New America in California: Publications, Events and More
All recent articles, policy papers, events, press releases and "In the News" items relating to this program are available below. An RSS feed is also available; see the orange icon below.
I hear you're searching for a new lieutenant
governor. If I may be so bold, I can think of one Californian who is
the right fit for the job.
Me.
Now that Lt. Gov. John
Garamendi is vacating the office to take a seat in Congress, I know
you're considering smart politicians of both parties. But selecting a
proven leader would be a terrible mistake. Someone with real experience
in government would be frustrated by the utter powerlessness and
insignificance of the lieutenant governor's… more
On the docket: "Proposition 13," the referendum by
which the people of California, in 1978, voted to amend the constitution of the
state to limit taxes. The text of the referendum caps the property tax to 1% of
property value. To raise taxes, there needs to be a super-majority vote of two
thirds in the legislature. "California is the only state where it takes a
two-thirds majority vote to pass a budget and raise taxes, comments Steven Hill
"We thought we were getting a man of action. Instead, we got someone
who'll spend six hours chasing a white ball around a park," Joe
Mathews, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, said, with
tongue planted only partly in cheek. "If voters had known about the
golf, they would have been less surprised by his lack of urgency on
many issues." ... Original Article
Forget the issues with cash and the polls, says New America Foundation
senior fellow Joe Mathews, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s decision
to leave the Democratic race for governor boils down to one thing. ... Original Article
... medical care," Micah Weinberg, a senior research fellow in the California Program of the New America Foundation, argues in a Sacramento Bee opinion piece...
Unlike the wave of immigration that came through Ellis Island and then
subsided, immigration to the United States from Mexico has been
virtually uninterrupted for one hundred years. In this vividly detailed
book, Tomás R. Jiménez takes us into the lives of later-generation
descendents of Mexican immigrants, asking for the first time how this
constant influx of immigrants from their ethnic homeland has shaped
their assimilation. His nuanced investigation of this complex and
little-studied phenomenon finds that continuous immigration has
San Francisco writer Douglas McGray (an Irvine fellow at the New American Foundation), a contributor of social-policy narratives for The New Yorker and the acclaimed public-radio show, This American Life, is Pop-Up's editor in chief. "Branching out into radio opened my eyes to all the ways a story can be told," says McGray, 34. Despite what he calls the "awkward phase" that journalism is currently suffering, the Maine native claims that Pop-Up Magazine is not a reaction to a floundering… more
Sen. David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican, has introduced legislation
that, if passed, would instruct the U.S. Census Bureau not to take into
account illegal immigrants and other noncitizens in the 2010 census.
I'm all for it. Furthermore, I propose that the government no longer
recognize deficits in budgets, record violent crimes in police reports,
acknowledge casualties of war or count -- let alone give proper names!
-- to hurricanes in weather reports.
“This fact should have been disclosed during the campaign,” wrote Joe Mathews, a senior fellow at the New American Foundation. “We thought we were getting a ...
According to the New America Foundation, premiums in California have grown seven times faster than median household income. Even being the very best, ...
There is widespread agreement that if federal health care reform passes, making it work will depend in great part on getting a handle on spiraling medical costs that already consume nearly one of every five dollars spent in the United States.
According to the New America Foundation, more than 300,000 Angelenos lack basic checking and savings accounts. "But
this is a reality in too many low-income communities throughout Los
Angeles and across the state, where banks and credit unions are
nonexistent," said Olivia Calderon, California legislative director of
the Asset Building Program at the foundation. ... Original Article
As California struggles to close persistent achievement gaps, it is increasingly apparent that these gaps exist at school entry and that efforts to improve the early education systems (PreK-3rd) are warranted.
Please join us in the release of "On the Cusp in California: How PreK-3rd Strategies Could Improve Education in the Golden State," a policy paper from New America's Early Education Initiative that highlights key strategies for creating a more seamless system for early learning in California.
Three weeks ago, when the Nobel committee awarded its literature prize
to Romanian writer Herta Muller, it lauded her courageous and
unflinching fictional portraits of "daily life in a stagnated
dictatorship" in communist Romania. What they did not mention, however,
was Muller's ongoing nonfictional critique of the leadership of
post-communist Romania.
The California Asset Building program hosted a policy roundtable discussion Wednesday October 14 in the State Capitol on updating the antiquated and misleading way we measure poverty. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's Director of Poverty Research, Mark Levitan, led Assembly and Senate staff in the in-depth discussion (view his presentation here). Last year, New York City enacted an updated and improved poverty measure based on recommendations made by the National Academy of Sciences.
Yet there are some interesting reform ideas now floating around California. In an oped in Monday's Los Angeles Times,
Joe Mathews, a senior fellow at the New American Foundation, offers
several possible changes in California's system. Here are three of
Mathews' proposal. ... Original Article
In a recent speech to the Academy of Arts and Sciences, California
Chief Justice Ronald M. George became the latest sharp critic of the
state's system of direct democracy. "Frequent amendments -- coupled
with the implicit threat of more in the future -- have rendered our
state government dysfunctional," he said.
The chief justice
isn't the first state leader to take aim at the way ballot measures are
enacted in California, and he won't be the last.