Mark Paul

Sacramento Bee | Plan to Open Up CalPERS Reflects Worry About Inadequate Saving for Retirement 

Investing for retirement is the financial equivalent of eating your vegetables: It's good for you, but sometimes downright distasteful.

Now a proposal making its way through the California Legislature has people talking about whether the state can make putting aside retirement money more palatable.

The plan would let private businesses and workers funnel direct payroll deposits into a retirement investment account. The California Public Employees' Retirement… more

Politicians don't like to talk about taxes except to brag about cutting them. But with California's widening budget deficit threatening deep cuts in education and other public services, it's difficult to avoid discussions about raising taxes.

Unfortunately, what's likely to be lost in the upcoming partisan melee over whether new taxes are needed to close the $16-billion gap is an equally important tax issue -- California's aging and often unfair tax system needs to be overhauled.

The goal of tax… more

Sacramento Bee | California Assembly Panel Passes State-run IRA Proposal

A proposal to open California's retirement system to private sector workers prompted questions Wednesday about government competing with investment firms and the pension system's ability to handle the unique program.

"We just don't know if it's going to work yet," Assemblyman Kevin Jeffries, R-Lake Elsinore, said of the proposal to have the California Public Employees' Retirement System offer IRA accounts to workers whose employers don't offer retirement savings… more

Today, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Assembly Member Kevin De Leon (D-Los Angeles) unveiled a proposal to give California workers access to a low-cost, professionally managed retirement account.

“We applaud Governor Schwarzenegger and Assembly Member De Leon’s bipartisan leadership” said Olivia Calderon, California Legislative Director of New America’s Asset Building Program. “Too many hardworking Californians don’t have access to a work based retirement savings plan. This is an incredible opportunity for California to show the rest of the nation… more

When you set out to fix something, it first pays to figure out what's broken and why. That's advice that state officials would do well to heed as they try to close a $14.5-billion budget shortfall. But unfortunately, the budget debate in Sacramento has served mostly to shroud the reasons for the problem in three myths.

In his State of the State address last month, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said that "while revenues are… more

California has a tax system largely fixed in place during the Great Depression, in an industrial economy-setting unconcerned with environmental sustainability. Two questions about this tax system are posed here: First, can California find ways to raise the revenue it needs in the 21st century that are a better fit with our high-tech, service-based economy than is the current system? Second, can California's tax/fee structure be used to meet the state's greenhouse gas emissions under its AB 32 guidelines?

On Feb.… more

You could see California's 2008 budget mess coming years ago.

In 2003, it loomed on the horizon, in long-term fiscal projections that Legislative Analyst Elizabeth Hill published just days before Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor. Without "actions to bring spending and revenues into line," she wrote, California's budget gap in 2008-09 would be "in the range of $10 billion, assuming the [vehicle license fee] increase remains in place, and $15 billion if it is rolled back." Borrowing to cover up the… more

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democratic legislative leaders Fabian Núñez and Don Perata have found common ground on the central goal of health care reform: to cover the millions of California workers and their families who don’t get health insurance through their jobs and can’t afford to buy it themselves. The harder part, to no one’s surprise, is agreeing on a way to pay for it.

The governor set out this year to take a big step closer toward universal health coverage… more

Mark Paul is an award-winning writer, editor, and policy expert with wide experience in journalism and California state government and politics. He covered California for 24 years, first as Editorial Page Editor and National Editor of the Oakland Tribune, then as Deputy Editorial Page Editor and columnist for… more

WASHINGTON, DC (May 22, 2007) — The New America Foundation is pleased to announce that Leif Wellington Haase will take over the reigns of its California Program in Sacramento. Haase will lead ongoing efforts to advance ground-breaking policy solutions to the state’s problems while enriching the quality of public debate in our nation’s leading laboratory of democracy. Gregory Rodriguez, who will continue as Irvine Senior Fellow, will assume additional responsibilities as Director of the California Fellows Program. Mark Paul, a… more