LA Times

A plan to raise revenue in the state hits the middle class while sparing the truly wealthy.

In Washington, Democrats want to end tax cuts for the rich. In Sacramento, they want to create some.

The preferences of the national Democrats are much better known than those of their California counterparts. With the Bush tax cuts expiring at the end of the year, the Obama administration and Democratic leaders in both houses of Congress want to extend those cuts for all but the wealthiest Americans — those making more than $250,000 a year.

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Both have put forth plans to address the state's loss of industrial manufacturing. Neither goes far enough.

For all their differences, Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown agree on one thing: California needs an industrial policy.

For half a century, aerospace was California's dominant economic engine. But then the end of the Cold War led to a radical contraction of the aerospace industry. Since then, the state has subsisted on bubbles, and it has wilted each time they popped. Neither the dot-com industry nor housing — the two chief sources of economic activity in this state for the past 15 years — offered the kind of sustainable and broadly shared prosperity that Californians took for granted in the years between 1940 and 1990. The high-tech companies that have flourished in this state over the past 20 years have created great wealth, but with much of their manufacturing done offshore, that wealth has not been shared with California production workers.

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By accelerating Measure R's transit construction through bond sales, L.A. County could generate at least 165,000 jobs here and now with the 30/10 project.

The American economy is intractably stuck. No one is creating jobs.

Not corporations, even though they're earning record profits and are sitting on nearly $2 trillion in cash. Their profit surge, however, comes from renewed sales abroad and relies on increased productivity, reduced wages and a diminished labor force at home. Not small businesses, which still cannot obtain credit from the banks nor resume hiring until U.S. consumers resume consuming. And most assuredly not the federal government, whose stimulus package saved millions of jobs, but not enough to convince the public to support the second stimulus the economy now desperately needs.

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The governor vetoed a bill that would have paid farmworkers overtime for more than an eight-hour day and would have given them at least one day off every seven.

It's not really news when a bill fails to become a law in Sacramento. In this age of partisan gridlock, plenty of good ideas are never enacted.

Still, one bill that made it to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's desk last week, only to be killed by his veto, is worth looking at for what it tells us about how hard it is to clean out even antiquated moral rot, so long as powerful interests profit from it.

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The departing head of the SEIU had a profound effect on California's politics and economy.

Andy Stern has arguably been the most influential non-Californian in the affairs of California in the past 15 years. The organizing director of the Service Employees International Union from 1984 through 1996, and the SEIU's president since then, Stern has shaped the state's politics and much of its economy.

During Stern's tenure atop the SEIU, the union doubled in size to roughly 2 million members, and in California it grew to nearly 700,000 members, far more than any other union in the state's history. Stern, who stunned the liberal and labor worlds by announcing his resignation last week, turned the SEIU into the nation's single biggest and most influential liberal political player. The union turned out the most precinct walkers, spent the most money and financed organizations that mobilized new immigrant voters and turned out the vote in key swing states.

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Pelosi's role in passing healthcare reform puts her in the top rank of House speakers.

Anyone who has heard Nancy Pelosi speak knows she is not a great speaker. Her favorite rhetorical device is to seize on a word and club her listeners over the head with it.

When she spoke from the floor of the House on Sunday in support of the healthcare reform bill, the word she wielded was "opportunity." Her point -- that the bill would enable Americans to leave their jobs to start up new ventures without fear of not being able to get health insurance in their new gig -- was altogether valid and perfectly good, but she insisted on repeating the word "opportunity" so many times that she left listeners (this listener, anyway) a little woozy.

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