$370B/yr - It seems a bit useless to call out the total tax number of all the bills put forth. What percentage of those typically pass? That would be relevant info to actually evaluate that number, without it, it's kind of meaningless. $183B/yr is the number given below for total budget. So what, they're going to triple the state budget in one year? No, that's insane, so why the hell bother pointing that out?
> "California is the fifth largest economy in the world, with a $183 billion state budget and $125 billion general fund that is intended to fund essential government services such as education, health and public safety. The taxpayers of our state have already provided the necessary funding for our Legislature to solve any challenge that impacts our communities."
Sums it up well. I know new challenges come up but California does/should already have a enough money to cover basic infrastructure.
Investment now saves money later in many cases. For example, climate change denying Florida will be halfway under water by the time the people give up on their state government and elect some people who will install pumps, barrier islands, etc. to mitigate the effects. The water is already noticeably higher in coastal areas.
Another good example is trains. They cost a ton upfront but they will shape entire communities for generations.
> Another good example is trains. They cost a ton upfront but they will shape entire communities for generations.
In California? Which entire communities? I lived there for 30 years and know of only a few very, very narrow definitions of community for which that is true. A strip in downtown LA and some of the BART constituency. California does not have the density of NYC or Paris. I do not understand how the trains will affect more than .05% or so of the population.
The reason it doesn't have that density is because of NIMBYs and train opponents like yourself. But the tide has already turned, measure S and skyrocketing rents show that everything has changed. I see cranes all over the place, trains will follow.
The nature of that kind of long-term infrastructure investment won't show itself for ten years.
Please speak for yourself. NIMBY doesn't describe me very well. I grew up with trains, love them, and was literally a block away from a busy line. I still miss the horns.
Chicken/Egg conundrum. LA's low-density sprawl exists for three (maybe four/five) reasons: Geological (quake shake = low rise makes sense), availability of land, and lack of suitable transport infrastructure. (Possible forth reason is the overall history of the place, maybe we're just at the apex of that time when various disparate towns come together to form the city and we're not quite done with that process yet). I guess there's a tenuous fifth reason which is LA's road infrastructure is at the extreme end of feasibility, including but not limited to the inhabitant's seemingly infinite patience for rush-hour gridlock.
If you believe the earthquake risk, land area, and roading are reasons enough that urban intensification has not occurred, then adding (more) rail doesn't really make sense. On the other hand, you could regard lack of rail as being the only thing holding back urban intensification, and the lack of it being the very reason for LA's current sprawl. Providing you don't regard the other factors as hard limiters, of course.
So in one school of thought: there's nothing really stopping the rest of LA intensifying in the same way as downtown (and the airport area), other than a lack of suitable transport infrastructure to facilitate it. So assuming intensification is a thing you want, there is the argument to invest and deploy the trains; in a few years you should see a great intensification of the new corridor areas of LA where it previously didn't make sense.
Personally, I'm not on board with the idea - The quake hazard alone is reason enough to keep things flat and wide. I might be somewhat conservative in that regard of course - Continually echoing in my mind is that statement from 'the really big one' article a few years back that said 'everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast', as far as how I judge LA's realism on earthquake risk.
Although I wouldn't be surprised if large, expensive buildings held up better to earthquakes than low-density homes people build as cheap as they can and where inspections are more lax. For instance Japan holds up very well to earthquakes.
Re: Japan all houses built since 1981 are earthquake safe. Before then houses were built with heavy roof tiles which would not blow off in a typhoon. Tiles falling off or the roof causing the entire building to collapse were responsible for many deaths in the Kobe earthquake.
LA has a fairly extensive and rapidly expanding network now, including expo line which goes all the way to santa monica. like most people who don't actually live here, you're working with decades-old information.
Well I wouldn't personally say that California has invested too much into trains compared to a lot of the world like Malaysia, Japan, China, Thailand, the EU, etc.
The Mission in San Francisco is a great example of a neighborhood with many transit connections that supports a large number of residents who do not own cars. The need for things to be walking friendly creates the charm of the neighborhood.
You mention BART, but not Caltrain. Cities with stops (e.g. Mountain View) end up being much more vibrant than communities a bit further away (e.g. Sunnyvale, Cupertino) as more of the restaurants and other businesses congregate where there is an influx of people.
I don't know which areas of California you're thinking of but you seemed to acknowledge that the cities that invested in trains benefit from them so maybe the problem is that the other areas just didn't invest and are now strips of fast food restaurants and chain retail in strip malls built for cars.
It wouldn't be my top choice for land to try to save due to it being on limestone as you mention. But regardless they are building more fancy housing as we speak, so it seems the least they could is plan a bit to mitigate the effects. Miami Beach has put in some pumps but overall no action is being taken.
Of course they don't bother trying to, you know, lift the giant subsidies on water for agriculture when farmers are still using 10000 year old irrigation practices that result in most of the water evaporating into the air ....
Lays out some on both sides, but still seems jarring to me that a state that sometimes contends with droughts is fighting to maintain so many water hungry crops.
> Like rice, that both consumes a lot of water and doesn't even produce that great of returns.
More water is used by cows. They drink lots of water, plus the food that they eat requires water. The only thing is that their food was most likely produced in another state.
Yes, it always amazes me that we grow rice in a desert. But you might say the same for cotton, but in the case of cotton, long-staple cottons derived from ancient Egyptian cottons make superior cloth because of the longer fibers, but are susceptable to boll rot if it gets rain at the wrong time. It isn't always a simple analysis. If you want to give up growing cotton in California, be prepared for the quality of your shirts to go down.
The bottom line is it isn't the farmers who are the ultimate consumers of the water. We all use ag water when we buy food at the grocery store. We eat the water. You can't make an impact on ag water without impacting the consumer also, and that connection needs to be acknowledged. The farmers use the water, but they don't consume the water. We do.
Your arguments would be correct if consumers footed 100% of the ag water bills. Want a premium-quality t-shirt? Go pay for superior cotton grown in a desert. Sounds fair to me.
The question is in subsidies on water for farming; without them, much of the ag on California would become unsustainable, or, hopefully, would turn to modern practices that allow to grow vegetables in places like Middle East with very moderate water supply.
This doesn't have to mean an across-the-board increase in food prices, though. Prices that consumers pay for goods should reflect the cost of the resources consumed in their production. If almonds in particular become more expensive at the grocery store (it takes a gallon of water to grow one almond), and this causes people to buy fewer almonds relative to other foods, and water is conserved as a result, then this seems like the right outcome. (If we did see an across-the-board increase in food prices, that could be fixed with government subsidies, if that were necessary to prevent the change from being a regressive tax.)
There's another side to the Alfalfa story. In recent years, much of the Alfalfa grown in California has been sold and shipped to dairies in South China [0]. This happens because of increased demand from the Chinese for dairy products coupled with the lack of available water for dairy farms in that region, combined with the astounding fact that it's actually cheaper to sell and ship to China than it is to sell and ship within California.
Came here to say something similar. That putting a tax on consumer's water bills will have a tiny effect on general water consumption. Compare this to a tax on water consumption in general: in the end it's the absolute water use that needs to come down, not the size of the consumer's water consumption relative to the total consumption.
Maybe this is what you get when the people's say in lawmaking is overshadowed by that of corps.
This tax is just more dope for the money junkies in Sacramento who think the answer to their fiscal misdeeds is more money. Anyone who has a healthy relationship with money knows the answer to money problems is to be fiscally prudent and stop buying things you can't afford.
Prop 52 and 56 approved funds that were earmarked for new health services. Brown and his lackeys made a $1.5 billion dollar error in MediCal. Sacramento's response? Use the prop 52 and 56 funds and "let the lawyers figure it out" [1](Senator Richard Pan, Sacramento) In effect, we have lawmakers saying they will willfully break the law and if you don't like it, you can sue them. I'm sure they will do the same with this new tax, use it for something else and wait to be sued. They should all be facing RICO charges.
What's even stupider is that if they stop using so much water, they'll lose the right to do so going forward. A lot of those places with grandfathered water rights have "use it or lose it" clauses. If they optimized for using less water then they'd lose the rights to pull the larger quantity out of the ground the following year.
Those rights apply to surface water. Ground water is, if I recall, a free for all. Pump as much as you can, as fast as you can, because everyone knows it will be gone in a few decades so you better make your money now.
Nope. Modifying pre-1914 water rights in California would constitute a taking, and the state government would have to reimburse that. As for the sweetheart deals that Nestlé gets from the federal government, that's another matter entirely.
Honestly why? We have one of the highest tax burdens in the entire USA. We already pay more for water and more for electricity than almost anywhere else.
Why? Because of the initiative process. Budgeting in California needlessly complicated and hamstrung due to the people of California. Prop 13 famously underfunds schools and the like. Also, Prop 98 (which is notoriously complex) hamstrings the budget process so that about half of the budget must be spent on education, which in effect can make everything that's not for K-14 twice as expensive.
When I ascend to the throne, I'd make the legislature unicameral (really, what's the point of a state Senate anyway?) and eliminate the initiative process.
Also, monorails have been successfully deployed around the world. They've been available since the early 20th century. It isn't fantastical technology to use one gigantic rail instead of two smaller rails.
This sounds like they are going to sell the water management, water rights to a for-profit company, once the taxes are in place. Guaranteed income & increases for years to come.
It's sad that most of our resources of necessity are in the hands of for-profit companies.
Public drinking water helps the poor, taxing it would hurt them. Correct? The wealthy drink bottles artisanal water anyhow.
I like the idea of a safe drinking water commission, but perhaps we fund it with taxes on chemical waste, mining, and fossil fuels. Things that contaminate the drinking water. That way the tax itself helps improve the water safety.
This seems as misguided as when we added a sales tax to help homelessness.
I read through the bill. There is a lot of talk on what fees they are imposing and on who. There is not much on what the money will be used for aside from mapping at risk water for contamination. A blurb about infrastructure consulting and potential help. Very light on details. And a section on how farms that discharge a lot of nitrates will be in compliance as long as they pay their fees within 90 days. Sounds like a charge of $1 per month to residents to have a new program around that can raise the fees later to keep the program around. I did not catch much of anything in the text about actually helping communities with unhealthy water.
On average, water rates in the US are about half of what they are in say France. In many cases, not only are rates too low to discourage inefficient water use, they’re too low to even adequately maintain the water/sewer infrastructure: http://www.asce.org/water_and_wastewater_report/
There is something a little intellectually lazy about taking an editorial from a republican representative in the OC Register and then treating it and commenting on it as if it is a news article that is not implicitly biased. Many news articles have been published on this bill. Here is one that the Mercury News did.
58 comments
[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] threadSums it up well. I know new challenges come up but California does/should already have a enough money to cover basic infrastructure.
Another good example is trains. They cost a ton upfront but they will shape entire communities for generations.
In California? Which entire communities? I lived there for 30 years and know of only a few very, very narrow definitions of community for which that is true. A strip in downtown LA and some of the BART constituency. California does not have the density of NYC or Paris. I do not understand how the trains will affect more than .05% or so of the population.
The nature of that kind of long-term infrastructure investment won't show itself for ten years.
If you believe the earthquake risk, land area, and roading are reasons enough that urban intensification has not occurred, then adding (more) rail doesn't really make sense. On the other hand, you could regard lack of rail as being the only thing holding back urban intensification, and the lack of it being the very reason for LA's current sprawl. Providing you don't regard the other factors as hard limiters, of course.
So in one school of thought: there's nothing really stopping the rest of LA intensifying in the same way as downtown (and the airport area), other than a lack of suitable transport infrastructure to facilitate it. So assuming intensification is a thing you want, there is the argument to invest and deploy the trains; in a few years you should see a great intensification of the new corridor areas of LA where it previously didn't make sense.
Personally, I'm not on board with the idea - The quake hazard alone is reason enough to keep things flat and wide. I might be somewhat conservative in that regard of course - Continually echoing in my mind is that statement from 'the really big one' article a few years back that said 'everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast', as far as how I judge LA's realism on earthquake risk.
Neither do New York State or France.
LA has a fairly extensive and rapidly expanding network now, including expo line which goes all the way to santa monica. like most people who don't actually live here, you're working with decades-old information.
The Mission in San Francisco is a great example of a neighborhood with many transit connections that supports a large number of residents who do not own cars. The need for things to be walking friendly creates the charm of the neighborhood.
You mention BART, but not Caltrain. Cities with stops (e.g. Mountain View) end up being much more vibrant than communities a bit further away (e.g. Sunnyvale, Cupertino) as more of the restaurants and other businesses congregate where there is an influx of people.
I don't know which areas of California you're thinking of but you seemed to acknowledge that the cities that invested in trains benefit from them so maybe the problem is that the other areas just didn't invest and are now strips of fast food restaurants and chain retail in strip malls built for cars.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2015/04/03/a...
Lays out some on both sides, but still seems jarring to me that a state that sometimes contends with droughts is fighting to maintain so many water hungry crops.
Good discussion here of what might shift if agricultural water had a price, or some kind of pigouvian tax: http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/05/11/cows-not-almonds-...
Like rice, that both consumes a lot of water and doesn't even produce that great of returns.
More water is used by cows. They drink lots of water, plus the food that they eat requires water. The only thing is that their food was most likely produced in another state.
The bottom line is it isn't the farmers who are the ultimate consumers of the water. We all use ag water when we buy food at the grocery store. We eat the water. You can't make an impact on ag water without impacting the consumer also, and that connection needs to be acknowledged. The farmers use the water, but they don't consume the water. We do.
The question is in subsidies on water for farming; without them, much of the ag on California would become unsustainable, or, hopefully, would turn to modern practices that allow to grow vegetables in places like Middle East with very moderate water supply.
[0]: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-feeding-china-hay-2014...
Maybe this is what you get when the people's say in lawmaking is overshadowed by that of corps.
Prop 52 and 56 approved funds that were earmarked for new health services. Brown and his lackeys made a $1.5 billion dollar error in MediCal. Sacramento's response? Use the prop 52 and 56 funds and "let the lawyers figure it out" [1](Senator Richard Pan, Sacramento) In effect, we have lawmakers saying they will willfully break the law and if you don't like it, you can sue them. I'm sure they will do the same with this new tax, use it for something else and wait to be sued. They should all be facing RICO charges.
1. http://www.latimes.com/politics/essential/la-pol-ca-essentia...
Regular consumers shouldn't be punished for the misuse of water by companies and farmers.
When I ascend to the throne, I'd make the legislature unicameral (really, what's the point of a state Senate anyway?) and eliminate the initiative process.
- $1+ B Side-deals to raise the gas tax $50+ B.
- $10+ B Mass-incarceration.
- $80+ B High-Speed Monorail boondoggle orders of magnitude more expensive than Hyperloop.
2) Hyperloop doesn't exist.
Then they apparently scrapped the idea of extending it beyond the airport.
It's sad that most of our resources of necessity are in the hands of for-profit companies.
I like the idea of a safe drinking water commission, but perhaps we fund it with taxes on chemical waste, mining, and fossil fuels. Things that contaminate the drinking water. That way the tax itself helps improve the water safety.
This seems as misguided as when we added a sales tax to help homelessness.
They're tripping over a $20 to pick up a quarter by taxing consumers. As others have mentioned consumers aren't the problem.
On average, water rates in the US are about half of what they are in say France. In many cases, not only are rates too low to discourage inefficient water use, they’re too low to even adequately maintain the water/sewer infrastructure: http://www.asce.org/water_and_wastewater_report/
http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/08/23/first-ever-tax-on-cali...