News

Tomorrow, the California Legislature is expected to pass a 2025-26 budget bill that will take even more from the future than the budget proposed by Governor Newsom.

As you know, GFC supports candidates for important local races when we are asked to do so by people we respect. Recently one of the people we respect most, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, asked us to support Anthony Tordillos…

Last week the news was all about the US House of Representatives passing another budget-busting bill that extends a streak of extraordinary federal spending growth since the pandemic. But California’s spending grew even more —  much more.

While it’s good news that two pension expansion measures (AB 569 and AB 1383) that we opposed will not advance, the bad news is that new unfunded liabilities are still being manufactured every year…

Thanks in part to hundreds of opposition letters from the GFC Network, two costly pension bills — AB 569 and AB 1383 — were stopped in the California Legislature today.

Yesterday I published a note on Substack about a footnote in California’s state budget that cost taxpayers $26 billion. I don’t want to burden your emails with too much technical information so if you’re interested please click on that link.

AB 84 (Muratsuchi) would severely damage California’s public charter schools by cutting their funding by almost $1 billion, diverting funds to new bureaucracies, and imposing unnecessary restrictions.

When the stock market fell earlier this year, some reporters wrote that the decline could lead to higher pension costs. Now that the stock market is rising will we see stories about pension costs not increasing? The answer is that neither story would be on point. Pension costs fall or rise depending on whether pension funds earn less or more than they expected to earn.

As part of an effort to close a $12 billion deficit, on page 67 of his revised budget issued earlier today Governor Newsom proposes to negotiate $767 million of savings on salaries for state employees.

This chart shows the top five donors to Governor Gavin Newsom’s campaigns and ballot measures and to committees that made independent expenditures in support of his campaigns and measures since he first ran for state office in 2010…