Happy New Year! From all of us here at the California Policy Center, we hope you've had a Merry Christmas and happy holidays. This New Year provides extra reason to celebrate. Not only is 2020 finally over, but 2021 offers numerous opportunities to move California in a freer, more prosperous direction. CPC will seize these opportunities to reduce the power of government unions in order to expand economic and educational freedom for all Californians. Our work has continued over the holiday season, with the analyses featured below. Please give them a read over your long weekend.
A Happy New Year for California students? This week, Gov. Newsom announced a plan to get elementary school kids back in classrooms beginning in February. Backed by $2 billion in state aid ($450 per pupil), the plan calls for a phased approach prioritizing students in transitional kindergarten through second grade, those with disabilities, and those with limited access to technology at home. These groups have suffered most from the distant-learning schemes imposed by teachers unions. In announcing his plan, Gov. Newsom cited the consequences of closed classrooms that CPC has been broadcasting for more than half a year. Even Dr. Anthony Fauci recently noted that schools “seem to be doing better when it comes to the level of infection” than the community as a whole.
The science is settled: Teachers unions have used up a lot of political capital by keeping schools closed. Gov. Newsom implied he's been negotiating with them for months to reopen. As CPC Contributor Larry Sand writes in his latest analysis:
Unions are educations’ No. 1 bullies. They continuously point to “science” to support their lockdown stance, yet Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Robert Redfield asserts that “school is one of the safest places” for children. UNICEF maintains that “there is strong evidence that, with basic safety measures in place, the net benefits of keeping schools open outweigh the costs of closing them.” In October’s Great Barrington Declaration, world renowned scientists noted that keeping children out of school is a “grave injustice.”
California's year in review: On the latest episode of National Review's Radio Free California podcast, CPC President Will Swaim and board member David Bahnsen review pandemics, wildfires, utility regulation, school lockdowns, the fall and rise of Kamala Harris, Father Junipero Serra, San Francisco, blackouts, Gavin Newsom, Kobe Bryant, George Floyd, porn-star licensing, on-and-off plastic bag bans, Elon Musk, Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf, John Wayne, John Sutter, Walter “Big Train” Johnson, the Book of Exoduses, and much (much) more.
California's political realignment: In a tour de force this holiday season, CPC contributor Edward Ring presents a playbook for how supporters of limited government can regain political power in California to fix the state. He suggests focusing on four topics that have broad cross-party appeal: Fixing failing schools; modernizing infrastructure, including water and energy; addressing homelessness and housing; and reducing wildfires:
This is an agenda that will attract every parent of a K-12 student in California. It will attract business and labor interests who want economic growth. It will attract every family that wants to live in a home with a yard without having to go broke to do it. It will attract every person who doesn’t want to live with water rationing, or unreliable and expensive electricity, or endure clogged freeways. It will appeal to homeless advocates, if they’re honest about what needs to be done, and it will gain the passionate support of every resident of every community currently besieged by homeless encampments.
This agenda is not ideological, it is practical. It mingles libertarian solutions, such as using the private timber industry to solve the problem of forest fires, with government solutions, such as issuing general obligation bonds to guarantee abundant water.
Conservatives can offer freedom, enlightenment, prosperity, abundance, and safety – everything that progressive liberal ideology has taken from Californians. They can adopt a platform that embraces school vouchers, infrastructure investment and practical approaches to water, energy and transportation challenges, regulatory reform to stimulate urban expansion and affordable new suburbs, sensible and cost-effective solutions to the homeless crisis, and a revitalized timber industry to curb the risk of wildfires and create thousands of jobs.
Conservatives can offer solutions. They can be bold. They can go on the attack, on behalf of all Californians. And they can win, to everyone’s tremendous benefit.
The coming drought? Some experts suggest California may be heading back into a drought, which government officials will attempt to exploit for political reasons. Ed has two recent contributions that are required reading for Californians looking to inoculate themselves against coming government attempts to exploit water shortages to take away Californians' water (and other) rights.
The real reason everybody in California suffers from a high cost of living is extreme environmentalism, translated into laws that benefit the wealthy and connected, and impoverish everyone else...
Extreme environmentalists won’t allow any new water storage, preventing Californians from capturing more runoff from winter storms. Up and down the state, new dams that could guarantee Californians always have affordable and plentiful water are stopped by environmentalists. They won’t even allow desalination plants to be built on the coast, plants that could produce millions of acre feet of fresh water.
In the second, "Grassroots Group Fights for Common Sense Water Policies," he highlights how the history of California dating back to the earliest settlements has been characterized by periods of intense drought. He interviews Kristi Diener, a Central Valley farmer and head of “California Water for Food and People Movement." Diener started her movement for rational water policy after watching 27,000-acre feet of water get released into California’s Stanislaus River to save just 23 steelhead trout during the drought in 2015.
Epic interview for the Epoch Times: Ed discusses these themes and gives a great background of California's water situation in a recent video for the Epoch Times.
Golden State eyes on Peach State voters: California's political future will be influenced by what happens in the Georgia Senate runoff elections on Tuesday. If Democrats win both races, they will enjoy one-party rule of both houses of Congress and the presidency. In that case, they can pass pro-government union legislation at-will. At the top of their list will be a blue state bailout, rewarding California for its fiscal profligacy and big government. As Jon Coupal, head of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, writes in the OC Register:
Progressives could also force through major labor legislation that limits opportunities for freelance work and grants new powers to unions that could effectively undercut “right to work” laws in many states. Public sector unions would see their political wishes granted.
For advocates of school choice, full Democratic party control in D.C. would mean programs such as vouchers, tax credits and charter schools would be curtailed or eliminated entirely. These are programs that are effective in educating school-aged children, which is why they are so popular with parents, especially those in economically struggling neighborhoods. But school choice is a threat to dominant union control, so don’t expect any sympathy from Washington if Georgia is lost to progressives.
For transportation, expect that roads and highways will play second fiddle to mass transit and boondoggles like high-speed rail. In the years since Republicans have controlled at least one house of Congress, they have effectively shut down any further funding of California’s failed high-speed rail project. If the Senate flips to Democrat control, expect a massive infusion of federal bailout money to the “train to nowhere.
Only divided government can provide a check on government unions' New Year's resolutions.
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