldviews, aspirations, and life goals, a new consciousness spread through grassroots organizing and social protest that would dramatically re‐organize society, decentralize our politics, reverse globalization, and end our addiction to economic growth,” Nisbet writes. It must be a very selective subset of globalization the Ecological Activists wish to reverse, however, because this most radical of Nisbet’s cohorts tend to be the same people who favor open borders and the erasure of national governments. Can they truly believe small communities will constitute what remains of governance when nation states and multinational corporations wither away?

But in their commitment to achieving 100 percent decentralized, renewable energy, the Ecological Activists make their greatest departure from reality.

The algebra of global energy consumption and population trends are well known. For everyone on earth to consume half as much energy per capita as Americans currently consume, global energy production has to double. Currently, renewables, for the most part very large scale renewables – primarily wind and solar – contribute less than 4 percent of global energy production, while fossil fuel contributes nearly 90 percent. Scenarios involving wholesale abandonment of centralized, fossil fuel based energy production cannot have any basis in reality unless the outcomes are horrific. Some Ecological Activists acknowledge this.

For example, in his 1968 best seller The Population Bomb, early Ecological Activist Paul Ehrlich suggested international “triage,” wherein nations lacking the ability to achieve self-sufficiency would have foreign aid cut off. Implicit in this strategy was that millions, if not hundreds of millions, of people would die. Ehrlich was talking about food aid, but he might as well have been talking about energy. The chances that a developing nation reliant on coal and oil can make a smooth transition to wind and solar energy using only their internal economic resources are zero.

Not mentioned in Nisbett’s paper, but easily fitting into the Ecological Activists category, are the “deep greens,” a group typified by the “Deep Green Resistance.” They reject “green technology and renewable energy,” both in terms of its ability to meet the total energy requirements of modern civilization, and in terms of how “green” it actually is. Their solution is to “create a life-centered resistance movement that will dismantle industrial civilization by any means necessary.”

Most Ecological Activists believe in phasing out use of fossil fuel in a manner they perceive to be as benign as possible. But to achieve this, and unlike the next group, the Smart Growth Reformers, the Ecological Activists do not believe in market based solutions. They support carbon rationing and carbon taxes as the means to both curtail use of fossil fuel and the means to fund development and deployment of renewable energy solutions.

In Congress today, the Ecological Activists would be most represented by the Democratic Socialists, led by their media anointed leader Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. The policies promoted by Ocasio-Cortez and her allies in the “Green New Deal,” in its undiluted form, read like a socialist manifesto. The fundamental “economic rights” of all Americans, according to the Green New Deal as described on the U.S. Green Party’s website are:

The Economic Rights of All Americans (U.S. Green Party)

“(1) The right to employment through a Full Employment Program that will create 25 million jobs by implementing a nationally funded, but locally controlled direct employment initiative replacing unemployment offices with local employment offices offering public sector jobs which are “stored” in job banks in order to take up any slack in private sector employment.

(2) Worker’s rights including the right to a living wage, to a safe workplace, to fair trade, and to organize a union at work without fear of firing or reprisal.

(3) The right to quality health care which will be achieved through a single-payer Medicare-for-All program.

(4) The right to a tuition-free, quality, federally funded, local controlled public education system from pre-school through college. We will also forgive student loan debt from the current era of unaffordable college education.

(5) The right to decent affordable housing, including an immediate halt to all foreclosures and evictions.

(6) The right to accessible and affordable utilities – heat, electricity, phone, internet, and public transportation – through democratically run, publicly owned utilities that operate at cost, not for profit.

(7) The right to fair taxation that’s distributed in proportion to ability to pay. In addition, corporate tax subsidies will be made transparent by detailing them in public budgets where they can be scrutinized, not hidden as tax breaks.”

It should come as no surprise that these “economic rights” are integral to the “Green New Deal” as it is envisioned by most all of the Socialist Environmentalists. The actual “green” portion of the Green New Deal is equally ambitious. Depending on the source, the goal of Green New Deal policies is to make the United States achieve “zero emissions” within the next 10-30 years. The Green Party proclaims specific, and very ambitious goals, declaring “The Green New Deal starts with transitioning to 100% green renewable energy (no nukes or natural gas) by 2030.” The young activists running the website “Data for Progress” declare “The full U.S. economy can and must run on a mix of energy that is either zero-emission or 100 percent carbon capture by mid-century.”

It is impossible to catalog the profusion of activist groups and activist websites now promoting the Green New Deal. There are too many. But almost invariably they perceive “social justice,” socialist economics, environmentalism, and abolition of fossil fuel as interlinked goals sharing common values. One of the explicitly political online promoters of a congressional Green New Deal is the Sunrise Movement. They claim to have already secured the endorsements of 45 members of congress, along with hundreds of organizations.

The organizations supporting a congressional Green New Deal are impressive not only by the sheer numbers of participants, but their institutional diversity – labor unions, youth movements, women’s organizations, “interfaith” groups, progressive democrats, anti-war groups, anti-nuclear groups, Native American groups, college associations, “clean energy” advocates, and countless environmental pressure groups. Examining the websites of these organizations reveals that in most cases they are set up either as political organizations, or they are set up to conduct political advocacy and public education while coordinating their efforts with political affiliates. A typical political agenda for one of these organizations would be to “recruit the army” in 2019, then swing elections in 2020 through voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts.

But how can Americans possibly expect to replace conventional energy with more expensive renewable energy, at the same time as they pay additional trillions to secure the “economic rights” for everyone living in the United States? The very idea is so preposterous it is difficult to take the Socialist Environmentalist movement seriously. That would be a mistake.

 Liberal Environmentalists

If the Ecological Activists tend to lean socialist, the second of Nisbet’s groups, the Smart Growth Reformers, appear to be conventional liberals. They are more business friendly, and while they agree that a climate catastrophe is inevitable without dramatic changes in policy, they believe “market forces” can be harnessed to change the energy economy of the world. Where the Ecological Activists support carbon taxes and carbon rationing, the Smart Growth Reformers support carbon trading.

The best known of the so-called Smart Growth Reformers is former Vice President Al Gore, who has enjoyed a career since 2000 that, if anything, eclipses his accomplishments as a politician. In addition to producing Oscar winning documentaries on climate change, writing best sellers on the topic, and receiving a Nobel Prize for his proselytizing on the issue, he has become fabulously wealthy. As a cofounder of Generation Investment Management, with over $18 billion in assets under management, and as a senior partner at the elite venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, Al Gore falls firmly into the pro-business political camp, along with plenty of other liberal democrats. Joining Al Gore among the Smart Growth Reformers would likely be U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose net worth is estimated at $29 million.

It isn’t hard to see why emissions trading would appeal to pro-business liberals, although that depends on how you would define “pro-business.” But why enact a carbon tax, where only the government gets to be the middleman, when with emissions trading, you can engage the global financial community, and create completely new categories of economics, as armies of accountants, economists, environmental scientists, and myriad additional, highly-credentialed ancillary experts engage in cradle to cradle assessments of carbon molecules.

Here’s how this byzantine scheme is supposed to work:

The Process of Carbon Emissions Trading

(1) Companies – all of them, from manufacturers, to dairy farmers, to public utilities – are required to report how much carbon they emit. But is this just “value added” carbon, or shall it also include carbon embodied in the raw materials and other inputs they source, and the carbon emitted by the transportation assets they utilized to acquire those materials?

(2) Each company is assigned a “baseline” annual carbon allowance, based on their current level of carbon emissions. But what if some companies already became highly carbon efficient, and have less capacity to reduce their emissions compared to their competitors? No worries, the experts will take that into account.

(3) The government, working in partnership with “stakeholders” including the affected companies as well as the facilitators in the financial community, awards an initial annual carbon emission allocation to each company. If they wish to emit more, they have to purchase emission credits; if they plan to emit less, they may sell their unused emission allocations.

(4) The financial community, working with government regulators, creates an exchange where permits to emit units of CO2, as well as credits to fund unit reductions of CO2, are traded, with the price per unit set by market supply and demand.

(5) The government, working in partnership with all “stakeholders” including the affected companies as well as the facilitators in the financial community, will then issue a reductions schedule, whereby each participating company (participation is mandatory) will be awarded fewer emissions allowances each year. This means that over time they will be forced to either buy more emissions credits on a trading market, or invest in innovative technology that will allow them to achieve their productivity goals with fewer emissions. In aggregate, emission allowances will systematically decline in conformity with national and international objectives.

(6) Private companies, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies will emerge with the mission of creating “carbon credits.” This is where the scheme gets even more interesting. These organizations may plant forests to sequester carbon, or they may actually inject carbon dioxide gas into underground caverns to “sequester” it (nothing could go wrong there), or, as government agencies, they may zone ultra high density neighborhoods in order to create a “carbon footprint” for their community that is lower than it would otherwise have been.

This last example introduces the concept of “additionality,” whereby, for example, the experts determine how much CO2 might have been emitted if none of the zoning rules or building codes had been changed (imagine detached homes with reasonably spacious lots, a few of them with solar panels installed by choice of the homeowner), vs. how much CO2 would be emitted if aggressive changes are made (imagine homes squeezed 14 to an acre, with all rooftops covered with photovoltaic panels).

Emissions trading schemes pose all kinds of problems. The subjectivity inherent in measuring significant variables, the stupefying complexity, the huge, nonproductive overhead, consisting of a veritable army of bureaucrats, consultants, experts, and, of course, financial middlemen. The potential for corruption, or just multiplying schemes that turn out to do more harm than good, saturate the prospect of emissions trading from end to end.

A recent ignoble example would be how carbon emissions trading in the European Union funded palm oil plantations. To purchase the right to emit more CO2 than their allotment, European companies bought “carbon credits,” investing in “carbon neutral” biofuel plantations in Indonesia, Malaysia, and elsewhere in the tropics. Thousands of square miles of tropical rainforest, valuable wildlife habitat, were incinerated to accommodate the new market for biodiesel made from palm oil. By the time the Europeans realized what they were doing, it was too late. Just ask the Orangutans of Borneo, if there are any left.

The “smart growth reformers” advocate more than just carbon trading, but it is difficult to overstate its centrality to their much broader agenda. And it’s important to emphasize that the scope of its implementation will go far beyond regulating energy. Because there is a “carbon footprint” to virtually every development – all housing, all infrastructure, all transportation; not just power plants, but bridges, dams, water and wastewater treatment plants, solid waste management, the energy grid, inland waterways, levees, ports, public parks, roads, rail, transit, schools, every durable good, every gadget, everything.

In the hands of a creative carbon accountant, there isn’t any human activity that might not have earnings potential, taxation potential, or become a target for regulation. Government agencies view this as a gold mine. Code enforcement departments and planning commissions will become profit centers – so long as people are forced by law and ordinance to use less and consume less. And to enable, monitor, and enforce the great ratcheting down: the internet of things.

Libertarian Environmentalists

It may not be entirely accurate to claim that most Ecomodernists are libertarians. While libertarians appear to overlap more with the Ecomodernists than with Smart Growth Reformers or Ecological Activists, there are a lot of libertarians that have been seduced by the “market based” solutions of emissions trading. Moreover, according to Nisbet’s paradigm, Ecomodernists “argue for ‘clumsy’ policy approaches across levels of society, government investment in energy technologies and resilience strategies,” hardly something you would expect from a libertarian. Nonetheless, many self-proclaimed Ecomodernists identify as libertarians.

One of the public intellectuals who is cited by Nisbet as an Ecomodernist is Michael Shellenberger. An apt choice, since Shellenberger, along with seventeen other notables, is a co-author of The Ecomodernist Manifesto.

Released in 2015, the manifesto’s mission statement includes the following: “We offer this statement in the belief that both human prosperity and an ecologically vibrant planet are not only possible, but also inseparable. By committing to the real processes, already underway, that have begun to decouple human well-being from environmental destruction, we believe that such a future might be achieved. As such, we embrace an optimistic view toward human capacities and the future.”

The Seven Key Sections of the Ecomodernist Manifesto

(1) Humanity has flourished over the past two centuries.

(2) Even as human environmental impacts continue to grow in the aggregate, a range of long-term trends are today driving significant decoupling of human well-being from environmental impacts.

(3) The processes of decoupling described above challenge the idea that early human societies lived more lightly on the land than do modern societies.

(4) Plentiful access to modern energy is an essential prerequisite for human development and for decoupling development from nature.

(5) We write this document out of deep love and emotional connection to the natural world.

(6) We affirm the need and human capacity for accelerated, active, and conscious decoupling. Technological progress is not inevitable. Decoupling environmental impacts from economic outputs is not simply a function of market-driven innovation and efficient response to scarcity.

(7) We offer this statement in the belief that both human prosperity and an ecologically vibrant planet are not only possible but also inseparable.

While reading the opening sentences of the seven sections of the Ecomodernist Manifesto don’t begin to do it justice, it’s enough to clarify some of the main points. The repetitive themes are that humans are better off than they’ve ever been, that primitive societies were not more in harmony with nature than modern societies can become, that plentiful energy is a prerequisite for human development, and that it is possible and necessary to “decouple” economic growth from environmental destruction.

Ecomodernists may not all embrace the libertarian desire to let the unfettered free market solve every challenge facing humanity (ref. #6), but perhaps in a more important sense they are very libertarian, in their commitment to encouraging a free market of ideas.

All in all, the Ecomodernist category is an intriguing way of gathering together an eclectic group of thinkers. Also included on Nisbet’s list of Ecomodernists is Roger Pielke Jr., a political science professor at the University of Colorado and another co-author of the Ecomodernist Manifesto. Pielke’s situation is one that many Ecomodernists (and Practical Skeptics) face, he is condemned by the “consensus” community merely because he is occasionally willing to criticize their work.

In a guest editorial in the Wall Street Journal in 2016, Pielke wrote:

“I believe climate change is real and that human emissions of greenhouse gases risk justifying action, including a carbon tax. But my research led me to a conclusion that many climate campaigners find unacceptable: There is scant evidence to indicate that hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or drought have become more frequent or intense in the U.S. or globally. In fact we are in an era of good fortune when it comes to extreme weather.”

Where Pielke is attacked for exposing politically motivated hyperbole that violates the integrity of the scientists that produce it or condone it, Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg (who is not on Nisbet’s list of Ecomodernists but perhaps should be) is attacked for exposing the deeply flawed economic logic underlying many of the most urgently promoted policies designed to mitigate climate change.

In a Tweet last December, Lomborg lamented the persecutory culture of the climate change community:

“What happens when you can’t keep cool on global warming: Everyone labeled “deniers” unless they don’t just support the science, but also every climate policy, no matter how inefficient. This is how panic and politicization lets bad policies dominate.”

What Pielke and Lomborg, and many others, have in common is their overt, unequivocal agreement with the fundamental premise – Earth is warming, and anthropogenic CO2 is the cause. And yet they are at times marginalized because they question certain critical assumptions or conclusions relating to that premise. As these two examples show, the twin hearts of the climate change movement – the science and the economics – have hardened against the voices of contrarians. Along with being eclectic, contrarian might be another widely shared quality of the Ecomodernists.

Unlike the Socialist Environmentalists or the Liberal Environmentalists, Ecomodernists are not as quick to condemn contrarian points of view. Shellenberger, for example, through his organization Environmental Progress, is a strong advocate of large scale development of new nuclear power plants to produce environmentally friendly electricity. While this solution generally attracts condemnation from the Socialist and Liberal Environmentalists, it is attracting growing support among Ecomodernists.

The Ecomodernist, or, if you will, the Libertarian Environmentalist, as a category, is elusive and heterogeneous. These qualities make its output less predictable, its potential greater. It is best defined simply as not belonging to the two preceding categories, nor willing to cross the red line into overtly questioning the theory of anthropogenic global warming. It has much to offer.

Practical Skeptics

The failure of Nisbet to include climate skeptics as a fourth category may be a forgivable oversight on his part, because climate skeptics have been almost erased from public dialog. As a result, it makes sense that Nisbet would not consider the members of this group to qualify as influential public intellectuals.

Another reason Nisbet may not have included climate skeptics would be because he was analyzing differing approaches by “public intellectuals arguing for action on climate change.” It’s certainly debatable, but understandable to assert that climate skeptics are arguing for no action on climate change. Equally likely, of course, was that Nisbet chose to avoid the opprobrium he would invite if he legitimized climate skeptics by including them in his analysis.

Climate skeptics have been demonized and ostracized by the Socialist and Liberal environmentalists. The Ecomodernists, for the most part, scrupulously avoid allowing their laudable contrarianism to overflow into questioning the theory of anthropogenic global warming. For example, and as previously noted, Bjorn Lomborg is condemned because he points out the undesirable economic consequences of the recommended solutions. Roger Pielke Jr. is condemned for pointing how the actual data does not support the activist contention that severe storms are increasing in frequency. And Michael Shellenberger invites criticism for offering the heresy of clean nuclear power as a solution to energy challenges. Maybe persecution engenders empathy. Whatever the reason, while none of these three individuals are “skeptics” in the harshest sense of the term, neither do they go out of their way to categorically denounce skeptics.

Practical Skeptics have a range of positions that earn them the “denier” label, and everything that comes with that: suppression of their work, savaging of their reputations, and banishment from the public square. Some of them, such as Climate Etc. host Judith Curry, former Professor and Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, maintain that while anthropogenic CO2 is contributing to global warming, the likely amount of warming is far less than what is being alarmingly projected. Curry has also criticized the growing calls by Congressional Democrats to criminalize the free speech of skeptic scientists, by attempting to expose their links, if any, to fossil fuel corporations.

One of the most distinguished, and most demonized, of living climate skeptics is Richard Lindzen, an American atmospheric physicist who is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute. Until his retirement in 2013, Lindzen was the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lindzen was one of the early participants in the early IPCC reports on climate change, but became disillusioned because he perceived the organization had become politicized.

Lindzen’s specific criticisms of conventional climate change theories are many: He acknowledges there are moderate warming trends, but that it is merely our emergence from the “little ice age” of the 19th century. He claims that if the earth were warming significantly, extreme weather would diminish, not increase. He questions the assumptions built into the computer programs that model global climate and produce predictions. He believes predicted warming is overstated. He states that the natural feedback mechanisms governing the global climate have offsetting impacts, and that if they did not, the earth would have experienced catastrophic warming eons ago.

There are dozens of credible climate skeptics, credible enough, that is, to deserve a place on panels at climate conferences or congressional testimony, editorial pages, scientific journals, and press coverage, on what are arguably the most consequential policy decisions of modern times. Along with Judith Curry and Richard Lindzen, other skeptical scientists include Roy Spencer, Fred Singer, and Anastasios Tsonis and many others – many of which are keeping their heads down.

Richard Lindzen has said that many climate scientists will criticize alarmist pronouncements in whatever may be their specific area of expertise. A glaciologist will challenge a press release predicting an ice-free Himalayan mountain range by 2035. A meteorologist will challenge a press release asserting an increase in extreme weather. But none of them will take the further step of criticizing the overall “consensus.”

Along with scientists willing to offer their contrarian views on global warming and climate change, there are useful websites tracking and reporting on the debate – a vibrant scientific debate that is alive and well despite being institutionally suppressed – Anthony Watts and Jo Nova both produce excellent daily summaries that offer updates on the ongoing scientific and political discussions surrounding climate change.

There remains a handful of organizations that will provide equal time, or even promote, climate skeptics. They include Cato, AEI, The Heartland Institute, and The Heritage Foundation. But these scientists, these online reporters, and these nonprofit organizations are vastly outgunned by most of the political establishment (with the major exception of the Trump administration), the media and entertainment communities, prestigious scientific journals, the K-12 public education system, higher education, local, state, federal, and international government bureaucracies, virtually every major corporate or financial player, and spectacularly wealthy nonprofit educational foundations including powerful environmental pressure groups.

Even the American judiciary is demonstrably biased, underscored on April 2, 2007, where in their ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA, the Supreme Court found that greenhouse gases are air pollutants covered by the Clean Air Act.

But scientific “consensus” does not constitute scientific truth. Just ask Galileo. And overwhelming institutional consensus on a course of action, even if there is such a thing, does not mean that course of action is the optimal course of action.

Solutions Require Renewed Debate

Even if anthropogenic CO2 emissions are driving the planet headlong into an apocalyptic nightmare, climate skeptics should be heard. Because as it is the scope of acceptable debate is relentlessly narrowing. Should Bjorn Lomborg’s valuable economic analysis be ignored, simply because he’s willing to point out the absurdity of spending trillions to possibly slow warming by a half-degree? Should Roger Pielke Jr. be silenced, when the data he presents suggests extreme weather may not be the primary type of havoc for which we need to prepare?

Should Ecomodernists that recognize market forces aren’t always best able to predict and quickly adapt to environmental challenges be shunned by “true” libertarians? Should Ecomodernists that promote nuclear power be shunned by the broader anti-nuke environmentalist community – joined by the commercial interests that benefit from eliminating a competitor?

And what if the skeptics are right? What if global warming, regardless of the cause, will not race catastrophically upwards? What if some warming, and somewhat more CO2 in the atmosphere, is mostly good for the planet and for humanity? What if extreme weather is not bound to become more extreme than ever?

Most importantly, what if spending trillions to replace fossil fuel with far more expensive alternatives robs us of the resources needed to lift billions of people out of poverty, thwarting their aspirations at the same time as providing them no means or incentive to reduce their fertility? What if the money we spend covering the world with solar panels, wind farms, and electric transmission lines, could have been better spent to replant the mangrove forests that used to buffer tropical coastlines against tsunamis, or desalinate seawater so coast dwellers no longer watch their land sink below sea level because of subsidence caused by over-pumping groundwater?

A healthy policy synthesis would be to promote and invest in projects and technologies that make sense no matter what climate outcome is destined to befall the planet. But the chances of getting that right are improved if skeptics are allowed to rejoin the conversation.

The notion that skeptics are the beneficiary of vast sums of dark money is by now ludicrous. Every major corporation, certainly including the oil companies, has worked out their lucrative pathway into a profitable “carbon free” future. But which set of public intellectuals, along with their powerful institutional allies and grassroots constituents, will prevail?

Will it be the Socialist Environmentalists, who are funded by a European-style leftist oligarchy, backed up by populist agitators, with growing support from the electorate? And if so, will any of the stupendous sums of new tax revenues they collect actually make it onto the ground in the form of renewable energy, and if so, will it do any good? Or will climate change just be the Trojan Horse of socialism that finally made it through the gates?

What about the Liberal Environmentalists, the “Smart Growth Reformers”? Will they win? And if so, do we want to live in their hyper-regulated world, where the “free market” survives in the form of cronyism, and every aspect of our lives is monitored in order to ensure we each maintain our “carbon neutrality”? And will that do any good? And when the predicted climate disasters don’t happen, will any of them admit those disasters weren’t going to happen anyway, or will they claim the green police state they built saved the world?

The Ecomodernists will hopefully excuse being associated in any context with the Practical Skeptics, so here goes: in terms of divergent, undogmatic thinking, and general optimism regarding the ultimate fate of humanity, these two groups have much in common. It used to be accepted that the person holding the sign on the street corner, proclaiming the imminent doom of mankind was the crazy one, and the person suggesting that actually, mankind is probably not doomed, was the sane one. But in the crazy world of climate alarmism, those roles have been inverted.

Shock. Despair. Change everything, overnight, or else. We’ve got five years. When it comes to climate change, that is the prevailing message, and deviation from that message invites demonization, banishment, erasure.

In a recent and very typical development, the BBC, in response to pressure from activists, announced in September 2018 they would no longer cover the arguments of climate skeptics. This is a natural progression that began in 2007 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled – in an ominous endorsement of politicized science and a staggering violation of common sense – that CO2, part of our atmospheric blanket against the cold cosmic emptiness, the food of all plant life, whose rise perhaps delays the past-due next ice age, is a pollutant. Nisbet’s omission of climate skeptics from his panoply of public intellectuals driving the climate debate is just another part of this sad, possibly misanthropic, potentially tragic course.

It is unclear who is right, nor whether reason will prevail. But it would be far better if every voice was heard.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

*   *   *

California Cronyism and its Consequences

/by

Crony capitalism is an economy in which businesses thrive not as a result of risk, but rather as a return on money amassed through a nexus between a business class and the political class. This is done using state power to crush genuine competition in handing out permits, government grants, special tax breaks, or other forms of state intervention.
– Wikipedia, Feb. 2019

If the goal of public policy is to optimize the role of government, cronyism must be identified and curbed wherever possible. Cronyism wastes the limited resources of governments, at the same time as it reduces the efficiency of the private sector by using subsidies and other incentives to undermine healthy competition.

The harm caused by crony capitalism can best be illustrated by example. In California, cronyism is a major culprit in one of the worst policy failures in recent decades, the housing and the related homeless crisis. Several types of cronyism played into California’s housing debacle. The most significant was cronyism that took the form of regulations that favored the wealthiest, most established corporations, while driving the smaller, emerging competitors out of the housing business entirely.

This form of cronyism through regulations was originally described by Bruce Yandle, now with the Mercatus Center, back in 1983. Yandle, writing for the American Enterprise Institute, coined the phrase “Bootleggers and Baptists,” to describe how during prohibition, the bootleggers who profited from the trade in expensive illicit liquor, would support the temperance movement’s Baptist activists and others, who lobbied against legislation to restore affordable legal booze. This concept applies perfectly to California’s punitive legislation that restricts land development.

For the past 30-40 years, and especially in the last decade or two, a growing assortment of laws and regulations have driven control over all major land development into the hands of a shrinking group of very large corporations. Using Yandle’s analogy, these are the bootleggers. Smaller landowners and construction companies have to sell out or subcontract to these large corporations, because there is no way they can afford the thousands or millions of dollars in fees and litigation, nor the years or decades of regulatory delays. And the Baptists in this example? The environmentalist lobby and its army of trial lawyers, who have seen to it that housing is restricted to ever smaller slices of California’s otherwise vast reserves of land, at the same time as they’ve successfully promoted building codes that make building a home far more expensive than it would otherwise cost.

California’s homeless crisis is certainly caused in part by unaffordable housing, but it is exacerbated by another type of cronyism, “nonprofit cronyism.” These are rent seeking nonprofits that develop scandalously expensive “permanent supportive housing” for the homeless. In Los Angeles today, apartments for the homeless – palatial abodes by any reasonable comparison to the squalor of living on the streets – are being constructed in some cases for as much as a half-million per unit. The government pays a portion of these costs through grants, using taxpayers money, while other funds are secured through tax deductible donations. And when these units actually are opened to a microscopic fraction of the homeless population, because they are owned and managed by nonprofit corporations, they pay no income or even property taxes.

Crony capitalism in its most obvious form is exemplified by massive public works projects of dubious value to society. California’s grandiose and possibly doomed high speed rail project is the classic example. Even if the final project is restricted to the segment from Merced to Bakersfield, tens of billions will have been spent on a project that never passed any reasonably unbiased cost/benefit analysis, which is why it never attracted matching funds from the private sector.

There are plenty of similar examples. One noteworthy case of a massive, and dubious public work, is the costly rebuild of San Francisco’s Transbay Terminal, which for over 50 years had functioned as the central bus terminal connecting downtown San Francisco with other points in the city as well as routes extending into neighboring counties. In 2010, the terminal was demolished to make way for an expanded, “multi-modal” transit hub for the 21st century. Not only would a new tunnel bring commuter trains into the rebuilt terminal from the existing Caltrain station, 1.3 miles away, but the new terminal would also serve high speed trains.

The probable demise of high speed rail hasn’t diminished enthusiasm for the project which in total is estimated to cost around $10 billion. Yet the design of the station itself, already mostly complete at a cost so far of $2.1 billion, is no longer considered sufficient to handle the projected volume of commuter trains. After eight years of construction, the new terminal opened for bus service in 2018 – essentially performing the same service as the old terminal – and then shut down a few months later because of structural defects. Nobody knows when it will reopen. And even when it does reopen, trains won’t be arriving until the $6 billion connecting tunnel is completed, sometime around 2029.

The enthusiasm that informs persistent supporters of dubious projects, which would certainly include high speed rail and San Francisco’s Transbay Transit Center, brings into focus one of the central questions about crony capitalism. How does one distinguish between a project of dubious value, and one of compelling value? Paul Rubin, a professor of economics at Emory University, expresses this question in his own humorous but revealing alternative definition of crony capitalism: “Crony capitalism is lobbying by someone I don’t like for something I don’t like.”

This question of one person’s good cronyism being another person’s bad cronyism is easily recognized in the allocation of subsidies to manufacturers. Ideally, there should be a level playing field between market participants. The government shouldn’t be, as they say, “picking winners.” To choose another obvious example, California’s legislature is determined to increase the number of zero emission vehicles in the state, via rebates, incentives and mandates. The cost to taxpayers – and benefit to manufacturers of electric vehicles – over the next ten years is estimated to range between $9 and $14 billion.

But what if electric cars aren’t an unmitigated good thing, so good they are worthy of subsidies? What if electric vehicles produce illusory environmental benefits? What if the embodied energy in an electric car, far exceeding that of a conventionally powered car, represents an environmental cost that isn’t made up for during its useful, zero emission life? What if the environmental costs of recycling these cars and their massive batteries, or the environmental costs of extracting the resources needed to manufacture these batteries in the first place, represent an unrecoverable environmental cost? What if the emergence of some even better, cleaner transportation technology is being suppressed by the proliferation of subsidized electric cars?

This sort of debate surrounds any subsidized product. And it is fair to say that sometimes subsidies are necessary. But in crony capitalism, those debates are hijacked and skewed by the special interests in the private sector with the strongest connections to government policymakers.

There are myriad forms of crony capitalism. Incentives offered by California’s state and local governments for manufacturers to relocate to California, or stay in California, have cost taxpayers billions. A report published last year in the San Jose Mercury described how public money subsidies have poured hundreds of millions to Silicon Valley giants including Google ($766 million), Facebook ($333 million), Apple ($693 million), and Tesla ($3.5 billion).

These sorts of arrangements repeat themselves across California, and while there is an economic payback to keeping those companies and their jobs in-state, there is also a great irony. California is consistently ranked as the worst state in the U.S. to do business. Why not change the laws and regulations that make California such an unwelcoming place, which would help retain and attract all businesses, instead of pouring compensatory money into the hands of a favored few?

Speaking of the favored few, another problem that consistently accompanies crony capitalism is that it usually benefits the cronies more than it benefits whatever deserving group or cause the deal supposedly supports. The environment and open space is protected – or overprotected – enabling rich developers to get richer, and nobody can afford homes. Palatial “permanent supportive housing” is built for a handful of the homeless, while well heeled nonprofits collect subsidies that could have been used instead to house tens of thousands of homeless using tents and porta-potties. Billions are poured into monumental, landmark, “signature” transportation projects, while ordinary people sit in traffic on pitted, congested, inadequate roads. Taxes are raised so wealthy people can save money on electric cars that remain priced well out of reach of an ordinary Californian. High tech corporations earn hundreds of billions for their shareholders, yet taxpayers support subsidies to keep them from pulling up stakes and moving to Texas.

Finding examples of crony capitalism is an endless task, somewhat shrouded in ambiguity and contradictions. Whenever the government interferes in the “free market,” a subjective assessment is made that the interference is in the public interest, and an even more fraught decision is made to undermine one set of private concerns while creating an advantage for another. Apart from the the impossible extremes of anarchy or communism, good governments have to find that balance in between.

In California’s case, there is a great deal of room for improvement. Support efforts to increase transparency in contract negotiations and contract oversight to expose and deter overt cronyism. Recognize that the impact of environmental regulations has crippled the aspirations of low and middle income Californians, and repeal them, starting with the most extreme. Pay attention to the reports that expose the waste and corruption surrounding attempts to house the homeless. Fight for precedent setting court rulings that will make it easier and less costly to get things done – from building homeless shelters to constructing new roads and related housing infrastructure. Repeal CEQA; there’s plenty of regulation at the federal level. Most of all, make the state’s regulatory climate more inviting so it’s easier to keep and attract all businesses.

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Policy Center.

 *   *   *

How California Can Do Its Part to Stop Sea Level Rise

/by

California is a global leader in fighting climate change. California’s citizens consistently have supported cutting edge technologies to wean their state off fossil fuel and nuclear power, and are on track to be using 100 percent renewable energy by 2050. But is this enough? How else can Californians do their part? What more can they do to set a fine example to the rest of the world?

Clearly, more can be done. So why not flood California’s Great Central Valley, sequestering billions of gallons of ocean water that might otherwise be endangering coastlines around the world?

The feasibility of such an endeavor is hardly a pipe dream. One great dam, extending south from the Marin Headlands across the Golden Gate, plumb into the mountainous ramparts of the tony Pacific Heights neighborhood in San Francisco, would easily permit the establishment of a gigantic lake, over 1,000 feet deep, to extend from majestic Mt. Shasta in the north to the red rock Tehachapi Mountains far to the south. For nearly 500 miles from north to south, and 150 miles or more from east to west, this gigantic reservoir could absorb 100 percent of California’s precipitation and storm runoff for decades, slowing the rise of our expanding oceans.

At the same time, Californians can quickly harvest the “low-hanging fruit” of seawater sequestration, by flooding the Imperial Valley. Since much of the Imperial Valley is below sea level, all it would take would be a pipeline, siphoning water out of the ocean off the coastal enclave of La Jolla, crossing the mountains to dump it into the Salton Sea.

Side benefit! The shrinking Salton Sea would be revitalized. Additional side benefit! A trunk pipeline could, also with no energy input required, drain additional ocean water into Death Valley, which is also below sea level.

Sequestration, after all, is hardly a foreign concept to awakened scientists, especially in California, who, year after year, spend billions in taxpayers money to study ways to stop the rising seas. But instead of sequestering carbon dioxide in caves, why not sequester seawater in California’s Central Valley?

It shouldn’t cost that much, after all, since all that is needed is a single dam, four miles long and less than a half-mile high, sealing off the Golden Gate. It shouldn’t take that long, either. Opening back in 1937, the famed Golden Gate Bridge was built in three years. If Mt. Tamalpais is scraped off, along with most of the rest of the Marin Headlands, and bulldozed into the bay, surely this great work can also be completed within three, four years tops.

As for the cost, everyone knows that no cost is too great to stop the rising seas. Californians have experience spending vast amounts of money to fight climate change. They drive on pitted, dangerous, negligently inadequate roads in order to pay for “light rail” and a “bullet train.” They pay staggering rates for electricity and water in order to pay for “wind power,” and to “save the Delta Smelt.” Californians, apparently, have hundreds of billions to spend on such projects, because no cost is too great when the fate of the planet hangs in the balance. It’s time to think big.

To assist with the cost, California’s many outspoken billionaires, nearly all of whom favor saving the planet by any means necessary, should also pay their “fair share” for the great sequestration. A statewide “climate emergency billionaire” tax could be assessed on 100 percent of their liquid assets (their fixed assets will be underwater), raising additional hundreds of billions of dollars.

The social justice element of this ambitious project might be troubling, since millions of “people of color” reside in California’s Central Valley. But not to worry, because the western portions of San Francisco and Marin County, along with the entire Silicon Valley, will also be inundated. This great migration will be a fantastic opportunity for California’s affluent coastal elites, many of them white “allies,” to link their fates with their disadvantaged counterparts, and to share in their hardships. Nobody will have “privilege,” and everyone will be heroes of the environment.

What about California’s agricultural industry? After all, California grows nearly all of America’s fruits and nuts, and even exports rice to China! But whatever agricultural bounty is lost can be offset by the biggest aquaculture experiment in the world. What Californians lose in fruits and nuts, they’ll gain in catfish and tilapia.

A true skeptic, perhaps even a “denier,” might correctly point out that filling California’s Central Valley with 1,000 feet of water would only cause the world’s oceans to drop by 1.5 inches. Filling the Imperial Valley and Death Valley might buy another inch. This sort of debate, however, should be silenced. We all have to do our part. We have to start somewhere. And since even now, the oceans are only rising by about one inch per decade, California’s brave sacrifice buys the planet about 20 years!

But where will all these Californians go, if nearly half the state’s population is displaced? Some of them could move to Los Angeles, a welcoming city that is, after all, already a magnet for the displaced of the world. What’s another 20 million newly arrived people for a “woke” population of wealthy liberals to support? Construct high rises in Brentwood and Beverly Hills in the backyards of the movie star mansions. Let’s embrace our density!

There’s an even bigger upside to the diaspora that California’s great new lake will cause. California’s displaced millions can also move to Nevada, where they will tip the political balance forever in that state as they vote for Democrats. These newly minted, fabulously enlightened policymakers can use their mega majority in Nevada to support yet another monumental step forward in the battle against rising seas—they can flood the Great Basin, allowing the people of America’s Intermountain West to also signal their illustrious virtue.

It is time for the spectacularly woke liberal voters of California to step up to save the planet from rising seas. Sequestration is an idea that’s time has come, because no price is too great, when the planet itself is in peril.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

 *   *   *

The University of Diversity Will Destroy America

/by

America’s educational system is breaking, and the primary culprit is the diversity bureaucracy, now an industrial strength special-interest group that grows more powerful and more expansive every year. For years they have dominated America’s social sciences and humanities, and now they’re launching an assault on the hard sciences. If they are not stopped, they eventually will destroy America as a first-world democracy.

They’re well on their way. But it isn’t “racism”—the currency of the diversocrats—that is denying opportunities to “people of color.” It is failures in the social culture of the inner cities, even more than aggregate economic disadvantages, or the lousy, unionized public schools, that result in the chronic academic underachievement of their children.

There’s no money to be made, or votes to be had, however, in telling this tough truth, even though it might do a lot of good if enough people said it or heard it. The commitment to “diversity” in American university enrollment is absolute and all-powerful, despite the incessant barrage of lavishly funded charges to the contrary emanating from the grievance industry. To achieve diversity, university admissions offices strive to achieve proportional representation by race, and to do that, they downgrade the significance of the single most predictive indicator of academic potential, the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).

A 2015 Princeton study examined “how preferences for different types of applicants exercised by admission offices at elite universities influence the number and composition of admitted students.” They estimated that compared to white applicants, black applicants’ SAT scores are “boosted” by 230 points, Hispanics’ by 180 points, while Asian-American applicants have 50 points deducted. This systemic bias in favor of less-qualified students harms everyone concerned, and if unchecked, immutable demographic trends will magnify that harm.

It’s almost comical, and unfortunately, it’s also almost futile at this point, to try to parse the logic of “diversity” advocates because so far these arguments have prevailed. The denial of SAT scores as predictive of academic achievement has reached the point where a growing number of colleges and universities are dispensing with it altogether.

As reported in Forbes last year, the University of Chicago “has announced it is no longer requiring SAT scores of applicants, noting explicitly that it wants to increase minority student representation.” This is dangerous folly. Seeding our universities with less-qualified students will have a ripple effect on every aspect of higher education—the rigor of the courses, the mix (and usefulness) of the degrees on offer, the skills of the graduates, and the quality of both the faculty and their research. This has already begun.

In reality, “minority student representation” is not exactly what they’re trying to increase at the University of Chicago, or anywhere else. What they’re trying to do, in fact, is increase the representation of “underrepresented minorities,” i.e., blacks and Latinos. What about Asian-Americans? Aren’t they minorities? Apparently not. This chart explains why not, using College Board data. It reveals the profound ethnic disparities in SAT math scores among America’s 2015 college-bound seniors.

These are not subtle differences. Most striking is the disparity occurring at the extremes of the distribution. It is those whose abilities fall within these gifted extremes who, overwhelmingly, become the inventors and researchers whose breakthroughs ensure American technological preeminence and benefit the world. Note how nearly 15 percent of all Asians were able to score over 750 on their math SAT. Clearly, using SAT scores as criteria, Asians are indeed underrepresented in elite universities, but they are overrepresented in proportion to their percentage of the population, as they should be. In absolute numbers, 93 percent of all students achieving a Math SAT score of 750 or higher are either white or Asian, and 95 percent of all students achieving a Math SAT score between 700 and 750 are either white or Asian.

America’s Future Depends on Meritocracy

Why does this matter? Who cares if our elite universities, or any of our institutions of higher learning, for that matter, admit students based on their scholastic aptitude, or their Math SAT in particular?

One important reason would be to ensure that Americans have an adequate supply of graduates in so-called STEM fields: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Again, using College Board data, “about twice as many Asian as white, black, or Hispanic students enter STEM fields. Completion rates are lowest for black and Hispanic students, with only 16 percent of those in each of these groups who enter STEM fields earning bachelor’s degrees in these fields, compared to about 30 percent of the Asian and white students who enter these fields.”

One of the most erudite critics of race preferences in college admissions is Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of The Diversity Delusion. In a recent guest editorial in the Wall Street Journal, Mac Donald noted several problems with racial preferences beyond the indisputable fact that they deny opportunities to more qualified students. Racial preferences are not limited to elite university admissions. They happen across all levels of post-high-school education, from community colleges to elite universities. To achieve proportional representation, racial preferences are the only option. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, here are the average math SAT scores by ethnicity in 2015: white, 533; Asian, 602; black, 425; Hispanic, 453. For reading comprehension: white, 528; Asian, 529; black, 430; Hispanic, 448.

Most compelling is Mac Donald’s assertion that by systemically elevating less-qualified students into schools that otherwise would be more selective, these students are being condemned—at whatever level—to compete with better-prepared students. That is, a student who might excel in, and complete a STEM degree, at a state college, will end up dropping out or choosing a watered down fill-in-the-blank “studies” major at an elite university. Similarly, a student who might excel in a community college, then transfer successfully into a four-year college to earn a STEM degree, might fail and drop out if he is elevated to a state college straight out of high school where he will compete against better-prepared students.

Mac Donald also points out that by placing students into academic populations where they are demonstrably less qualified to meet the academic standards, their academic failures fulfill negative stereotypes, an outcome precisely at odds with what supposedly is the intent of policies that embrace “diversity.”

Increasing Ethnic Diversity Means Ethnic Quotas Must End

It’s relatively harmless to indulge the diversity bureaucracy’s self-serving rhetoric regarding the “merit myth” when “underrepresented minorities” truly are numerical minorities. For example, in 1965, America was 84 percent white, 11 percent black, 4 percent Hispanic, and 1 percent Asian. But by 2045, according to research from the Brookings Institution, also using U.S. Census Bureau data, America will be the 49 percent white, 13 percent black, 25 percent Hispanic, 8 percent Asian, and 5 percent multiracial. When it comes to education, however, 2045 is already here. The minority-white “tipping point” for Americans under 18 will be reached, nationally, by 2020. In many states, that point was reached years ago.

When more than half of all students are nonwhite, and, increasingly, more than half of all job applicants are nonwhite, it becomes necessary to reestablish merit as the sole criteria for academic admissions and job hires.

Forcing less-qualified applicants into positions where they are at a competitive disadvantage creates all kinds of havoc. It engenders bitterness and cynicism in the millions of more qualified individuals who are passed over. It creates insecurity and often leads to failure, among those who know they’ve been given opportunities and positions they were less qualified for. And at the aggregate level, long before quotas are extending preferential treatment to over 50 percent of the population, they become an issue of economic health, and even a national security issue, as entire academic institutions and entire industries are undermined in order to make room for less qualified people.

Ethnic Communities Must Stop Using Racism as an Excuse

The reality in America for at least the last three decades is that if an applicant for college admission, a new job, or a promotion, is nonwhite, he will get the job in preference to a white applicant with equal skills. This remains the only way to achieve anything close to proportional representation, and the practice is enshrined in countless federal and state laws, regulations, and tax incentives. Racism, if it still exists, does not exist in America’s institutions, which must bend over backward to be inclusive.

Moreover, even absent mandates, corporations have no incentive to engage in racial discrimination. Corporations survive by being competitive, and corporations stay competitive by hiring the most qualified individuals, regardless of their race.

With respect to college admissions, setting aside the easily discredited notion that SAT scores don’t mean anything, how can low scoring groups raise their scores? It might start by leaders in these communities spending more time trying to address the social failures afflicting those communities, and less time complaining about “racism.”

Two salient measures of a community’s health, which in turn affect the educational achievements of a community’s children, are gang activity and family status. The next chart, using data from the U.S. Department of Education, shows the incidence of gang activity in America’s high schools, as reported by students. Black and Hispanic students are more than twice as likely as whites and Asians to encounter gangs in their high schools. Gang activity is a reasonable proxy for the ambient culture being either conducive or detrimental to learning.

Gangs, however, in large part are a consequence of an even more fundamental variable affecting learning outcomes: whether or not children attending schools are living with a father and mother at home. The next chart presents this data, again collected by the U.S. Department of Education. As shown, 73 percent of white households, and 82 percent of Asian households have both parents present. In stark contrast, only 33 percent of black households and 56 percent of Hispanic households have both parents present.

When parents—especially fathers—are gone, gangs often fill the void. But is it racism that causes families to break up disproportionately among blacks and Hispanics? And is it spurious to suggest correlation is also causation when common sense would support the notion that children in broken homes who go to gang-infested schools will not attain the same levels of achievement as students in intact homes with tranquil school environments?

It’s not fair to suggest that any individual family living in one of America’s inner cities can cope with an educational environment that deters learning as easily as a family living in a tranquil suburb. But individuals can choose to keep their families intact. They can choose work over welfare, to set an example for their children. They can choose to emphasize the value of an education and use the many resources available to them. They can also choose to participate in their communities, supporting the police who fight to curb gang activity. They can join with other parents to demand competent teachers in public schools, and end the labor union monopoly on education. They can demand school choice. They can take responsibility for all these things, and until they do, claiming “racism” is the cause of academic underachievement is just an excuse.

One demographic trend that may help throw a wrench into the diversity bureaucracy’s iron grip on academia is the proliferation of Americans of “mixed race.” In 2015, more than 17 percent of marriages in America were across “racial” lines. It’s daunting to imagine why ethnic voters would oppose racial quotas when racial quotas will increase their chances of college admission or a job promotion. But what happens when everybody can claim to be a member of a protected-status group? We are already seeing the Asian community’s reaction to being dumped out of the “underrepresented minorities” bucket. What happens when the diversocrats ability to aggregate in order to discriminate runs up against a population that’s gotten so intricately disaggregated that everything they try invites grassroots opposition from a growing coalition of voters, or, inevitably, lawsuits, which increasingly they will lose?

America has to move away from enforced proportional representation in all things, starting at the university. Meritocracy always reestablishes itself, one way or another.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

 *   *   *

 

California’s GOP Plays it Safe When Safe Equals Death

/by

In September 2016, Michael Anton published an influential essay entitled “The Flight 93 Election.” It compared the 2016 election to the tragic Flight 93 of 9/11/2001. Anton’s essay opened with this: “2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain.”

California’s GOP faced a similar existential choice this weekend at their semi-annual state convention, when they had to elect a new party chairman. California’s GOP, like Flight 93, faces certain death. Many would say it is dead already. A new term has been coined to describe the status of the GOP in California, a “mega minority.” Whereas a “super minority” means your party holds less than one out of every three offices, a “mega minority” means your party holds less than one out of every four offices. That would describe California’s GOP these days, where they control a mega minority in the State Assembly, the State Senate, California’s Congressional Caucus, and the higher state offices such as Governor, Lt. Governor, etc., where they are not represented at all.

Three people rose to the challenge of flying California’s GOP into 2020, hopefully not crashing on the way. Firebrand populist and 2018 Gubernatorial candidate Travis Allen, who is openly supportive of president Trump, the thoughtful veteran Steve Frank, who served as the party’s vice chair and is senior political editor of the California Political Review, and Jessica Patterson, who served as 2010 gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman’s statewide field director, and more recently as CEO of “Trailblazers,” an organization that trains GOP candidates.

It is a simplification, but probably accurate, to reduce the contest between these three candidates as one between the insurgents – Allen and Frank – and the establishment candidate, Patterson. Travis Allen, whose grassroots support terrified California’s GOP elite as much as Trump’s did nearly three years ago on the national stage, had the largest and most vocal contingent of supporters. Frank, who did not terrify the establishment quite so much, enjoyed a surprisingly strong strong showing of grassroots support. More surprising, and very revealing, was Frank’s alliance with Allen, where both candidates pledged to support whichever of the two gathered the most votes if the contest wasn’t resolved on the first ballot.

As it turned out, on Sunday morning the establishment candidate, Patterson, received 651 delegate votes on the first ballot, which at 55 percent meant a second ballot was unnecessary. Allen got 366 votes, Frank got 175. It wasn’t close, but it wasn’t a blowout, either. If just 55 more delegates, out of 1,192 total, had gone with an insurgent, California’s GOP might have had a Trump supporter running the state party.

To sustain Anton’s metaphor, the establishment is still in California’s GOP cockpit, at the controls. The insurgents, with pots of scalding coffee and a serving cart as a battering ram, have crashed into the door, and the door has held. Will the plane now crash? One thing is certain, it’s in a nose dive. So why should business as usual be good enough? What did GOP delegates have to lose by supporting Allen, or Frank, besides perhaps their pride, or in some cases their jobs? Is that what this came down to?

Why else prevent the passengers from taking over the GOP cockpit? Does anyone actually care if California’s GOP lives or dies anymore? Why shouldn’t it devolve into a regional party? Protect seven congressional seats, because that matters. Turn seven or eight additional congressional districts into battlegrounds, and try to get them back, because that matters. Stay in control of a few counties. Orange. San Diego. Kern. Let the State of Jefferson contingent continue to make noise up north. That’s it. Apart from protecting these last, scattered redoubts, California’s GOP does not matter. This bears repeating. California GOP: You don’t matter.

That’s the challenge that’s been handed to establishment favorite, Jessica Patterson, a thirty-something professional political operative whose first big job was working for Meg Whitman. Meg Whitman. Remember Meg Whitman? This is the business executive who ran for governor back in 2010, burning through $178 million – including well over $30 million from donors who were so embittered by her disastrous failure that they never came back.

Remember how that turned out? Whitman got smacked down, hard, in the general election by Jerry Brown. Whitman, or, let’s be accurate, Whitman’s fabulously remunerated consultants, ran a campaign where the vapidity rose in direct proportion to the millions spent. Whitman ran a campaign without an edge, without so much as an improvised serving cart, much less an actual battering ram, fighting to reach the cockpit in a plane that was already well into its dive. Meg Whitman’s campaign was a debacle. It was an embarrassment.

Is that what’s in store for California’s GOP? More Whitman style platforms, agendas, campaigns? Because if so, who cares?

Patterson’s more recent experience is as the CEO of the California Trailblazers, an organization that “recruits, trains and elects Republicans to state legislative office.” How’s that worked out for the GOP? After the 2014 elections, the GOP still held 28 sets in the state assembly. After 2016 they were down to 25; after 2018, they were down to 20. After the 2014 election, the GOP still held 13 seats in the state senate, after 2018 they were down to 10, although they may pick one more in an upcoming special election. It doesn’t take a political consultant to read those numbers. The plane’s in a dive.

California’s GOP in the 21st Century: Cowardice Masquerading as Propriety

Blaming the obstreperous Trump for the GOP’s failures in California is easy. But when it wasn’t Trump, it was something else. Back in 2012, well before the age of Trump, Prop. 32 was defeated. For those who don’t recall, Prop. 32 would have required public employees to, oh my God!, affirmatively consent to having their union dues withheld, before California’s public sector unions could continue to ransack public employee payroll departments to the tune of at least $800 million per year.

Public sector unions spent over $73 million to defeat Prop. 32, and its defeat happened to coincide with a particularly poor performance by the GOP in several California races. What did the consultants claim? They said that the presence of Prop. 32 on the ballot galvanized the opposition. That it caused higher turnout among pro-union democrats. They blamed Prop. 32, instead of their own, tepid, expensive campaigns, for the failures of the GOP that year.

And what of Prop. 32’s campaign strategy? During that campaign, a supporter with sources highly placed in the Democratic party, delivered a confidential memo to the Prop. 32 campaign. In that memo, Democratic strategists acknowledged that their deepest fear was that the Prop. 32 campaign would tell voters the truth: California’s public sector unions are running the state into the ground. These unions won’t budge on pensions which are bankrupting the state, and they’ve destroyed the public schools. But did the GOP consultants, who the Prop. 32 donors demanded take over the Prop. 32 campaign, pay attention to this opportunity?

No. They didn’t. Apparently it would have been unseemly to actually fight to win. Instead, in an acrimonious meeting with the insurgents who had beaten the odds and gotten Prop. 32 onto the ballot, they declared the campaign would be cast as “campaign finance reform.” While technically one could argue that Prop. 32 was about campaign finance reform, everyone knew it was really about public sector unions. So the unions successfully branded the campaign as “Paycheck Deception,” instead of what it was, “Paycheck Protection,” and proceeded to outspend and out maneuver Prop. 32’s proponents.

You can go all the way back to the special election of 2005 to find examples of California’s GOP tepidity. It’s easy now to forget the excitement incoming Governor Schwarzenegger generated among the GOP faithful in California. Here was a candidate, as far removed from the establishment as Trump was a decade later, sitting in the guest’s chair, telling Jay Leno and half of America that “it’s the unions that are breaking California, and I’m going to terminate them.” And he tried for a full legislative season, during his first year as Governor, and he got nowhere. So in 2005 he took his case to the people, filing four initiatives – a balanced budget, redistricting reform, lengthened evaluation period for teacher tenure, and paycheck protection. The consultants, what a surprise, talked him out of a fifth – pension reform. And what happened?

There Schwarzenegger was, on television again, saying it was up to the people to save California. But he said it by himself. Alone. Where was California’s GOP during that entire election season? Instead of tapping into the populist momentum that had put Schwarzenegger into office, and giving it voice, most of them were running away from Schwarzenegger as fast as they could. Nobody who condemns Schwarzenegger for later pivoting left should forget that back in 2005, while the unions spent well over $100 million to defeat his initiatives, the GOP and its donors did not step up to match them in money or, more importantly, in their tone. They went to their safe spaces, protected their safe seats, and continued as the minority party, the dwindling opposition. Bleating haplessly. Losing.

These are the people who run California’s GOP. They’ve lost their mid level donors because mid-level donors can’t afford to support, over and over again, tepid, losing campaigns. They’ve lost most of their big donors because big donors would rather move their money into states where they can win. And as of Sunday, February 24th, they’ve lost their grassroots support. That part is probably just fine; political consultants working for California’s GOP don’t care much for the grassroots. The nice consultants – most of them – view grassroots activists with bemused tolerance. Others view them as an annoyance. On February 24th, they were more than a nuisance, they were a threat, crushed with moderate difficulty. Tragedy averted.

But the plane is still in a nosedive.

An Agenda to Make California’s GOP Relevant Again

What California’s GOP elite doesn’t seem to appreciate is that they have nothing to lose. They’ve lost every battleground district. The Democrats are going to do whatever they want in the legislature. Corporate interests are cultivating competing factions among the Democrats. All the smart money is with the Democrats, because the Republicans don’t matter anymore. Instead of doing the bidding of the handful of remaining donors, and the consultants they control, California’s GOP should seize this opportunity. Does Jessica Patterson have the convictions, the courage, the independence, and the vision to do that? To take that risk? This is a tremendous moment.

How often does any organization have the chance to experiment wildly, to try something radical, to risk everything, because they have nothing to lose? That’s what faces California’s GOP today. Finding a pilot who will give the plane a soft landing, or prolong the time until the crash, accomplishes nothing. Push the throttle. Pull some Gs. Stress the airframe. Take a chance. Because otherwise you’re dead.

Trump, for all his tactless bombast and alarming disregard for convention in almost all things, has stimulated political engagement at a level not seen in the last fifty years. Trump’s ability to challenge the premises of America’s uni-party elite on the issues of trade, immigration, foreign interventions, and “climate change,” along with his disregard for the pieties of libertarians and socialists, and his indifference to the encroachments of political correctness – all this may eventually be recognized as having had an extremely healthy impact on America at a critical time. California’s GOP insurgents recognize this. California’s GOP elites do not.

There are issues specific to California that can – at the risk of appropriating a phrase that may offend the clean limbed, manicured elites with guilt by association – “make California great again.” It is not necessary for California’s GOP to select all of these issues. They can pick and choose. Any one of them has the potential to be of transformative value with California’s voters. All of them address the greatest inequity that Californians confront, but never solve – the criminally high, utterly contrived, scandalously avoidable, punitive cost-of-living in this state.

To make California affordable again, a new, unafraid, assertive California GOP would have to rethink its ideological underpinnings. It would have to violate many socialist and libertarian taboos in favor of pragmatic choices reminiscent of 1950’s California, when vast sums of government funds were applied with an efficiency that makes mockery of today’s tangle of bureaucratic delays and interminable lawsuits.

For example. it isn’t heresy to use government funds, from bonds or operating budgets, to subsidize infrastructure. What’s needed, however, is a determination to set priorities that benefit the people of California, and a willingness to fight through waves of endless litigation to score precedent setting court victories. Doing this will help ensure that most of the money spent in subsequent projects will go to people who operate heavy equipment, instead of most of it paying people who sit in front of keyboards. Some of these priorities might themselves be heretical, or anathema to special interests, but here goes….

Education

Enact school choice. Don’t just fight a rear guard action protecting the beleaguered charter schools. Approve school vouchers and allow competition between traditional public schools, charters, parochial schools, and private schools. Quit tiptoeing around this issue. California’s public schools are a ridiculous mess. Turn the state into a laboratory for education, and let parents choose which schools their children will attend. A lot of pedagogical debates would be settled pronto, if principals and teachers were able to run their schools any which way they wanted, yet were held absolutely accountable by the parents.

Enforce the Vergara reforms so it is easier to retain quality public school teachers and easier to fire the incompetent ones.

Offer vocational training in the trades as an option for high school students after age 15, including private sector funded apprenticeships for high school credit. Look to the European systems for examples.

Restore the balance in California’s colleges and universities so that the ratio of faculty to administrators is 2-to-1, instead of the current ratio that allows administrators often to outnumber teachers.

End all discrimination and base college admissions purely on merit. Expand STEM curricula so it represents 50 percent of college majors instead of the current 20 percent. In all publicly funded institutions of higher education, fold all of ethnic and gender “studies” majors into the traditional fields of history and sociology. Consolidate these majors and reduce the number of enrollments to make room for more STEM enrollments.

Get rid of all of the horribly misguided campus “safe spaces” and other malevolent hate-nurturing segregationist boondoggles. Stop appeasing the professional race hustlers. Tell the truth to people of color – California is the best place in the world to thrive, California is a tolerant, diverse society, and all this victim mongering will not make society better and will not make you successful or happy. Say this loud and proud and never back down. Fire the entire diversity bureaucracy. Forthwith.

Criminal Justice and Immigration

Restructure the penal system to make it easier for prisoners to perform useful public services. For example. along with working the fire lines during fire season, they could work all year clearing dead trees out of California’s forests. Use high-tech monitoring devices to reduce costs. Reserve current prisons only for the truly incorrigible.

Support comprehensive federal immigration reform that includes merit based legal immigration, and attenuates chain migration. Support something, anything, that squelches illegal immigration. If that’s not a border wall, then push for stronger employer verification. Quit agreeing with the Democrats. This is not a “manufactured problem.” It is not in the interests of American citizens, especially in low income communities, to continue to allow the entry of unskilled immigrants – legal or illegal – and the only people who don’t accept this are either denying basic economics or they are part of a special interest group. Come to some reasonable accommodation with ICE.

Transportation

Add at least one lane to every major interstate in California, and upgrade and resurface all state highways. Widen and upgrade roads up and down the state. Kill High Speed Rail.

Begin investigating and facilitating private sector rollout of next generation transportation solutions, including coordinating development of aerial taxi corridors as well as high speed “hyperlanes” for next generation smart electric cars. Prepare for the advent of flying cars, self driving cars, share cars, ride hailing, micro-transit companies, and high speed cars.

Water

Complete plant upgrades so that 100 percent of California’s sewage is reused, even treated to potable quality. Kill the Delta Tunnel(s) and do seismic upgrades on the Delta levees instead – that will have to be done regardless. Build a hatchery to replenish Delta Smelt.

Unlock water markets. If farmers had the right to sell their water allotments without risking losing their historical water rights, municipalities would never have shortages of water. It’s truly that simple, because California’s total urban water consumption – all of it, residential, commercial, industrial – is less than 7 million acre feet per year, whereas farmers in California consume on average over 30 million acre feet per year.

Pass legislation to streamline approval of the proposed desalination plant in Huntington Beach, and fast-track applications for additional desalination plants, especially in Los Angeles.

Spend the entire proceeds of the $7 billion water bond, passed overwhelmingly by Californians in 2014, on storage. Build the Los Banos Grandes, Sites, and Temperance Flat reservoirs, adding over 5.0 million acre feet of storage to the California Water Project. Support federal efforts to raise Shasta Dam. Pass aggressive legislation and fund aggressive legal actions and counteractions, to lower costs and enable completion of these projects in under five years (which is all the time it used to take to complete similar projects).

Work towards a grand bargain on water policy where environmentalists accept a few more reservoirs and desalination plants in exchange for plentiful water allocations to threatened ecosystems, farmers pay more for water in exchange for undiminished quantities, and taxpayers bear the burden of some new debt in exchange for permanent access to affordable, secure, and abundant water.

Energy

Permit slant drilling to access 12 trillion cubic feet of natural gas deposits from land-based rigs along the Southern California coast. Build an LNG terminal off the coast in Ventura County to export California’s natural gas to foreign markets. Permit development of the Monterey Shale formation to extract oil and gas. Permit construction of new natural gas power plants.

Promote nuclear power as a solution that not only makes the dawning electric age – from electric cars to rampant, exponentially multiplying bitcoin mining operations – utterly feasible. Nuclear power is only costly because permits and regulations and insurance premiums (mostly to insure against the cost of lawsuits, not actual hazardous calamities) are artificially elevated. Retrofit and reopen San Onofre. Keep Diablo Canyon on line and add capacity. Permit construction of “generation 3+” nuclear power plants and prototype micro-reactors.

Housing and the Homeless

Unlock open land for development. Quit acting like there’s not a single square mile of open space that isn’t sacred to the environment. California has over 25,000 square miles of cattle ranch land. If just 20% of that land were developed, California’s urban footprint would double. Enough already. Then subsidize practical new public infrastructure (i.e., roads, not “light rail”) throughout new regions opened up for land development.

Repeal the 2006 “Global Warming Solutions Act” and “Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act” of 2008 and make it easy for developers to build homes on the suburban and exurban fringes, instead of just “in-fill” that destroys existing neighborhoods. Cancel the war on the single family dwelling, and allow developers (or in some cases even require them) to build homes with large yards again. Repeal excessive building codes such as mandatory photovoltaic roof panels. Create a regulatory environment that encourages private investment in new housing developments instead of discouraging it.

Allow police to enforce vagrancy laws, even if it means expensive corrective litigation going all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Build inexpensive tent cities for the homeless. Some cities in California have already had success with this tactic. The corrupt and futile opposite extreme is to construct “permanent supportive housing” which in Los Angeles has cost over $400,000 per apartment unit.

Pensions and Infrastructure

Require California’s public employee pension funds to invest a minimum of 10 percent of their assets in infrastructure projects as noted above. They could issue fixed rate bonds or take equity positions in the revenue-producing projects, or a combination of both. This would immediately unlock approximately $80 billion in construction financing to rebuild California’s infrastructure. At the same time, save the pension systems by striking down the “California Rule” that prevents meaningful pension reform.

Once the California Rule is abolished, prospectively reduce pension multipliers to pre-1999 levels for all future work for all employees, existing as well as new hires. That, along with defending the reforms of PEPRA, might be all it would take.

Vision and Leadership Will Save California’s Republicans

The establishment GOP fought off an insurgency on February 24. Their new chairman, Jessica Patterson, called for all the factions to join together and work as a team. But until California’s GOP is willing to embrace bold policies that will offer California’s struggling middle and low income communities opportunities for upwards mobility, they will remain irrelevant. It isn’t enough to “join together.” It isn’t enough to secure some reliable flow of donor support. To thrive, a political party needs to have a distinct vision of the future, a policy agenda that will achieve that future, and leaders that understand and can express that vision. Those qualities are more important than money. Meg Whitman proved that.

An important reason Democrats win is because they invariably speak with moral authority, whether they deserve it or not. But the moral worth of Democratic policies is shallow. In the name of earth justice and social justice, they have made California the most inhospitable place in America for low and middle income residents. The Democrats are incapable of compromising on their rhetoric or their policies. They are locked into the ideological straight-jackets of climate change hysteria and identity politics. The Republicans must demonstrate their ability to find the balance that Democrats are incapable of finding. They must promote and enact policies, some examples of which have just been described, that challenge some of the premises of environmentalism and social justice. There is a moral value to providing opportunity by making California affordable. There is a moral value to instilling pride by abandoning race and gender preferences. There is a moral value to embracing policies of abundance – by turning the private sector loose to increase the supply of housing, energy, water, et. al. – rather than creating politically contrived artificial scarcity.

One very encouraging sign at California’s state GOP convention of February 2019 was how diverse the attendees have become. Democrats should find this very alarming, because the so-called “people of color” at the GOP convention were not part of the rent seeking coalition that Democrats have built, looking for reparations and entitlements to compensate for their supposedly disadvantaged status. These were confident, self-sufficient individuals, who valued the opportunity to compete and succeed on their own merits. There were hundreds of Latinos, Sikhs, Indian Americans, African Americans, Asians. More of them than ever, they came to Sacramento to be among fellow Republicans. This should not only trouble Democrats, perhaps it should also trouble establishment Republicans, because nearly all of them were enthusiastic Trump supporters.

If you were at the GOP convention last weekend, you could have talked to a Latino whose cousin has a ranch in the Rio Grande Valley. He would have told you why we need border security. You also could have talked to an African American grandmother who has watched hope return to members of her extended family, because they have good jobs in the Trump economy. These people are proud Americans. They don’t want to be patronized or appeased, and more and more, they see right through the Democrat’s game. They want the tough truth. Because honest hard work, reckoned by immutable and evenly applied standards, is the only true pathway to achievement. They are waiting for Republican leadership to fight to make California great again, not attempt to become Democrat-lite.

The themes that will capture new voters can’t just be marketed as “bold.” They have to be bold. There is an alternative vision, embracing solutions, not just identifying problems. It can incorporate some or all of the agenda just set forth. But it will mean launching a sustained assault on the government unions, the extreme environmentalists and their allies, the plaintiff’s bar, and the social justice fanatics that have taken over public education. It will require challenging not their lofty idealism or their proclaimed altruism, but their premises and their methods.

No, we are not running out of land, energy or water, and yes, we will entitle vast tracts of open land for development and build infrastructure including dams and desalination plants and encourage private sector investment partners.

No, if we don’t go “100 percent renewable” by 2050 the planet will not burn up, and yes, we will develop natural gas reserves and build nuclear power plants.

No, we will no longer admit unqualified students to colleges and universities, and yes, we will establish uniform admissions requirements, reserving our enrollments for the finest students in the world.

No, we will not tolerate mediocre results in our public schools, and yes, we will fight for school choice, vouchers, charters, and eliminate union work rules that prevent dismissing or laying off bad teachers.

No, we will not allow pensions to bankrupt the state, and yes, we will restore pension benefits going forward to pre-1999 formulas, and we will require California’s pension funds to invest at least 10 percent of their assets in California infrastructure projects.

For every no, there is a yes. For every problem, there is a solution. And the moral worth of these solutions must be asserted unflinchingly. These solutions will create opportunity for all Californians. Fighting for these solutions is risky. It will invite a furious response from the entire Democratic machine. But it could work. And it’s the right thing to do.

Maybe it’s time for California’s establishment GOP, including the donors and consultants who have retained their power over the party, to acknowledge the things Trump’s done or is trying to do that make sense. By acknowledging the value in every good idea, no matter where it comes from, they might not lose their souls. In fact, it might be their salvation.

Jessica Patterson was endorsed by every living ex-chairman of California’s state GOP. Many influential observers expressed gratitude that the “pale, male, stale” California GOP was going to elect a woman to pilot the plane. But when the plane is in a nose dive, everybody on that plane, no matter what their race or gender, wants the best pilot to fly the plane. If the best pilot is a purple, non-binary alien from the planet Remulak, that pilot will be pushed into the cockpit. It’s too soon to know how Jessica Patterson will run California’s Republican party. The fact that she was endorsed by the people who have managed its decline is not helpful. The fact that she is “not Travis Allen, Trump supporter,” is not helpful. Hopefully she will embrace policies, and recruit leaders, who will change the trajectory.

Do not play it safe, Ms. Patterson. Safe equals death. This is an emergency. To paraphrase Auden, consultants are not wanted now, put out every one; pack up the pollsters and dismantle the focus groups. And to extend Anton’s Flight 93 metaphor into the fantastic realm of star fighters rather than airliners, “use the Force, Luke.”

 *   *   *

Defining Appropriate Housing Development in California

/by

One of the most frustrating contradictions inherent in the policies being enacted by California’s one-party state goes something like this: We are inviting the welfare cases of America and the expatriates of the world to move here, while simultaneously enacting environmental policies that make it extremely time consuming and expensive to build anything.

No wonder there’s a “housing crisis.” Until demand decreases, or supply increases, housing in California will remain unaffordable for most of its residents. But don’t expect demand to slacken any time soon. The political consensus in favor of increasing California’s population has a strong moral justification – why shouldn’t the wealthy, innovative, compassionate people of California be willing to share their wealth with millions more people who are less fortunate? But there are other less high-minded upsides to population growth and obstacles to new housing.

Currently, real estate prices and rents are on the rise, favoring investors and landlords. Banks enjoy higher lending volumes, while borrowers enjoy greater liquidity, however precarious, as the property bubble offers them more collateral as security. The government agencies profit from higher property tax assessments and higher capital gains collections on sales of real estate. Large land developers that have the political clout and financial heft to build housing despite the many obstacles, enjoy unusually high margins that they could never achieve in a normal competitive market. Finally, as an expanding population increases demand for housing, at the same time public school districts can increase attendance-based revenue – which will make it somewhat less urgent that they reform their union work rules and spending priorities.

Efforts by California’s policymakers to increase the supply of housing have to be viewed in this context. They want to increase the supply of housing. Yet they also want to keep happy the special interests that pay for their political campaigns. Therefore, strict – and very self-serving – parameters are likely to limit what new laws are enacted to stimulate new housing. For example:

Negative Consequences of Special Interest Defined Development in California

(1) Additional open land outside of urban boundaries will remain off limits to development, in order to ensure that existing municipal jurisdictions are able to retain access to the new property revenues that will accrue to new stocks of residential and commercial real estate. This will be justified as necessary to protect the environment.

(2) Most obstacles to housing construction will remain in place – in particular, excessive fees to government agencies and onerous CEQA requirements. This will ensure that only the most powerful corporate and financial entities will be able to take advantage of new opportunities to build housing, while cutting out the small landowners and developers.

(3) Major land developers will be given financial incentives by state and local government entities to build “affordable housing” and eliminate “blight,” but these incentives will be out of reach for smaller landowners and developers.

(4) In order to keep the real estate asset bubble fully inflated, housing prices will only fall marginally as development occurs, which pretty much helps nobody, but massive programs of taxpayer funded rent control and rent subsidies will be enacted to make up the difference for qualifying low income families.

(5) “Densification” will be imposed on residential neighborhoods, with the primary victims being any neighborhoods that are situated close to bus stops or light rail stations. Developers will be permitted to build multi-story, multi-unit buildings on small residential lots and will not be required to offer parking; all of this will greatly increase their profits.

(6) Building code requirements will relentlessly increase in the name of energy efficiency and safety, with the practical effect being to lock out small landowners and developers from being able to afford to upgrade their properties or develop new properties; these same more stringent regulations will not seriously impact large development corporations and financial investors.

It is wrong to be entirely cynical about the laws that are coming. Slamming the door completely shut on newcomers to California would be cold hearted, unpopular and probably cause more economic harm than good. Zealously enforcing residential zoning densities that were put in place several decades ago would be overly sentimental, ignoring the disruptive adaptations and radical transformations that have defined and enriched urban life since settlement began. Completely embracing a new wave of suburban sprawl would needlessly eat up more open land than a more balanced policy approach might cost. While the new building code mandates are now excessive (if not ridiculous), nobody wants to go back to toilets with seven gallon tanks, or insulation with an R value of 2.0.

Unfortunately, balance is not what we’re finding in the new laws. Last year, the State Senate considered a bill – SB 827 – that would have removed local zoning control and allowed multifamily housing to be built in well-established single family neighborhoods. This would have allowed those multifamily housing projects to be as tall as 55 feet. Against heavy opposition, SB 827 never made it out of committee, but this year it’s back. The new legislation, again sponsored by Democrat Scott Wiener, is SB 50.

Reading through the text of SB 50 grants insight into just how entrenched the collusion is between public officials and developers seeking subsidies and waivers. Consider this introductory language:

“Existing law, known as the Density Bonus Law, requires, when an applicant proposes a housing development within the jurisdiction of a local government, that the city, county, or city and county provide the developer with a density bonus and other incentives or concessions for the production of lower income housing units or for the donation of land within the development if the developer, among other things, agrees to construct a specified percentage of units for very low, low-, or moderate-income households or qualifying residents.”

In plain English, the “Density Bonus Law” forces taxpayers to subsidize not only developers who are already making more money by being allowed to pack more units on less land, but also low and “moderate” income households who will occupy a percentage of housing units. Bring ’em in! Paying artificially high prices for housing while also paying for someone else’s inflated rent will never wear thin with taxpayers.

The Coalition to Preserve LA, “a citywide movement of concerned residents who believe in open government, people-oriented planning, equitable housing and environmental stewardship of Los Angeles,” produced this summary of SB 50.

Densification a la SB 50:

  • Forces cities to allow luxury towers in single-family areas.
  • Upzones thousands of beautiful streets to 6- and 8-story apartments if an area is “jobs-rich with good schools.”
  • Upzones thousands of single-family areas within a 1/4 mile of a frequent bus stop or 1/2 mile of a rail station.
  • Lets developers sue any city that tries to stop them.
  • Cuts parking to zero, claiming rich residents “use transit.”
  • Falsely claims to protect renters & sensitive communities.
  • Strips protections of many HPOZs and historic buildings.
  • Lets developers wipe out setbacks, backyards, green belts.

For millions of Californians who live in bucolic suburbs, with tree lined streets and spacious private yards, SB 50 unchecked is going to be a holocaust. It will utterly destroy their way of life. Many victims will not have the ability to move. The greatest insult of all: Their taxes will be paying for it. And as a “solution,” it is completely unnecessary. There are better ways, that leave established neighborhoods intact and cost taxpayers nothing.

Reforming the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA)

There are two ways to mitigate the impact of CEQA, the law that requires “environmental impact reports” on any land development in California, including “climate change” impact along with a host of metastasizing additional requirements. The first, being practiced increasingly, is to grant CEQA waivers to politically connected developers that are proposing projects deemed politically correct. The second, far preferable solution, is to fundamentally rewrite CEQA.

An excellent summary of how to reform CEQA appeared in the Los Angeles Times in Sept. 2017, written by Byron De Arakal, vice chairman of the Costa Mesa Planning Commission. It mirrors other summaries offered by other informed advocates for reform and can be summarized as follows:

  • End duplicative lawsuits: Put an end to the interminable, costly legal process by disallowing serial, duplicative lawsuits challenging projects that have completed the CEQA process, have been previously litigated and have fulfilled any mitigation orders.
  • Full disclosure of identity of litigants: Require all entities that file CEQA lawsuits to fully disclose their identities and their environmental or, increasingly, non-environmental interest.
  • Outlaw legal delaying tactics: California law already sets goals of wrapping up CEQA lawsuits — including appeals — in nine months, but other court rules still leave room for procedural gamesmanship that push CEQA proceedings past a year and beyond. Without harming the ability of all sides to prepare their cases, those delaying tactics could be outlawed.
  • Prohibit rulings that stop entire project on single issue: Judges can currently toss out an entire project based on a few deficiencies in environmental impact report. Restraints can be added to the law to make “fix-it ticket” remedies the norm, not the exception.
  • Loser pays legal fees: Currently, the losing party in most California civil actions pays the tab for court costs and attorney’s fees, but that’s not always the case with CEQA lawsuits. Those who bring CEQA actions shouldn’t be allowed to skip out of court if they lose without having to pick up the tab of the prevailing party.

Unfortunately, California’s new governor, Gavin Newsom, while acknowledging problems with CEQA, has put responsibility for recommending changes to CEQA in the hands of a task force consisting of labor union officials and land developers. It will be a surprise if a group dominated by these two special interests will be capable of coming up with the solutions recommended by De Arakal and others.

Principles of Appropriate Development in California

There is a moral imperative to increase the supply of housing in California. As noted, California’s policymakers have awakened to the fact that construction of new housing is not nearly meeting demand for new housing. But the way they’re going about stimulating housing construction is flawed. It will not appreciably lower the cost of housing and it will needlessly enrich special interests. Here are some ways housing could be more appropriately developed in California:

(1) Eliminate all forms of government subsidies, incentives or waivers to any developers. All players in the housing industry should be unsubsidized, and playing by the same set of rules.

(2) Stop requiring diverse types of housing within the same development or neighborhood. Mixing high-density, subsidized housing into residential neighborhoods devalues the existing housing, and this social engineering is unfair to existing residents who have paid a high price to live there.

(3) Roll back the more extreme building codes. Requiring 100 percent of homes to be “energy neutral” or include rooftop photovoltaic arrays, for example, greatly increase the cost of homes.

(4) Lower the fees on building permits for new housing and housing remodels. Doing this might require pension reform, since that’s where all extra revenue goes, but until permitting costs are lowered, only billionaire developers can afford to build.

(5) Speed up the permitting process. It can take years to get permits approved in California. Again, the practical effect of this failure is that only major developers can afford to build.

(6) Reform the California Environmental Quality Act as noted. Better yet, scrap it altogether. Federal laws already provide adequate environmental safeguards.

(7) Make it easier to extract building materials in-state. California, spectacularly rich in natural resources, has to import lumber and aggregate from as far away as Canada. This not only greatly increases construction costs, it’s hypocritical.

(8) Increase the supply of land for private development of housing. Currently only five percent of California is urbanized. There are thousands of square miles of non-farm, non critical habitat that could be opened up for massive land development.

(9) Engage in practical, appropriate zoning for infill and densification in urban cores, but only after also increasing the supply of open land for housing, and only while continuing to respect the integrity of established residential neighborhoods.

California has unaffordable housing because extreme environmentalists have imposed an agenda onto state policymakers that, unfortunately, dovetails perfectly with the agenda of special interests – in particular, public sector unions and bureaucrats, and large corporate land developers and construction contractors. This coalition is also responsible for the related problem of neglected infrastructure in California. Until California’s voters wake up and break this immoral, self-serving coalition, there is little hope that housing prices in particular, or the cost-of-living in general, will come down in California.

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Policy Center.

 *   *   *