By Jon Coupal

Gov. Gavin Newsom has yet again forced the Legislature into special session to continue his war against the oil companies. This time, his proposal is to empower the California Energy Commission to “develop and impose requirements for refiners operating in the state to maintain minimum levels of inventories of refined transportation fuels meeting California specifications.”

The governor claims this will prevent price spikes but clearly doesn’t understand the laws of supply and demand. Even Joe Lombardo, the Republican governor of Nevada, and Katie Hobbs, the Democratic governor of Arizona, sent a letter warning that his proposal would increase prices, not lower them.

It isn’t the oil companies that are adding almost a dollar per gallon in direct taxes, indirect taxes and costly special fuel requirements. Add in the higher costs of simply doing business in California and you know why gas prices are about $1.50 over the national average. It’s California.

Gov. Newsom and the Legislature could lower prices anytime they want. The reality is, they don’t want to. They want the tax money. They just don’t want you to be mad at them when you go to the polls, so they feign outrage. That’s what the special session is about.

So, since we don’t need a special session to lower gas prices, maybe we should have one about the multitude of other issues plaguing our state. Here are some suggestions.

Let’s call a special session on California’s highest-in-the-nation homeless rate. According to the state auditor, California spent more than $24 billion on homelessness programs in the last five years and the problem has only gotten worse. The state’s most recent “point-in-time” count estimated more than 180,000 were homeless. That’s up 6 percent from the previous count.

Despite the state auditor noting that no one is tracking the impacts of this spending, the governor managed to talk the voters into throwing $6 billion more on the fire earlier this year.

Maybe we need a special session on why California has the second-lowest literacy rate in the country. According to the EdVoice Institute, 60 percent of California students are not reading at grade level by the third grade and approximately 28 percent of California adults are not literate.

Assembly Bill 2222 would have required phonics-based reading instruction that research shows is more effective but it didn’t get a hearing because the teachers’ union opposed it.

How about a special session on California’s highest-in-the-nation home prices? The median home price in California was $906,600 according to the latest numbers from the California Association of Realtors. They calculate a minimum annual income of $236,800 was needed to qualify for the purchase of a median-priced, existing single-family home.

But that might be hard to do if you can’t find a job. Might be good to have a special session on why California has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, California had a seasonally adjusted unemployment rate of 5.3 percent in August 2024. That puts us just ahead of Illinois, Nevada and the District of Columbia.

Meanwhile, Proposition 32 asks voters to raise the state’s minimum wage from $16 to $18 and then adjust it annually for inflation. Unfortunately, raising the hourly minimum wage often results in businesses cutting hours and laying off workers – once again proving the adage that the real minimum wage is zero.

Or what about our soaring home insurance rates? Let’s have a special session about that. Many insurers have simply stopped writing policies in California and the ones that remain are raising rates as fast as they can. State Farm has requested permission from the state’s insurance commissioner to raise rates 30 percent. Allstate is raising them 34 percent.

Now, a study from Insurify says they expect car insurance rates to increase 54 percent in California – that’s more than double the national average.

California has a lot of problems. Maybe we should talk about those instead of playing political games about gas prices.

Jon Coupal is president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.

By GILLIAN BRASSIL AND NICOLE NIXON

Billionaire Elon Musk said Tuesday he would move the headquarters for his social media and rocket ship companies out of California after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill banning public school districts from notifying parents if a child asks for different gender identification than what appears on their birth certificate. Musk called this the “final straw” on his social media platform X. “Because of this law and the many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies, SpaceX will now move its HQ from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas,” Musk wrote. “And X HQ will move to Austin” Texas, he wrote in a follow-up post. “I did make it clear to Governor Newsom about a year ago that laws of this nature would force families and companies to leave California to protect their children,” Musk added.

Read more at: The Sac Bee

by Jon Coupal

August 25, 2023

Less than two weeks ago, radical progressives in the California Legislature launched the most brazen sneak attack on California’s iconic Proposition 13 in its 45-year history. Assemblyman Christopher Ward, backed by the new Speaker of the Assembly, Robert Rivas, introduced Assembly Constitutional Amendment 13 (ACA 13). It would amend the constitution to make it easier to raise taxes, by making it harder to pass citizens’ initiatives that seek to enforce Proposition 13’s two-thirds vote requirement for local special tax increases.

Read more at the Orange County Register

By Terry Castleman at The Los Angeles Times

February 15, 2023

The California exodus has shown no sign of slowing down as the state’s population dropped by more than 500,000 people between April 2020 and July 2022, with the number of residents leaving surpassing those moving in by nearly 700,000.

The population decrease was second only to New York, which lost about 15,000 more people than California, census data show.

California has been seeing a decline in population for years, with the COVID-19 pandemic pushing even more people to move to other parts of the country, experts say. The primary reason for the exodus is the state’s high housing costs, but other reasons include the long commutes and the crowds, crime and pollution in the larger urban centers. The increased ability to work remotely — and not having to live near a big city — has also been a factor.

The census data show that the trend has continued and point to those states that have seen population gains even as California’s has shrunk.

Net migration out of California surpassed that of the next highest state, New York, by about 143,000 people. Nearby states such as Utah have warned Californians who might consider moving to stay out. A similar story is playing out in Nevada, where California migrants are seeking to re-create their lifestyle.

Read more at Yahoo! News

By Jamie Joseph

February 8, 2023

In a move hoping to tackle the state’s rising crime rates, California Assemblyman Juan Alanis (R-Modesto) has proposed a bill to repeal Proposition 47.

Proposition 47, passed by voters in 2014 with nearly 60 percent of the vote, raised the felony threshold for theft in retail stores from $400 to $950, limited jail time for misdemeanors to a maximum of six months, and reduced some drug-related crimes from felonies to misdemeanors.

The bill was part of a criminal reform effort to alleviate prison overcrowding, but it has faced criticism for an increase in crime, particularly property theft, across the state’s largest cities since it passed.

Alanis, who also sits as the Chairman of the Assembly Public Safety Committee, proposed his new bill—AB 335—which, if approved, would roll back the statutes of Proposition 47, with the exception of the lesser penalty for possessing concentrated cannabis since marijuana is legal in the state.

The legislation must be approved by the electorate, presumably in the 2024 statewide General Election.

Read more at The Epoch Times

By Adam Beam at the Associate Press

February 23, 2022

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — With California entering the third year of severe drought, federal officials said Wednesday they won’t deliver any water to farmers in the state’s major agricultural region — a decision that will force many to plant fewer crops in the fertile soil that yields the bulk of the nation’s fruits, nuts and vegetables.

“It’s devastating to the agricultural economy and to those people that rely on it,” said Ernest Conant, regional director for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. “But unfortunately we can’t make it rain.”

The federal government operates the Central Valley Project in California, a complex system of dams, reservoirs and canals. It’s one of two major water systems the state relies on for agriculture, drinking water, and the environment. The other system is run by the state government.

Water agencies contract with the federal government for certain amounts of water each year. In February, the federal government announces how much of those contracts can be fulfilled based on how much water is available. The government then updates the allocations throughout the year based on conditions.

Farmers started last year with a 5% allocation from the federal government but ended at 0% as the drought intensified. This year, the federal government is starting farmers at 0% while water for other purposes, including drinking and industrial uses, is at 25%.

“Last year was a very bad year. This year could turn out to be worse,” Conant said.

Read more at ABC News

by Louis Casiano at Fox News

February 16, 2022

As crime continues to concern communities throughout California, Republican state leaders are making efforts to repeal a much-debated measure critics say has emboldened criminals and tied the hands of law enforcement.

In March, state legislators on the General Assembly‘s Public Safety Committee will conduct a hearing on AB 1599, which would pose the question of Proposition 47 – known as the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act — to voters once again in an effort to crack down on rampant theft.

The measure was ushered in by voters in 2014 and has been blamed for the many brazen smash-and-grab thefts and shoplifting incidents plaguing cities up and down the state.

By Richard McGahey

December 31, 2021

My previous blog documented California’s 2020 population loss, the first time that’s happened since the state was founded.  Billionaire Elon Musk has moved to Texas, but the biggest worry for the state is the loss of lower and middle-income residents, likely driven by California’s high housing costs.  The state must fix its housing affordability problem for a more secure future.

Some media coverage claims the losses are among the wealthy.  A Yahoo finance story claimed “millionaires and billionaires have fled California in droves,” driven not only by high taxes but “political correctness.”

But the Public Policy Institute of California shows that’s not the real problem.  Rather, the Institute finds that “California has been losing lower- and middle-income residents to other states for some time while continuing to gain higher-income adults.”

The Institute, like other analysts, sees “the state’s high cost of living, driven almost solely by comparatively high housing costs” as a major culprit in the outmigration story.  Without a bigger supply of more affordable housing, moderate income families will continue to be pushed out while new immigrants won’t be able to afford life in California.

Read more at Forbes

By Sarah Parvini at the LA Times

December 15, 2021

The number of people moving to California from other states has dropped significantly since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and more Californians are leaving the state, according to a new study released Wednesday.

The two trends signal that population loss due to domestic migration out of the Golden State has more than doubled since the beginning of the pandemic. The pattern has rippled across California: New entrances to the state have dropped in every county since the end of March 2020. When Californians do move, researchers said they are slightly more likely to leave the state than they were before the start of the pandemic.

Entrances to California from other states have dropped 38% since March of last year, while the number of residents leaving to other states has increased 12%, the report from the nonpartisan California Policy Lab said.

“The public’s attention has been focused on the so-called ‘CalExodus’ phenomenon, but the reality is that the dramatic drop in ‘CalEntrances’ since the pandemic began has been a bigger driver of recent population changes in the state,” Natalie Holmes, research fellow at the California Policy Lab, said in a statement.

Read more at the LA Times

By Alicia Victoria Lozano at NBC News

December 10, 2021

LOS ANGELES — Immediate relief from California’s affordable housing crisis may not come next year even though a series of new laws is scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1, advocates and experts warn.

Efforts are already underway to undercut legislation recently signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom. Opponents say the housing laws strip cities and counties of control over zoning and do not ensure that new units will be affordable.