California’s Fiscal Insanity – The Hugh Hewitt Show

Spencer Pratt is making a huge splash in the L.A. mayoral race.  It is a heck of a fun show.  Unfortunately that is all I think it is – a show.  Buzz not withstanding the odds are very much against him and even if he managed to win, there is not all that much he could do to truly change things in that increasingly dystopian city.  Meanwhile there are some very serious issues at hand.

I’ll start with this:

California state employees now face a return-to-office rule that millions of private-sector employees already know as “going to work.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom directed state agencies to prepare for in-person work four days each week starting July 1.

But here is the rich part:

Anica Walls, president of SEIU Local 1000, has led union pushback against the order. The union represents nearly 100,000 state workers and, as the Sacramento Bee reports, filed an unfair labor practice charge over Newsom’s return-to-office policy.

When the pandemic hit and everyone thought they could telecommute, I wrote a post, based on my 30 years of working out of my house, that was almost universally panned entitled “Rules For Working From Home.”  Among the rules was this, “If you log working time at home, but are doing anything other than work, you are stealing from your employer.”  How much money do you think telecommuting state employees in California have stolen in this fashion?  Bear in mind – California is already broke and almost everyone else in the state has been back in the office for several years.  Exactly who is enjoying the unfair labor practices here?

But when it comes to really wasting taxpayer money, let’s turn to the sign depicted here.  The picture was taken by a friend of mine in LA just yesterday at the fence line denoting Sunland Park.  Note there are two signs – a small one that has, according to my friend, been there for a while now.  And then immediately above it, the big one that has appeared only as election season has heated up.  Let’s forget for the moment all the resonance of the wind up to the Civil War that invokes and concentrate on the simple fiscal reality involved here.

The mayor ordered that the Parks Department have these signs printed, costing taxpayer money.  There are roughly 650 parks in L.A. – some of them enormous and therefore with very large perimeters.  That’s a lot of signs. Then the signs were distributed to the parks and labor was expended to post them.  Again, a significant expenditure.  And then, when an election nears, the whole process is repeated, this time with a larger and more expensive signs in an effort to, apparently, make sure everyone knows the mayor does not approve of the federal efforts on immigration.

I don’t know what is worse – the waste of money involved in a pointless sign or the fact that it is so obviously a use of city funds for electoral purposes.

Another SoCal friend, who spends roughly half the year in the UK, wrote to me yesterday and said, “as things get weirder here in California, a good number of people seem to be just hunkering down.”  In other words they are sheltering in place while the California storm swirls around them.  That’s a heck of a metaphor – life inside a permanent tornado.  After all, California is the storm that never seems to abate.

Knox County, TN, where I now reside, just announced the final budget under Mayor Glenn Jacobs who is being term limited out.  Mayor Jacobs, when he hit the highlights of the budget, noted that the county has a larger “rainy day fund” (like the savings account that you and I keep) at the end of his administration than it did when he came into office.  And that happened while teachers and law enforcement got salary increases.  Oh, and taxes did not go up either.  It is possible to operate a government with fiscal sanity.

I guess unless you are California.