Steven Greenhut
For the first time in at least a century, California has actually lost population. The latest Department of Finance data shows that the state lost 182,000 people last year. Californians have for years been leaving for states with friendlier tax…
Sacramento The latest battle against structural racism has taken a bizarre turn, as progressives have declared that the use of credit scoring for determining certain financial decisions is inherently discriminatory and unfair. Such scores do not take into account anyone’s…
Sacramento California’s legislative analysts and Capitol staffers do a remarkably thorough job summarizing proposed bills in their publicly available reports, but it’s still unusual to see them cite the work of free-market economists. It’s obvious why. Almost every new measure…
Sacramento Democratic lawmakers depicted a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning California’s requirement that advocacy groups disclose their donors to the state as a nefarious attack on the nation’s campaign-finance laws. They drew conclusions about the influence of “dark money”…
Sacramento In their zeal to promote unionization, California regulators and lawmakers have long taken a lackadaisical approach toward property rights, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who follows the antics of California’s progressive government. One of the best examples was the California…
Sacramento During a recent interview, a journalist asked me what states should do now that a particularly intense drought has taken hold of the West. It was a perfectly fair question, but it points to one of my pet peeves…
Sacramento It’s been nearly 20 years since former Gov. Gray Davis stood in suburban eastern Los Angeles County at the opening ceremony for a six-mile stretch of the Foothill Freeway, where he declared that the state no longer would build…
Sacramento Now that California finally is loosening its COVID restrictions, the state is back to dealing with one of its longest-running crises: the state’s persistent housing shortages. The housing market has overheated throughout most of the country, but the median…
Sacramento After years of devastating wildfire seasons, California is facing a full-on insurance crisis that you can add to the list of its other crises. In this case, homeowners who live in wooded areas — the wildland-urban interface, as actuaries…
