California has poured tens of billions of additional dollars into its public schools this decade on the assumption – or hope – that they would close the state’s stubborn academic “achievement gap.” Former Gov. Jerry Brown championed the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) that gives school districts with large numbers...
Walters: How Budget 'Trailer Bills' Are Misused
In the jargon of the Capitol, “trailer bills” are measures that accompany the annual state budget – in theory making the changes of law necessary to implement the budget’s fiscal policies. In practice, they serve another, much different function – to sneakily do things that might otherwise be difficult to...
Walters: DMV Crisis Could Make or Break Newsom
Ambitious politicians like to dazzle us with what Hollywood screenwriters call “high concept” pitches that reduce complex ideas to a few succinct words. Gavin Newsom is certainly an ambitious politician and is extraordinarily oriented toward high-concept gestures. His latest emerged during a quick trip to El Salvador last week, ostensibly...
Walters: Slowing Economy Could Hit State Budget
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s first budget proposal, unveiled two months ago, took a surprisingly conservative approach, given his promises of high-dollar spending during his campaign for the governorship. While he proposed token appropriations to expand health insurance for the poor and pre-kindergarten care and education, his 2019-20 budget would devote most...
Walters: Sales Tax Bite Looms for Internet Consumers
There’s nothing new about ordering merchandise from the comfort of one’s home and having it delivered to the doorstep. Generations of Americans — especially those living in isolation on farms and ranches — pored over the inches-thick catalogs that Sears and Roebuck, Montgomery Ward and other retailing behemoths issued each...
Walters: It's Time to Derail the Train to Nowhere
Gov. Gavin Newsom came close this month to abandoning the state’s misbegotten bullet train project that’s already cost many billions of dollars and demonstrates no signs of becoming viable. “Let’s be real,” Newsom told legislators in his first State of the State address. “The project as currently planned would cost...
Walters: Has Newsom Become Governor Gaslight?
“Gaslight” was a 1938 British play, set in the 1880s, about a man who manipulates his wife into believing she is going insane to suppress her suspicions about crimes he is committing. Two years later, it became a British movie and in 1944 an American version, starring Charles Boyer and...
Walters: Long Alliance of Democrats and Police Union Erodes
California’s crime rates soared in the 1970s and became a potent political issue that Republicans used, with great effect, against Democrats by accusing them of being soft on crime. More or less simultaneously, a Democratic Legislature and governor, Jerry Brown, enacted collective bargaining for California’s public employees. Those two seemingly...
Walters: Newsom Downgrades Brown's Pet Projects
When Gavin Newsom was running for governor last year, he adopted “courage for a change” as his slogan. It could be – and was – interpreted two ways: that he wanted to change the direction of California, or that he was disparaging outgoing Gov. Jerry Brown’s reluctance to confront the...
Walters: So Far, Prison Inmate Rehab Isn't Working
The state prison system’s official title, “Department of Corrections,” was for decades nothing more than a euphemism, as was the official nomenclature for the system’s guards of “correctional officer.” The system expanded from about 20,000 inmates during Jerry Brown’s first stint as governor to more than 160,000 when he began...