[COMMENTARY] Rebuilding infrastructure will help California thrive

California is the epicenter of innovative technologies. We take pride in being the home of Silicon Valley and the birthplace of groundbreaking products.

But most of us forget that we need strong infrastructure systems to ensure we can continue such success and keep pushing the envelope.

I know — in our digital era of smartphones being able to broadcast our every selfie, the methodical process of climbing out of our infrastructure deficit is not the sexiest of topics.

But here’s the thing: The majority of California’s transportation and other infrastructure systems were built between the 1950s and the early 1970s — when California only had a population of 27 million and a much smaller, less diverse economy.

Today, California is home to more than 38 million people and projections show the population will grow to 50 million by 2040 — all of whom travel our roads, rails and airways for work, vacation and other activities. Californians currently register nearly 32 million vehicles per year and drive 324 billion miles annually.

These millions of Californians and much of the nation also rely on California’s infrastructure systems to quickly get local products such as fruits and vegetables to their supermarkets as well as import and export products through our state’s ports.

This is not to say that our state cannot accommodate growth — we can. But we need to ensure that our transportation, water delivery and freight systems are updated and strong enough to not only accommodate California’s residents, but also help them thrive.

Fortunately, Gov. Jerry Brown knows the critical status of our infrastructure and set aggressive goals to improve the existing deficit, such as pushing forward the nation’s first high-speed rail system, the Bay Delta Conservation Plan, and encouraging the Legislature to tackle the deferred maintenance of our roads and bridges by convening a special session.

The Legislature has started to make progress in the special session on a deal to tackle the billions in deferred roadway maintenance costs — which are currently estimated at $59 billion. With California being an international trade gateway, we must be able to move billions of dollars worth of goods and services across a massive state and through our international ports without our roadways and bridges falling apart.

Right now, the state’s current fuel excise tax — on which much of transportation funding depends — is sufficient to fund only $2.3 billion of work annually, leaving $5.7 billion in unfunded roadway repairs each year. California needs to find more reliable funding streams to repair and build out transportation corridors. By broadening the revenue streams and moving toward a model where all road users equitably pay their fair share, we will ensure our roadways are repaired, upgraded and expanded in a timely manner.

Via: Daily News

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HILLARY’S ‘PROGRESSIVE’ DEMISE

Under her deathly leadership a term loses all meaning and direction.

Barack Obama is the most “Progressive” of recent, and perhaps of all, American presidents. Indeed he is the only recent Democratic president rightly characterized as “Progressive” rather than just liberal.

But with massive increases in government debt and food stamp use, declines in labor force participation, the impending insolvency of the Social Security Disability Fund, relentless unemployment among African-Americans and deteriorating race relations, and by far the worst economic “recovery” in modern American history, one has to ask (in the sarcastic style of my Jewish grandma), “This is progress?!?”

It’s not just that things aren’t going well. It’s that they’re going particularly badly for those whom Progressives claim to care about most (the poor, minorities, the “working class”) while the rich get richer (in itself not a bad thing) and large companies succeed while small companies struggle and new business formation stagnates — a terrible situation in an economy that relies on small and new companies for job growth.

Conservatives have long fretted over Democrats controlling the political lexicon, causing words to mean — Humpty Dumpty style — what liberals say they mean, but we have consistently failed in changing the literal terms of the debate.

Following on Barack Obama’s dismal performance, Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and campaign offer the best opportunity in memory for Americans to reconsider the true meaning of the most fundamental word in the left’s rhetorical arsenal: Progressive.

Mrs. Clinton has yet to propose a truly new idea. Each of her few policy positions are regurgitations of populist pabulum that offer nothing innovative, nothing for Americans to get excited about, no hope to improve the lives of people anywhere on the income spectrum, and no future for our nation. In short, she is a perfect Progressive.

Hillary’s biggest “new” idea is to massively increase the capital gains tax rates and holding period for those Americans in the top income bracket — couples earning over $464,850 per year and individuals earning over $413,200 — creating six tax brackets with holding periods up to six years and confiscatory rates up to a jaw-dropping 43.8 percent.

Bloomberg and even the New York Times have trashed the plan as doing nothing more than making the tax code more complicated while not furthering Hillary’s stated goal of causing corporations and investors to become less short-term focused.

Beyond the feckless political pandering — can you smell Hillary’s fear of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren? — and economic idiocy of the plan, it’s remarkable that the wife of the man whose vaunted federal budget surplus occurred due to cutting the capital gains tax ratewould so aggressively champion the opposite policy.

Other Clintonian “progress” includes pandering to black voters about “voter suppression” through Voter ID laws even though a recent poll shows that more than three-quarters of Americans, including 58 percent of Democrats, continue to support having to show photo ID before voting. (Data are mixed about the actual impact of the laws on turnout among blacks and other voting groups.)

Of course if you pander to blacks, you have to pander to women as well. Hillary does that in the most predictable fashion, tweeting out the threadbare but mythical “outrage of so many women still earning less than men on the job.”

Hillary is also calling for the installation of half a billion new solar panels in the United States. No matter your view on the merits of solar power (you can count me among the skeptics regarding its value for utility-scale power generation), if this is what counts as innovative policy Mrs. Clinton must have a truly stunted imagination.

In a politically boneheaded statement given Clinton’s need for Silicon Valley’s checkbooks and millennials’ votes, she whines about “the on-demand or so-called ‘gig economy’… raising hard questions about workplace protections.” Actually, Hillary, it doesn’t raise any such hard questions and your union-driven crocodile tears don’t mask the anti-progress nature of your complaints.

Her comment related particularly to ride-sharing service Uber, which received another thinly veiled threat from Clinton: “I’ll crack down on bosses who exploit employees by mischaracterizing them as contractors…” No, Hillary, it’s fairly simple: I own a car. I want to give someone a ride to make a few extra bucks. I don’t need your “protection” and I’m not — and don’t want to be — an employee.

Hillary might offer us even more “progress” if she would answer more questions. But she’s a political greased pig, refusing to take a position on issues ranging from the Keystone XL pipeline, the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade treaty, and repealing Obamacare’s medical device tax.

When Hillary Clinton deigns to answer a question, or during one of her remarkably robotic and somnolent teleprompter speeches, she offers hackneyed and harmful policy prescriptions that, even if you’re of a moderately liberal mindset, must strike you as utterly uninspiring and representing anything but “progress.” In trying to be everything to everybody, she’s turning into nothing for anybody.

Soul-crushing big-government policies are, to coin a phrase, failed policies of the past. What’s really new — in the sense that it was abandoned long ago by American politicians of both major parties — is freedom. Freedom-based policies derive from trusting (as Progressives manifestly do not) that Americans are, can be, and prefer to be self-reliant and smart enough to make important and often difficult choices about our own lives and businesses without being nudged, much less shoved, by the Nanny State. More freedom… that would be real progress.

So why do conservatives, who are proposing creative, cost-saving, and freedom-enhancing solutions to a wide range of vexing public policy issues from poverty to education to health care to transportation funding, allow the regressive, bossy, mindless and uncreative left to maintain the mantle of “progressive”? I wish I knew.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign gives Republican candidates an opportunity to ask voters a simple question: If “Progressives” are lying about the very name of their movement, what else are they lying about? The answer, of course, is “nearly everything.”

Via: American Spectator

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[OPINION] Opinion: Fix state? Here are 16 ideas

Silicon Valley tycoon Tim Draper’s quixotic campaign to reassemble California into six new states didn’t go anywhere, so he shifted into soliciting ideas to “Fix California.”

Draper received 427 suggestions and narrowed them to a “stately 16” finalists, one of which will be the winner with “perhaps a chance to get on the 2016 California ballot.”

Some of the 16 are relatively simple procedural changes, such as making the Legislature’s activities more transparent or placing more information on candidate and ballot measures in an online voter guide.

Others are more significant changes with the potential for broader impact, such as allowing ballot measures to qualify via electronic signatures, or giving voters access to public funds to electronically donate to candidates or parties of their choice.

But a few would, if enacted, truly transform California – perhaps not as much as reconfiguring it into six states, but fundamentally nevertheless.

One echoes Draper’s six-state notion by congealing California’s 58 counties into six “super counties.”

Another would replace the current two-house Legislature of 80 Assembly members and 40 senators with a 120-member unicameral Legislature, à la Nebraska.

A third would create thousands of “neighborhood legislative districts,” thus expanding the Legislature from 120 members to 14,000 members, who would then elect 120 members of a “working committee.”

The most far-reaching proposal, however, would replace California’s governmental structure with the parliamentary system used by most of the world’s democracies, with the governor the leader of the Legislature’s majority party or a coalition, like the British prime minister.

All of the 16 are interesting, certainly, and demonstrate, if nothing else, that many Californians sense – accurately – that such a large and complex state is not being governed as well as it should be.

Some of the lesser proposals, such as forcing the Legislature to comply with the same transparency laws it imposes on local governments, are just common sense. And if we can file our income tax returns electronically, we should be able to vote and sign petitions that way.

Fundamental structural changes are more difficult, but it’s high time that we consider them. We have a system that hasn’t changed in more than 150 years, other than becoming more infuriatingly complex and unresponsive. Nor have we changed a county boundary in more than a century.

Six counties may be too few, but replacing counties with perhaps a dozen regional governments that would absorb thousands of single-purpose special districts makes a lot of sense.

Our Legislature is, believe it or not, too small. Some state Senate districts are hundreds of miles long and all have nearly a million constituents, which reduces them to blips on a computer screen. A unicameral Legislature with perhaps 300 members would be better, and we ought to at least consider a parliamentary system, which could be both more empowering and more accountable, with politicians less able to pass the buck.

There are no magic solutions, but California has always been willing to embrace progressive change, and it’s time we made some fundamental reforms in the way we are governed.

Via: Sacramento Bee

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Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/dan-walters/article27050479.html#storylink=cpy

Plan To Split California Into Six States Gains Ground

Los Angeles (United States) (AFP) - A plan to divide California into six separate US states is closer to making it on to a November ballot, with organizers gaining approval to collect signatures.

The seemingly far-fetched initiative, sponsored by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper, claims "political representation of California's diverse population and economies has rendered the state nearly ungovernable."

And on Tuesday, the California Secretary of State's office gave the movement a boost, saying that proponents "may begin collecting petition signatures."

At least 807,615 voters -- representing eight percent of the total ballots cast for governor in the 2010 election -- will need to sign the petition by July 18 to make it on to the ballot.

The proposal aims to split the state -- America's most populous with around 38 million inhabitants -- into "six smaller state governments, while preserving the historical boundaries of the various counties, cities and towns."

In 2012, California was tied with Russia and Italy -- all with a GDP of approximately $2.0 trillion -- for eighth place in world GDP rankings, according to the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy.

The proposal would create a state out of Silicon Valley, home to tech giants Google, Facebook and Apple. It would also create South California, which would include Hollywood and the US entertainment industry.

West California, Central California, North California, and Jefferson in the most northern part of the state, would also go it alone.

According to the proposal, voters overwhelming approved dividing California in two in 1859, but Congress did not act due to the Civil War.

Draper, who has funded more than 400 companies including Skype and Baidu, is founder of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson in Menlo Park, California.

Via: Yahoo News

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Facebook's Zuckerberg says immigration reform 'biggest civil rights issue of our time'

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg suggested Sunday that U.S. immigration reform is “one of the biggest civil rights issues of our time.”

The 29-year-old billionaire, who has recently taken a more active role in calling for immigration reform, made the comment on ABC’s “This Week.” And he was immediately challenged by the interviewer, who suggested many Americans would likely disagree that providing a path to citizenship for some of the 11 million people living in this country illegally is a civil rights issue.

“There are a lot of misconceptions about that,” Zuckerberg responded. “A lot of them came here because they just want to work. They want to help out their families and they want to contribute.”

Zuckerberg recently founded the group FWD.us with other Silicon Valley leaders “to promote policies to keep the United States and its citizens competitive in a global economy,” according to its website.

His efforts follow the Democrat-controlled Senate earlier this year passing sweeping bipartisan reform legislation backed by President Obama.

Such legislation has stalled in the House, where Republican leaders want a more step-by-step approach to reform that begins with border security.

Via: Fox News Politics

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Silicon Valley: ObamaCare Website ‘State-Of-The-Art Incompetence’

According to New York magazine, "one tech worker quipped that a Stanford computer-science class could have built healthcare.gov for a thousandth of the reported $400 million–plus budget." 

Matt Mullenweg, the co-developer of WordPress, said the Canadian firm that oversaw the healthcare.gov website received "more money than all the revenue of most Silicon Valley start-ups combined."

Eric Ries, described as a member of the "Silicon Valley's cognoscenti," said Healthcare.gov's failures represented "state-of-the-art incompetence."

Via: Breitbart

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Faces of meth: ‘Five years of Obama’ edition [SLIDESHOW]

Back in 2008 it was fun. Daring. Exciting. The rush was unbelievable. The visuals? Man, this dope is like the best parts of coke and acid. Plus all the cool kids were doing it, but, like, for real — not in a cliche way, ya know?

Young guys and pretty girls from Silicon Valley. All the actors and stuff. Hell, it even made old fogies like Kerry and Reid feel young. We all remember how hard it was to convince Hillary to give it a try, but after she’d had a hit, man, it was like she was flying. Just untouchable.

But things turned south quick. The high was fleeting. It just couldn’t take anyone to those soaring heights anymore. We were all left chasing the hit, never quite catching it.

And before long things were getting desperate. Bad things were happening. Bad men started getting violent in Mexico. Stevens got killed. People started talking about war.

Now everything is different. The smiles are gone. Let these pictures be a warning. Stay away from that dope.

We were liberals once.

And young.

Via: Daily Caller

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