News

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…

SB 799 would allow private attorneys to bring lawsuits against taxpayers and give rise to the types of harassment that already plague California under the Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA), disability access laws (ADA) and Proposition 65.

A CA lawmaker under the influence of government unions has proposed yet another bill to expand retirement benefits. AB 1383 would boost pensions for safety employees without requiring sufficient funds to be set aside to meet those promises.

AB 569 would allow California cities to boost pension promises to public employees without requiring sufficient funds to be contributed upfront to guarantee payment of those promises. If it becomes law, AB 569 would set the table for another explosion in unfunded retirement obligations, the costs of which are already crushing California governments.