Why stop with imposing crippling tariffs on foreign goods just to show you can, in order to make a domestic political point and as a Bronx cheer to your international rivals, even though it’s a hammer-blow to your citizens’ pocketbooks?

Why not just adopt Beijing’s Politburo-directed policy of, for instance, building vast ghost cities with entirely empty apartment towers for the temporary jobs the construction will create even though no one wants to live there?

Why not tell Americans how many babies they can have: Just the one! Oh, wait! No, have three, because now we’ve got way too many old folks and not nearly enough young workers to support them!

Sounds absurd, because it is.

But the trade war President Joe Biden is currently engaged in with China by upping even further the tariffs on some goods produced there is precisely in line with such dismal interventionist approaches to government policy.

After campaigning against them, Biden never removed the wrongheaded tariffs former President Donald Trump imposed on Chinese goods, and now the current president is going to up the ante.

It’s true that, unlike the capricious Trump, Biden has not imposed tariffs on random goods produced by allies, such as the one Trump hit French wine with for no other reason than to be classically mean to the French.

But this week Biden slapped major new tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, advanced batteries, solar cells, steel, aluminum and medical equipment. On the auto front, the tax rate on imported Chinese EVs will rise to 102.5% this year, up from current levels of 27.5%. The tariff rate will double, up to 50%, on solar cell imports this year. Tariffs on certain Chinese steel and aluminum products will climb to 25% this year. Computer chip tariffs will double to 50% by 2025.

This is a good time to remind ourselves that tariffs aren’t a cost paid for by governments. They are paid for by consumers — in this case, by all Americans.

It is true that the EV tax at this point is mostly a symbolic one. When the Associated Press looked at what cars would be affected, it could only find two Chinese-made vehicles that would fall under the tariffs right now, the Polestar 2 luxury EV and potentially Volvo’s S90 luxury gas-electric hybrid midsize sedan.

Triply true: Such a low sticker price will only be possible thanks to huge Chinese government subsidies for the EV makers in order to create market share.

But such facts simply do not override the most profound rule of international trade: Trafficking in tariffs is always a mug’s game. Governments do it for one reason only, which is internal domestic politics. It’s very hard to explain the complexities of the fact that nations should produce what they do best and most efficiently, and trade with other nations for other goods, to the average voter. Biden is engaged in a close and gripping re-election campaign against Trump. He and his economic advisers know the reasons tariffs are bad. They simply think they can’t afford to be seen as non-China bashers during the silly season that is a presidential campaign.

With the national debt now topping $34 trillion and high interest rates, greater and greater proportions of federal spending is now going toward interest on borrowed money.

Politicians will no doubt hope Americans attribute this to the high level of pandemic-era spending. But the reality is that even before the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, and even with a robust economy, the federal government was spending $1 trillion more than it was taking in and was on track to spend as much as $1.5 trillion through the 2020s.

After the initial wave of emergency spending in response to the pandemic, however, Congress continued to indulge in spending binges. This includes trillions of dollars spent under President Joe Biden in the name of reviving the American economy post-pandemic and hundreds of billions on wars abroad.  Once upon a time, matters like federal spending and the national debt were of top concern to the Republican Party. Just over a decade ago, there was even something called Tea Party movement, raising the alarm across the country about federal profligacy. Today, you’re lucky to even hear a Republican member of Congress mention debt, deficits or the words “fiscal responsibility.”

There are, of course, consequences to this level of debt.

“The higher the debt is, the higher interest rates will be,” David Wilcox, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, explained to The Hill. “Higher interest rates tend to discourage investment in new capital by businesses, and capital makes workers more productive.”

The inability of the federal government to keep spending in check extends to an inability to maintain the solvency of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, notes the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

“Within the decade, the Social Security retirement and highway trust funds will be insolvent, requiring painful across-the-board cuts,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, in a statement earlier this year. “And by 2034, debt will reach an unprecedented 116 percent of output.”

But instead of meeting these challenges, both parties have fiddled, preferring to do everything but govern. Worse, there’s little reason to trust either party at this point with getting things done. Republicans don’t talk about fiscal matters anymore, while Democrats will use any new tax revenue to justify spending even more.

At this rate, it will take another crisis to get Congress to act. But we’re sure they’ll botch things even then.

The commission, which stands as an independent agency which investigates state policy issues and offers recommendations for reform, began holding hearings on CEQA in March 2023.

The commission credits the environmental protection law, which was signed in 1970 by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, for offering important protections to the Golden State’s environment.

However, the commission concluded, “it is also true that CEQA, like any law, can have damaging, often unintended, consequences. It is an expensive and lengthy process that can add years to project timeframes. It can be used for purposes that have little relationship to environmental protection. Its strong bias toward the status quo means that it can be used to block projects that would help improve the environment.”

Hundreds of CEQA lawsuits are filed every year. While some might raise legitimate issues, many often don’t and are intended to throw a wrench into planned developments.

A 2015 report by Jennifer Hernandez and David Friedman found that, “Sixty-four percent of those filing CEQA lawsuits are individuals or local ‘associations,’ the vast majority of which have no prior track record of environmental advocacy — and CEQA litigation abuse is primarily the domain of Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) opponents and special interests such as competitors and labor unions seeking non-environmental outcomes.”

As frequently noted in these pages, there’s a reason why Gov. Jerry Brown referred to CEQA reform as “the Lord’s work.” Brown recognized that reforming the law to prevent abuses of it was necessary, but also recognized that getting reforms through was a tall task. And so, to date, the Legislature has mostly stuck to incremental tweaks or just outright exempting specific projects or types of projects from the law.

The Little Hoover Commission also calls for targeted reforms to the law. This includes following Washington state’s lead in exempting new housing within urban growth boundaries from environmental review. This would free much development from delays or legal threats.

Other recommendations include strengthening standing requirements for those who wish to use the law to sue under CEQA, “establish clear parameters for significance thresholds and for analysis and mitigation of impacts,” and improving processes to prevent “data dumps” and “late hits” against  projects.

These are all worthy of consideration.

Indeed, it is time for the Legislature to not just talk about talking about CEQA. It is time for the Legislature to take seriously the need to reform the California Environmental Quality Act in a way that is fair and responsible. We can and should protect the environment without all the abuses of the law.

“I’m not prepared to increase taxes,” he said on Friday while unveiling his May Revise to the state budget. “We have among the highest tax rates in the United States of America for high wage earners. We have among the highest tax rates, as I noted, for corporate tax rates … I feel strongly that we have to live within our means, within the framework of being more efficient and more effective.”

ɫ����̳om has maintained this posture in recent years. Earlier this year he spoke out against a proposed wealth tax by Assemblyman Alex Lee, D-San Jose. ɫ����̳om likely learned his lesson after throwing his support behind Proposition 15 late in the game in 2020. Prop. 15 was the union-backed proposal to gut Proposition 13 by creating a split roll property tax system so the state could collect billions more from commercial and industrial properties. ɫ����̳om waited until September 2020 to back the measure, calling it a “a fair, phased-in and long-overdue reform to state tax policy.”

Even then, he maintained a stance against raising income taxes, saying “now is not the time for the kind of state tax increases on income we saw proposed at the end of this legislative session and I will not sign such proposals into law.”

The very narrow passage of Proposition 1 in March  of this also no doubt signaled to ɫ����̳om that voters aren’t exactly trustful of new government money grabs.

Recent polling by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California confirms that Californians are in an anti-tax mood, with 56% of likely voters saying they would vote down a parcel tax to boost funding for their local public schools. Identical polling in 2016 and 2017 found that a majority of Californians supported such an idea, so the trend has clearly shifted.

ɫ����̳om should use his final years in office to modernize and streamline state government. There’s no need to tax overtaxed California residents and businesses more. Especially not with the subpar performance of the government we currently have.

My husband and I, like all our friends, started off sending Yonatan to Jewish school; it was important to us because we are observant Jews. But from the beginning, there were issues. Unlike the other kids, he couldn’t sit still or follow directions in a typical classroom environment. Though his teachers tried to help him keep up, they were unable to meet his needs. It was clear that he needed additional help.

We contacted our local public school to get Yonatan an Individualized Education Program (IEP), which provides services for students who need additional help. It was then we learned the heartbreaking news that we had to enroll him in public school to get him the help he needed. We had no choice but to prioritize his physical, neurological and academic development over his spiritual and religious growth.

The tragic part is that it never had to be this way. In California, families can use funding from a federal law known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) to place their children in hundreds of private schools. But politicians in Sacramento categorically ban all private religious schools and the families they want to serve from even applying to receive this funding. Although other states fund programs for students with disabilities in religious schools through IDEA, California does not.

Unfortunately, paying out of pocket was never an option for us. Like many other families in the Golden State, we could not bear the costs of paying tuition at a Jewish school and for the disability resources he needed. We were forced to abandon the education we wanted for our son simply because religious schools are cut off from the same funding that hundreds of other private schools receive.

Yonatan is 19 years old now, and I regret the fact that he never had access to a Jewish education. The Jewish community on its own cannot fund programs for special needs students. The cost to educate these students are prohibitive without state support, who need therapists and access to the right technology to keep up in the classroom. It’s simply too much of a financial burden for the community to bare.

My son deeply cares about his faith. Every Sabbath, he goes around our Jewish neighborhood from synagogue to synagogue, smiling, dancing and opening up the ark where the Torah is kept. He is well-known to members of our community, who love him and his enthusiasm.

Recently, he went on a school trip, and even though we have told his school on many occasions that he can’t eat non-kosher food, he came home and told me that he ate pizza from a non-kosher restaurant. Incidents like that one has been a tragic motif of his time in public school.

Yonatan has come home begging us to dress up for Halloween – a holiday observant Jews don’t celebrate. We have made decisions that we never thought we’d have to, such as sending him to school on Jewish holidays. But when that bus pulls up in front of our house and our kid with special needs begs us to go, it is painful to have to give in.

Sending your child to a non-religious school doesn’t just impact your child – it impacts your entire family. Though Yonatan has had some great educators over the years who cared about him, they weren’t and aren’t equipped to handle his religious needs. I know that if Yonatan had been provided services in a Jewish environment, he would have flourished, but that conversation was never able to materialize.

I feel that as a mother, I have failed my child, and other children like him in my community by not fighting harder for funding for special needs services in religious schools. I have compromised on what is right for them, as well as my own family.

The rule must be discarded in the dustbin of history. If non-religious private schools receive IDEA funding, religious schools should as well. I’m now fighting for other families with stories like mine, such as the Loffmans, whom—represented by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty—are currently suing the state of California, along with several other families and Jewish day schools, to gain access to these services in Loffman v. California Department of Education. Their son is young, and they still have the opportunity to give him what he needs both developmentally and spiritually. All Californians have an obligation to make sure that happens.

I may have had to compromise on my kid’s education, but other parents shouldn’t have to. Parents deserve the right to pick the school that’s right for their children– and have the full support of the state of California behind them. I pray that day arrives soon.

Miriam Mark is the Executive Director of Teach CA, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of yeshivas and Jewish day schools for equitable government funding and resources.

Since January, California’s budget deficit has been estimated from between $27.6 billion and , depending on whose figures you trust. Whatever the exact number, the obvious explanation is the state spends too much money. The obvious answer is the state needs to cut spending. Where? Wherever the money is, including the biggest line items such as education, social services, climate change.

Until last week, Gov. Gavin ɫ����̳om has mainly focused on that involve additional borrowing and funding delays. Finally, with his release of the May budget revise, ɫ����̳om is proposing some real (albeit insufficient) cuts. The Legislature has until June 15 to pass a final budget.

As CalMatters , the governor has announced “more than $30 billion in ongoing and one-time spending cuts … though he promised that ‘core programs’ providing social services to needy Californians would be mostly untouched.” It’s too bad the governor and Legislature didn’t create a more sustainable path when we had a $100 billion surplus a few years ago.

The most heartening news: ɫ����̳om is resisting efforts to raise taxes. “I’m not prepared to increase taxes,” he at a press conference last week. “We have among the highest tax rates in the United States of America for high wage earners. … I feel strongly that we have to live within our means.” Tax hikes certainly wouldn’t help his national political aspirations, but we’ll see.

The Sacramento Bee legislative leaders as “lukewarm” to the proposal. If lawmakers seem unhappy, that’s a good sign given their tax-and-spend preferences. The state does indeed have the nation’s highest tax rates – and ramping up taxes will only stifle the economic growth that our capital-gains dependent budget needs. Businesses continue to flee at record rates.

The administration is working from the most-optimistic $26.7-billion figure, but we’ll soon see the Legislative Analyst Office’s (and likely higher) figures. The Legislature has wisely begin whittling away at the shortfall, although its $17-billion in savings avoids serious cuts and “mostly relies on new revenue, internal borrowing and funding delays and shifts for savings,” . When those measures are considered, the actually approaches $45 billion.

Other than cutting a pointless pushed by the bicycle lobby, the governor has largely spared most of the state’s climate programs. The state that its $53.9-billion multi-year commitment is “more than what most other countries are spending.” Given that the May revise is unlikely to fully close the budget gap, this seems like a good place to target next. After all, that’s where the money is.

The report evaluated the California Interagency Council on Homelessness (Cal ICH), which is tasked with coordinating and monitoring the work of multiple state agencies charged with addressing homelessness.

With 180,000 people known to be homeless in California last year, up 50% from 2013, the state has had a humanitarian crisis playing out on its streets for a long time.

Accordingly, taxpayers have entrusted the state with billions of dollars at the state and local level to solve the problem. One might assume the state takes this responsibility  seriously and would proceed with common sense, like tracking what works and what doesn’t work to help guide how it does things.

But as the state auditor reported, “The state lacks current information on the ongoing costs and outcomes of its homelessness programs, because Cal ICH has not consistently tracked and evaluated the state’s efforts to prevent and end homelessness.”

The auditor continued, “Cal ICH has also not aligned its action plan to end homelessness with its statutory goals to collect financial information and ensure accountability and results. Thus, it lacks assurance that the actions it takes will effectively enable it to achieve those goals.”

While one might think mass firings would take place as a result of such incompetence, the state has so far met this report with a hearing, which is better than nothing.

On Monday, lawmakers on the Assembly budget subcommittee on accountability and oversight grilled homelessness officials and were surprised at the lack of data on hand.

Assemblyman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, commented, “You come to a budget committee, and there’s no numbers? How many people have we helped? How many people are off the street? … Because that’s what the public wants to know. What’s the money been spent on?”

Opined Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi, D-Torrance, “We can’t just be shoveling money at a problem without knowing if we’re spending the money wisely, in the most cost-effective way.”

Of course, both Assemblymembers Ting and Muratsuchi have been in office for a long time and could have been putting in the work to get to the bottom of this years ago.

Better late than never.

The inadequacy of state and local responses to homelessness has been extensively documented in these pages and elsewhere for years.

People are suffering and dying on the streets, but California state government can’t get around to making sure that it is meeting the challenge with  the seriousness it demands.

If this is how California handles one of the most visible, destructive and massive crises it could possibly have, just imagine how poorly California state government oversees everything else it does.

Is it any wonder that California’s education system continues to struggle? Is it any wonder that California’s transportation infrastructure is in such poor shape?

California’s Democratic supermajority hasn’t bothered to ask the tough questions about anything because it hasn’t had to. Elected officials like to pat themselves on the back for throwing money around but don’t bother making sure they’re doing any good.

It’s time for that to change.

The song’s refrain is particularly apt, too: “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

To California’s Franchise Tax Board, you can leave — but it might still consider you a resident for tax purposes.

A recent report from the San Francisco Chronicle found that, “People leaving California … may find that some or all of their income could still be taxable in California.”

Other states take similar approaches, but California revenuers are particularly aggressive at chasing down expats.

As Pender added, California failed to impose an exit tax, but instead imposes something similar.

It taxes athletes based on the number of games played in California. It embraces a broad definition of the word “domiciled,” meaning that if you take up residence elsewhere it still might consider you a Californian if you maintain close connections within the state.

California will still tax you for, as the article noted, rental income or a business with sales in the state, income from California-based retirement plans, freelance income from California clients and other income sources.

The agency often audits “high-income people who have recently established residency in another state.”

In one notorious case, California spent 26 years trying to collect millions of dollars “from a wealthy computer chip inventor … after state tax collectors accused him of fabricating a move to Nevada just as he started to cash in on a lucrative patent he obtained in 1990,” according to the Las Vegas Sun.

The inventor largely won his case in 2017, but it shows just how zealous California can be at chasing taxes.

Instead of targeting fleeing Californians, the Legislature and governor should create a tax structure and climate that encourages people to invest, work, build businesses and create revenue here.

“Hotel California” was an allegory of greed — something that’s especially fitting given the endless greed of the state’s tax agencies.

“Best chilaquiles I have ever had!” raves one online commenter. But it’s the next comment that gets to the difference between Homegirl and the others: “The food and service were both incredible, and it has an incredible mission.”

Mission? In a cafe? Beyond, say, composting and recycling?

Well, the casual observer will soon see that, yes, the Gen Z and Millennial servers do have even more tattoos than most of their peers, some of them of the teardrop-on-the-face variety.

That’s because Homegirl’s parent nonprofit, Homeboy Industries, has evolved since 1988, when it was founded as a way of improving the lives of former gang members in East L.A., into the largest gang intervention, rehab and re-entry program in the world.

The Homegirl baristas and bakers and servers are all formerly from the gang world, and all have taken advantage of the employment classes, and perhaps other services from tattoo removal to substance-abuse counseling, and are now supporting themselves through one of the greatest success stories in Southern California. Homeboy even runs one of its cafes in a branch on the second floor of L.A. City Hall, offering up to the City Council members, lobbyists, staffers and mere citizens who must do business there a welcome respite from the government sausage-making: BLTs, Danish, bagels and double chocolate chip cookies, all house made.

And the ex-gang members’ success in the world is thanks to the vision of Father Gregory Boyle, the native Angeleno, Loyola High grad and Jesuit priest who formerly served as the pastor of Dolores Mission Church in Boyle Heights, which at the time was the poorest parish in Los Angeles.

Boyle’s name stands out among the 19 politicians, celebrities and other activists who this week received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Joe Biden.

He has been a true Angeleno hero for decades, and it makes us and other Southern Californians proud to see him so recognized at the national level. After watching so many in his community gunned down in the gang wars that began in the late 1980s — with about 1,000 gang-related killings in 1992 — Boyle said, “Gang violence is about a lethal absence of hope.” His novel concept: treat gang members like human beings.

The community is invited in to help: Among the long-term volunteers at Homeboy are lawyers, teachers, therapists, social workers and medical professionals offering their services pro bono. Contact Homeboy if you’d like to get involved at homeboyindustries.org.

Instead of hand-wringing, Father Greg did something. Now, thousands have jobs and new lives, thanks to Homeboy. That’s work we call highly worthy of this nation’s Presidential Medal of Freedom.

A new Goldman Sachs study for the first quarter of 2024 found compensation for private-sector union workers rose 6.6% over the previous year, “once again far outpacing compensation growth for nonunion workers, which also increased but to a more moderate 4.1%.”

Unions have been enjoying a resurgence under President Biden. The April 24 New Yorker “many scholars and union officials have come to view Joe Biden as the most pro-labor President since Franklin Roosevelt, a designation he has proudly embraced.” 

American Progress in February Ford’s giant new electric-vehicle battery plant in Tennessee as an example of President Biden’s pro-labor policies. The plant received a taxpayer-guaranteed loan from Biden’s of 2021 after Ford signed project labor agreements guaranteeing high union wages. That might be good for the beneficiaries of federal dollars and those specific union employees. But the 2021 act’s $1.2 trillion price tag is one reason inflation has risen so much in recent years across the country.

Raymond Sfeir, director of the A. Gary Anderson Center for Economic Research at Chapman University, points out that one reason union pay is rising faster now is because their contracts commonly extend several years, with expiring contracts dating back to before the inflation of the Biden era. By contrast, pay for non-union workers rose faster than for union workers from 2021-23 because their contracts are shorter and can be renegotiated more quickly to reflect inflation. Yet ultimately, he said, “For firms with labor unions the pay increase will be higher because of the power the labor union has.”

The Goldman Sachs overview looked only at jobs in the private sector. While most American workers aren’t in a union, about half of those who are in a union work for the government. 

Public sector compensation in California has risen sharply in recent years.

Last May, the United Teachers of Los Angeles approved a with the Los Angeles Unified School District raising pay 21% through 2025. It’s certainly not because the quality of instruction has improved that much. Most of the students on their watch fail to meet grade-level standards in mathematics and English language arts.

Finally there also is a major difference between private and public-sector union contracts. If private union contracts rise too high, a company can go bankrupt. For the public sector, bankruptcy occurs, but is rare. Instead, excessive contracts lead to tax increases or reductions in services. That has been seen throughout California in recent decades as taxes have risen to record levels while schools, roads and other public services decay.

Unions bring higher compensation to their members. But the bill is paid by everybody else.