Victor Davis Hanson is a resident scholar at the Hoover Institute and lifelong Californian from the Central Valley. He recently spoke at a conference of Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association members. For the naïve who want an optimistic presentation about how great California is, VDH is not your guy. He gives an accurate, if depressing, view […]
The deadline for local governments to place tax hikes on the November ballot is rapidly approaching. This is why political consultants have descended like locusts on city councils, county boards of supervisors and school boards pitching their services. Their objective? Fool, er, convince, voters to approve even higher levels of taxation. These consultants are nothing […]
Just a year after Proposition 13’s passage in 1978, California voters approved another taxpayer rights initiative called the Gann Spending Limit. Unlike Proposition 13, which was a direct limit on taxation, Gann was an attempt to limit government spending. It limited the growth of state and local government expenditures to a base-year level adjusted annually […]
Examples of hypocrisy and double standards in California politics are too numerous to count. But some stand out more than others. Two bills, both designated as “job killers” by the California Chamber of Commerce, would require companies to hand over to the government more data about pay and internal practices. Under AB 2095 (Kalra; D-San […]
By Jon Coupal and Angélica Salceda Gov. Gavin Newsom has proudly proclaimed that “California does democracy like nowhere else in the world.” But as he warned, we cannot take our democracy for granted. The pandemic has changed how we do business: segments of the private world now operate remotely without the need for face-to-face interactions. […]
Everyone knows that the Constitution protects free speech under the First Amendment. But many may not realize that the First Amendment also protects commercial speech, such as advertisements. Even though the level of protection afforded to commercial speech is less than that given to other kinds of speech, especially political speech, businesses still have rights […]
With the state government of California sitting on a budget surplus that exceeds $50 billion, Sacramento politicians can’t bring themselves to return a few dollars to middle-class taxpayers. While the cost of consumer goods and services is rising rapidly, due mostly to feckless government policies, it is the cost of gasoline that truly sticks in […]
During the past two years, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration has paid billions of dollars in secretive no-bid contracts with little to no transparency. Now Newsom is deploying his same secretive approach to a growing number of other public contracts. All Californians, irrespective of party affiliation, should be deeply concerned. Especially troubling is the Newsom administration’s […]
In George Orwell’s 1984, there is a particularly gripping scene where the protagonist, Winston, is being interrogated by O’Brien, a member of the party leadership. O’Brien shows Winston a photo that proves that three party members who were executed for treason were, in fact, innocent. O’Brien then drops the photo into what is called a […]
The mass shooting in Sacramento last weekend that took six lives occurred one block from the Capitol offices of Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. The following morning, I speculated on social media that it was probably gang members with criminal records. It didn’t take a Kreskin to make that sort of prediction which, of course, turned […]
