Californians pay the highest income and sales taxes in the United States, and the government recently piled on a $5.2 billion tax on gasoline, diesel fuel and vehicle fees. Taxpayers recently got some clues about what the state will do with all that money. According to the state controller, the state is bulking up…
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California Assembly Bill 1250, authored by Los Angeles Democrat Reginald Jones-Sawyer, would restrict counties from contracting out for key services. The bill is sponsored by two of the most powerful government employee unions, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). As the San Jose…
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California government employees represented by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) will soon be getting “bonus checks” of $2,500. It remains unclear what this “bonus” is for, but it is not tied to any performance measure such as greater efficiency or accountability. The office of California’s state controller, which sends out the checks, had…
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Back in 2013, some 8,000 members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) rallied at the California state capitol in Sacramento chanting, “We’re letting them know this is our house!” In 2012, the government employee unions had helped elect big-government, tax-hiking politicians such as Jerry Brown, and they were now clamoring for more money…
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California is the least tax-friendly state according to new rankings from Kiplinger. Much of that unfriendliness is due to the 2012 Proposition 30, which imposed the highest income tax rate in America, 13.3 percent, and also raised the sales tax to 7.5 percent, also highest in the nation. Proposition 30 was pitched as a…
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Government waste occurs in schemes such as the federal stimulus, the GM bailout, Obamacare, and so forth. Government waste also occurs as a result of nepotism and sinecures, as in the case of Gil Cedillo Jr. In 2011 California’s Central Basin Municipal Water District hired Cedillo as a “business development manager,” a position the…
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The California Department of Motor Vehicles is a massive bureaucracy whose legendary inefficiency is on the increase but which some pundits see as a model for government monopoly health care. Mariam Noujaim works for the DMV and is a member of the 2.1 million member Service Employees International Union (SEIU), one of the more…
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In The Hill, Jason Millman reports that the the number of organizational waivers issued by the Obama administration from the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) has now reached 1,040. What the article does not discuss is that those receiving such waivers overwhelmingly include major government-employee unions such as the Service Employees International…
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