New America in California: Publications, Events and More

“Every man, and every body of men on earth, possesses the right of self-government…I am not among those who fear the people.”  --Thomas Jefferson “This representative assembly should be in miniature an exact portrait of the people at large.  It should think, feel, reason, and act like them.”  -- John Adams “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”  - Alexis… more

Citizens, community groups, and experts from across the state came together to discuss a California constitutional convention. How might it come about? How could it help our cities, schools, budget and government? Video is available below.

Assemblywoman Lori Saldaña opened the Women and Wealth Asset Policy Forum event, sponsored by the New America Foundation's Asset Building Program in partnership with the California Women's Legislative Caucus, the California Commission on the Status of Women, and the California Women's Agenda.

Terry Tamminen, director of the New America Foundation's climate policy program, said growing consensus on climate change has shifted the debate and forced ...

Whatever path is taken, change is in the air, said Mark Paul, a senior scholar with the New America Foundation, a Washington-based think tank. ...

Among the speakers will be Steven Hill of the New America Foundation; Robert Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies; ...

Can't stand your boring husband? Thinking of calling it quits? Well, you should have mustered the nerve to leave him well before this economic crisis. Now you might not be able to afford to live without him, literally.

It's a well-known fact that financial woes are the biggest cause of marital spats. With the economy the way it is, you'd expect lots of husbands and wives to be at each other's throats. But the conventional wisdom is wrong. This recession is so bad that you can count… more

Karen Bass is an unlikely tax cutter. She's the Democratic speaker of the California State Assembly, a fierce defender of the labor movement, and an advocate for repealing a constitutional provision that requires that tax increases pass the state legislature with a two-thirds majority.

Late last year, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger called California’s looming budget crisis a fiscal armageddon waiting to strike. Now, as the state faces a $24 billion budget shortfall and major cuts are inevitable, doomsday seems to have come to California, and particularly to its poorest. The one-million-plus Californians on CalWorks, the state’s main welfare program, could lose monthly income beginning in July. Support for those who care for disabled Californians is set to be slashed.

“If your goal is to make California governable again by restoring fiscal sanity and political accountability, there’s no way to avoid Prop. 13,” Mark Paul, senior scholar and deputy director of the California program at the nonpartisan New America Foundation, wrote recently. “The 1978 Jarvis-Gann measure is not just a property tax limitation. It’s the hack that rewrote California’s operating system in ways that make it unworkable and unloved across the political spectrum.”

The worst thing about Sarah Palin's decision to resign the governorship of Alaska is the conclusion she appears to have reached about the political calendar: Even three years before the 2012 elections, the job of potential presidential candidate doesn't leave any time for governing, even a lightly populated state.

As strange as her announcement sounded, Palin's view of the electoral world is clear-eyed. These days, politics trumps governing all the time.

Virginia's Democratic gubernatorial primary made all sorts of national news last month. The more typical stories equated former Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe's defeat with the end of the Clinton era. Yet, despite the abundance of coverage, one significant detail has been left out of the generally agreed upon "story" about Virginia's recent gubernatorial primary -- the losing candidates received more votes than the winner.

Mark Paul, a scholar with the non-partisan New America Foundation, says, "It's silly to have a conversation about the future of California without talking about Proposition 13."

But it's not clear that IOUs are sufficient to force lawmakers to close a deal, said Joe Mathews, Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation.

How did we manage to have it all in the years after the Second World War--car, house, health care, affordable education, Social Security, rising wages, leisure--and where did it go? If anyone knows, please tell California. Things seemed to be going so well here a half century ago: unemployment rates just above 3 percent, swimming pools in every backyard, baseball teams poached from Brooklyn, matchless public schools and universities, and swift new highways. Good jobs were available to nearly anyone who came, and nearly everyone did.

It… more

Lisa Margonelli, fellow at the New America Foundation, another Washington D.C. think tank, countered that the government has invested in young industries before and that this time around is nothing unusual.

Pete Wilson’s California wasn’t too different from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s. The state’s education system lagged behind the rest of the country, interest groups had a tight grip on Sacramento, healthcare costs were rising, and the economy was the worst it had been since the Great Depression. While Wilson may be best remembered for his more controversial stances—like supporting Proposition 187, which sought to refuse services to illegal immigrants—he also managed to pass budgets and break partisan stalemates, ultimately leaving his successor… more

California is an ungovernable state. It is plagued by systemic gridlock and paralysis that is built into its governmental institutions. "California does not work because it CANNOT work," said Micah Weinberg in a quote for George Skelton's Los Angeles Times column.

With only a day left until the State of California starts issuing IOU's, Governor Schwarzenegger is accusing Democrats in the Assembly and Senate of wasting their time. Both houses passed bills avoiding some of the cuts Schwarzenegger has proposed by raising the tobacco tax, imposing a severance tax on oil drilled in California and raising the vehicle license fee to keep state parks open. They acted even though the Governor promised to veto the bills.

Guests:

With California's fiscal woes mounting, and the government in Sacramento seemingly frozen in place, a constitutional convention has been proposed as a way to fix the Golden State's deeply entrenched structural problems.  But as more people have begun considering this option, several important questions have arisen about some of the details of the Convention, specifically:  1) how would the delegates to the Convention be chosen; 2) how would a Convention of delegates chosen by random selection function, and how would the delegates be educated;