Most judges’ races are anything but exciting. Unless you know the judge personally, they’re all pretty much the same when it comes time to vote. However, what would you say about a judge who imposed punitive attorneys’ fees on plaintiffs working in the public interest to improve election laws? Punitive to the tune of $243,279.50.
Usually it's the other way around – heartless Republicans trying to screw the poor, and Democrats trying to "help" them (but without addressing the actual source of the problem, and often making it worse).
But yesterday's Examiner (March 4) had a kind of "man bites dog" story – Assembly Bill 503, authored by Republican Assemblyman Tom Lackey of Palmdale and signed into law last year, requires local agencies to offer payment plans to poor people burdened by government fines they cannot afford.
To give local Democrats their barely-deserved slice of credit, once this GOP-originated crutch became law, SF's Democrat city Treasurer, Jose Cisneros, added extra padding to make the crutch a little easier to use by implementing a plan that goes further in some respects than what the law requires. Which his spokesperson was not too modest to tell the Examiner:
As implemented locally by Cisneros, the plan goes "far beyond what was legally mandated"
The folks at the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) have something “exciting” in store for the residents of the Bay Area’s nine counties. SB 595, authored by Senator Jim Beall of San Jose, will “give the voters the chance” to approve a $3 toll increase in all Bay Area bridges, except the Golden Gate Bridge. The bureaucrats make it sound like an honor for the voters to be given such an opportunity to tax themselves. Apparently we should be thankful they granted us this chance to give the bureaucrats more tax money to waste. We note also that the MTC voted recently to hike the toll increases faster than was initially suggested, and the measure was moved up to the June 2018 ballot, rather than the November 2018 ballot, so as not to “interfere with other local measures planned
Never content to rest until San Francisco’s government runs every aspect of our lives, supervisors Malia Cohen and Sandra Fewer recently requested the formation of a municipal city bank task force to study and advance the idea of a San Francisco public bank. The idea has been around since the financial crisis of 2008 and is catching on more these days with the problem of legalized recreational pot in California and banking laws like the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 that obligate financial institutions to report suspicious activity, which includes pot financial transactions that are still illegal under federal law. While it is understandable that the new law has created a problem with the incompatibility of current banking laws (a problem created by government), is it really necessary for
Recently every board member of the San Francisco Board of Education demonstrated what hypocrisy in action means. The entire Board of Education unanimously rejected an application for a new KIPP elementary charter school set to open in the Bayview next year. Never mind that hundreds of parents, teachers, and students showed up in support of the charter school. Never mind, also, that a large chunk of the KIPP supporters were African-Americans from the Bayview, which the Board purportedly wants to help, but when push comes to shove, you can always count on government bureaucrats to vote for the status quo and less individual choice. After all, they do know better.
A public park in San Francisco's SOMA district has been sitting closed behind a fence for almost all of 2017, with chain link fence segments installed in February replaced with a $145,000 black iron barrier in June.
Because, you know, if those in power didn't do things like saying they're going to use taxpayer money for improving parks, then "improve" them by closing them so you can't use them, it would create a public health risk – people seeing a well-functioning government might die of shock! Freedom is dangerous.
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Supervisor Jane Kim is at it again. Not content to rest on the laurel of her “victory” of making San Francisco City College tuition-free by introducing last year’s successful ballot measure W (dubbed the Mansion Tax), she’s found another way to make San Francisco more “affordable.” She recently asked the city controller to analyze the costs of providing universal childcare in San Francisco, and she plans to introduce a ballot measure for the November 2018 election that will offer “affordable” childcare for all. Kim wants a system that would reduce childcare costs for San Francisco families to just 10% of their income.
The next time you head down to The Embarcadero you may notice that Justin Herman Plaza will now be called Embarcadero Plaza. While San Francisco activists have no Confederate statutes to dismantle, the desire to “clean house” in a historical sense is sweeping the country, and San Francisco officials don’t want to be left in the dust. In July Supervisor Aaron Peskin introduced a resolution proposing to temporarily rename the plaza, citing Herman’s role in the displacement of minority residents, until a new replacement name can be decided on. The rest of the Board of Supervisors quickly supported the resolution by voting unanimously to rename the plaza. The late poet Maya Angelou, who was the first black female streetcar operator in San Francisco, is the name mentioned most often as t
In 1798, Thomas Malthus predicted that population growth would lead to mass starvation. If things had continued as they did for thousands of years previously, he might have been right. Fortunately, the advent of the Industrial Revolution dramatically boosted productivity, and gains in productivity haven't let up since. In recent times, global productivity has increased by an estimated 1.8% per year between 1964 and 2014. With improvements in technology and know-how, a single worker today can typically produce what it would have taken dozens to produce a few hundred years ago in the same amount of time, resulting in much better standards of living for most people than were the norm in Malthus's era.
A worker in the United States today earns more in 10 minutes, in terms of buying power, than subsistence workers, such as the English mill workers that Fredrick Engels wrote about in 1844, earned in a 12-hour day. Or to put it another way, "each farmer (in the United States) in 2000 produced on average 12 times as much farm output per hour worked as a farmer did in 1950." In other words, to produce the same amount of output, less than 10% as many employees are needed in agriculture as was the case half a century ago. And that's only over the past 50 years. Go back 200 years or more, and the gains are even more dramatic. While agriculture, once the occupation of 90% of Americans, has particularly benefitted from technological changes that enhanced productivity, many other economic sectors have seen similar increases.
So how have gains in productivity affected government operations – law enforcement, for instance? How much more crime do today's police departments prevent, with how many fewer officers, compared to their pre-Industrial counterparts?