Just Published: Follow the Journey of One Young Woman Who Overcame Learning Disabilities Through Science and Choice in new book, A Kite in a Hurricane No More In A Kite in a Hurricane No More, a new book just published by the nonpartisan Pacific Res...
25 November, 2020
As most of us won’t be able to travel during the holiday season this year due to Covid-19 restrictions, we’ll have a lot more time to read a good book this year. To give you some ideas for your next great read, we present our......
25 November, 2020If rapidly rising cases of COVID-19 haven’t stopped Los Angelenos from stepping out of their homes — this will. To carry out the LA City Council’s decision to bow to mob violence and cut $150 million from the Los Angeles Police Department’s bud...
24 November, 2020Last week, the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s office (LAO) released its fiscal outlook for 2021, which is traditionally the start of the debate over next year’s state budget. Unexpectedly, California finds itself sitting on a $26 billion windfall ...
23 November, 2020It is well known that regular public schools receive more funding than public charter schools, but a just-released study finds that this gap becomes massive when all sources of revenues are included, and this yawning chasm can be seen especially in O...
20 November, 2020Today, we begin a new regular feature on “Right by the Bay” called “Winners and Losers.” Every Friday, our regular bloggers will present their choices for the winners and losers of the past week. We hope you’ll check back every week and drop us a.....
20 November, 2020As President-elect Joe Biden continues his transition to the West Wing, the poorly understood issue of student loan forgiveness has appeared again. I still think that the idea of complete student loan forgiveness is disastrous idea that has many flaw...
19 November, 2020Thanksgiving has not been canceled. Yet. But given what we’ve learned in recent days, would anyone be surprised if officials insisted we mark the holiday this year by cowering in our basements? On Friday, Gov. Gavin Newsom and the governors of Oregon...
18 November, 2020Ronald Reagan once described the government’s view of the economy like this: “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” From his last point, even the Gipper couldn’t imagine that government would tax...
17 November, 2020There is much speculation as to why Republicans defied expectations in down-ballot races in California this election, especially when Donald Trump garnered less than 34 percent of the vote in the state. The GOP is on track to gain two Congressional ...
16 November, 2020Tim Anaya – Why is Friday the 13th Unlucky? Why is Friday the 13th considered unlucky? Watch this video and learn why. Kerry Jackson – Anniversary of Fall of Berlin Wall This week is the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. ItR...
13 November, 2020Making the Case for Patriotic Education in American Schools By Katy Grimes, California Globe President Donald Trump signed an executive order recently establishing a 1776 Commission to create a curriculum that teaches “patriotic education” in schools...
13 November, 2020In an election result that astonished the country, Californians voted down an initiative that would have returned racial preferences to state college admissions, hiring, and contracting. In a margin of 56% to 44%, one of the most diverse and deepest...
12 November, 2020I was honored to give the Veterans Day address at John Adams Academy charter school. I focused on the connection between patriotism and military service. The following is an abridged version of my speech. Dr. Gary Houchens, an education professor a...
11 November, 2020One of the more overlooked results from the 2020 election is progressive states like California rejecting the lowering of the voting age. In Pacific Research Institute’s post-election podcast, I gave some insight into why Proposition 18, a ballot mea...
11 November, 2020Gov. Gavin Newsom had a lot riding on the outcome of Tuesday’s election. How the presidential and congressional elections and one key statewide ballot measure shake out will have a significant impact on how he crafts his upcoming 2021-22 state budge...
10 November, 2020This election cycle, I received three official ballots. Two showed up in California: one at my in-law’s address in Orange County, and a second in Riverside County, where I currently reside. In Nevada, my parents received my third official ballot at t...
09 November, 2020Rowena Itchon – Remembering Our Veterans Remembering our veterans: Ronald Reagan’s Veterans Day speech Kerry Jackson – The Origins of Prop. 13 Joel Fox tells the great story of the origins of Proposition 13. When voters apparently rejecte...
06 November, 2020
As is often the case, California voters had to sort through a number of ballot propositions on Election Day. Here’s a quick breakdown of the statewide measures. Proposition 14. Issues $5.5 billion in bonds for stem cell research, winning 51-49. Insta...
05 November, 2020
As of this writing, we don’t know who has won the 2020 presidential election. Whoever wins, America’s next chief executive has many important policy decisions to make in the coming weeks. Here’s a preview of some of the big issues that the presiden...
04 November, 2020Free marketers often assume that between the two political parties, Republicans are better for the stock market. It makes sense. Republicans believe that economic growth can be achieved by reducing regulation and costs for businesses and relying on ...
03 November, 2020By Lance Izumi and McKenzie Richards President Trump has signed an executive order establishing a national commission to promote patriotic education and to “encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history.” When t...
02 November, 2020Tim Anaya – Winning the Water Wars In case you missed it earlier this week, watch PRI’s webinar from earlier this week with Steven Greenhut discussing his new PRI book, Winning the Water Wars. Rowena Itchon – Remembering Bush v. Gor...
30 October, 2020By Lawrence Siskind In 1996, California voters amended their Constitution by enacting Proposition 209. It reads: “The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, c...
29 October, 2020A Bloomberg News story last week laments, not overtly but in an unmistakable tone, the “surge” in demand for luxury homes because it “highlights the growing U.S. wealth gap.” The “surge” should instead be a welcome development. Greater demand for opu...
29 October, 2020
PRI’s Rowena Itchon was featured in a KPIX story discussing her recent Right by the Bay blog post on the debate over the future of affirmative action in California. Watch her comments below . . . ShareTweetPinShare...
28 October, 2020While San Francisco parents struggle to help their kids keep up with their education during the coronavirus school closures, San Francisco school district officials are worrying about how to rename 44 schools out of the 125 in the city. The names of ...
28 October, 2020During the first presidential debate in September, both candidates answered where they think the economy is headed. Trump believes in a V-shaped recovery, basically a quick rebound, while Biden prefers a K-shaped recovery, with the rich recovering wh...
27 October, 2020
For hard-working Californians who are busy with their everyday lives, it can be hard to sort through the various measures we’ll be voting on this November. To help you get educated on the issues, below are links to PRI’s free-market analysis on the ...
26 October, 2020Rowena Itchon – The Presidential Cookie Poll In battleground Pennsylvania, a presidential cookie poll shows that Trump is leading Biden. Kerry Jackson – Trump-Biden Debate Rap Some needed humor during an election more heated than any of u...
23 October, 2020Gov. Gavin Newsom and his staff have dreamed up a “health equity metric” to determine who can emerge from the pandemic lockdowns and who can’t based on racial and ethnic quotas. Identity politics, the shallowest, crudest, and most divisive of all pol...
22 October, 2020Lance Izumi, senior director of the Pacific Research Institute’s Center for Education, recently interviewed U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, and covered the importance of expanding school choice opportunities for every student in America, sch...
21 October, 2020On November 3, Californians will be asked to make a what appears to be a simple decision, that is, would they like to increase their privacy? However, where Proposition 24, to enable the California Privacy Rights and Enforcement Act is concerned, app...
21 October, 2020What does it say when members of Congress from elsewhere are more serious about saving the state from future wildfire disasters than many of California’s own politically connected activists? More than 4 million acres have burned so far in this year’s...
20 October, 2020Milton Friedman famously declared that “one of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.” While California desperately needs to apply this wisdom across the policy spectrum, arguably, the gap ...
19 October, 2020California teacher unions fight calls to reopen schools By Howard Blume As parents express widespread dissatisfaction with distance learning, two influential California teachers unions are pushing against growing momentum to reopen schools in many co...
16 October, 2020Kerry Jackson – Remembering Baroness Thatcher Tuesday was Margaret Thatcher’s birthday. She would have been 95. This week, PRI held its 9th annual Baroness Thatcher Gala, named in her honor. We’re all better off because of her. Tim...
16 October, 2020Starting with the Legislature’s approval of former Gov. Jerry Brown’s public safety realignment plan in 2011, California has undergone a big change on criminal justice policy. Turning its back on policies like “Three Strikes” that were passed during ...
15 October, 2020Last week, I wrote about a proposition on the California ballot that would give 17-year-olds the right to vote in some California elections. California’s push for the youth vote got me thinking about how recent college graduates and others entering t...
14 October, 2020Pick nearly any state in the union and likely it has a large swath of rural area and population. Even California, which is rarely thought of as a “rural state,” is still physically more than half rural, with about four million residents living in tho...
13 October, 2020Norman Gonzales and Carlos Yniguez from John Adams Academy join PRI’s Lance Izumi to discuss a change in this year’s budget that takes away funding for thousands of kids attending charter schools across the state, and how the school is fighting this ...
12 October, 2020The 2020-21 state budget signed back in June by Gov. Newsom glaringly failed to fund regular public schools and public charter schools with growing enrollments. A purported “fix” to this problem, pushed by the governor and Democratic legislators, tur...
12 October, 2020DOWNLOAD THE PDF California is now the first state to require plastic beverage containers to contain a minimum content of recycled material. A step forward? Hardly. The bill, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sept. 24, the day after he issued an ...
12 October, 2020Tim Anaya – A Conversation with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos In case you missed it earlier this week, watch as our Lance Izumi interviews Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Rowena Itchon – What If Joe Biden Were A Libertarian? What if Jo...
09 October, 2020To adequately cover all the angles, implications, and consequences of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s executive order to rid the state of gasoline and diesel cars and trucks and replace them with electric vehicles would require a short book, or a long policy pap...
08 October, 2020In case you missed our special live webinar, listen to PRI’s Lance Izumi as he interviews U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. The two discuss the importance of expanding school choice opportunities for every American student, school reopenings fo...
08 October, 2020
Watch Lance Izumi, senior director of PRI’s Center for Education, in conversation with U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. They discuss the importance of expanding school choice opportunities for every American student, school reopenings f...
07 October, 2020One of the most disturbing political ads airing across the state this election season is a television ad urging a “yes” vote on Prop. 16, the ballot initiative that asks voters to overturn Prop. 209, the landmark California law that ended racial pref...
07 October, 2020Voters will be asked to decide on many important ballot propositions on November 3 with rent control, the future of independent contractors, and data privacy among the most impactful issues on the ballot. One proposition that voters may overlook is P...
06 October, 2020With the Presidential debate and the first couple testing positive for COVID-19 dominating the headlines last week, you may have missed a very big story from Yolo County. The Judicial Council, the policymaking body for California’s judicial system, e...
05 October, 2020Tim Anaya – Memorable Moments that Dominate Presidential Debates Are Almost Always Unexpected This week on PRI’s Next Round podcast, we break down the first presidential debate. Here’s a look at memorable moments from debates past....
02 October, 2020As the COVID-19 pandemic keeps many regular public schools closed, it should be a no-brainer that states would fund online public charter schools, which specialize in delivering instruction through distance-learning tools. Shockingly, however, some b...
01 October, 2020When Barack Obama told the country that under Obamacare “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” he was dinged for telling the PolitiFact Lie of the Year. California Gov. Gavin Newsom made a similar promise when he signed last week an......
01 October, 2020Back in the November 2018 election, California voters were forced to pretend to be health care executives when they were asked to decide whether to require dialysis clinics to give refunds to patients (or patients’ insurers) if profits were abo...
30 September, 2020Property taxes are a hot issue on the ballot in California this November. Most of the attention has centered around Prop. 15, which would impose a split roll property tax scheme in the state. Garnering less attention is Prop. 19, which has the poten...
29 September, 2020Like in so many policy areas, California is going in the wrong direction when it comes to charter schools. But while Sacramento is making it hard for charters to grow, a new Harvard University study finds charter-school students are learning more th...
28 September, 2020PRI joins all Americans in remembering the life and legacy of the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with a special “What We’re Watching”. Remembering RBG An excerpt from the Opera Scalia/Ginsburg An Unlikely Friendship ...
25 September, 2020Last week, the First Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that private sector unions can’t force workers to pay for union lobbying activities. Jeanette Geary, a Rhode Island nurse who is not a union member, waged a decade-long battle against the Unite...
24 September, 2020Most of the California business community is at the mercy of California’s progressive state legislature. It is easy to forget, especially with Silicon Valley pumping out inflated IPOs, that small businesses are the backbone of the economy. The U.S. S...
23 September, 2020Unlike many California ballot measures, the title of Proposition 21 is clear and upfront. There’s no intent to deceive with misleading language. It’s not “an argument designed to influence the voter,” and isn’t likely to prejudice the electorate. The...
22 September, 2020Among the measures on a lengthy statewide ballot this November – there are 11 statewide ballot propositions in addition to numerous local measures across the state – are two curious measures that deal with voting. One measure, Proposition 18, would a...
21 September, 2020Tim Anaya – Making the Entire Health Care System More Affordable In the final episode in PRI’s “Escape the Drug Pricing Maze” series, the Professor and Pete visit the City of Free Enterprise and learn that reforms to make the ...
18 September, 2020
The 2020-21 state budget signed back in June by Governor Newsom glaringly failed to fund growing regular public schools and public charter schools. A purported “fix” to this problem, pushed by the governor and Democrat legislators, turns out to be j...
17 September, 2020When I mentioned to our editorial committee that I was going to work on a blog on good bills out of California’s recent legislative session, Kerry Jackson joked that I needed fewer than 100 words to cover that topic. After a few hours of hunting......
17 September, 2020Last month, the Trump Administration announced a “historic deal” to normalize relations between the United Arab Emirates and Israel. Did the Trump administration solve Middle East conflict? No. While the merits of the deal will be debated in think ta...
16 September, 2020While visiting yet another charred part of California last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom said he was “a little bit exhausted that we have to continue to debate this issue. This a climate damn emergency.” It’s a statement he can make confident that few of C...
15 September, 2020Lance Izumi, Pacific Research Institute’s senior fellow in education, joins the Phil Cowan Show on AM 1380 The Answer with guest host Katy Grimes, to discuss the current state of education due to COVID-19 and the impact of the coronavirus. Izum...
14 September, 2020An unusual hearing took place at the State Capitol last week. Members of the Joint Rules Committee gathered to hear presentations on plans to tear down the existing State Capitol annex and replace it with a new, modern building. Three different bui...
14 September, 2020Rowena Itchon – A Virtual Tour of the 9/11 Memorial Tim Anaya – Annual 9/11 Reading of the Names of the World Trade Center Victims Ben Smithwick – A 9/11 Survivor’s Story Brian Clark shares the story of his escape from the Sou...
11 September, 2020The state of California, which can’t keep the lights on thanks to political interference in energy generation, nor build enough homes because government has poisoned the housing market, is going into the pharmaceutical manufacturing business. But the...
09 September, 2020The final gavel fell last week on the 2020 legislative session. Cut short by seven weeks due to the coronavirus, lawmakers were forced to take a backseat to Gov. Newsom, who made use of his wide-ranging emergency powers to lock down businesses to st...
08 September, 2020Much has been written about perhaps the wildest last night of the legislative session ever. For those who weren’t paying attention, all but one Republican senator was quarantined when Sen. Brian Jones tested positive for COVID-19 a few days prior, fo...
07 September, 2020Kerry Jackson – Beware of the “Fact Checkers” So who is fact checking the fact checkers? Someone needs to because “all too often they fail to get even basic facts correct,” says Jim Agresti, president of Just Facts. Ben ...
04 September, 2020The end of the California Legislative session is typically a celebrated time in the halls of the state capitol. Legislators and staff are tired yet festive as they work toward wrapping up a long year of running their bills. A long week of all-day flo...
03 September, 2020While schools may or may not reopen in the fall, one thing is certain — many of Communist China’s propaganda programs in American schools and colleges will likely close down, courtesy of strong new accountability measures set forth by the Trump admin...
02 September, 2020Right by the Bay has been following Sacramento’s tax raising schemes here, here, and here. But the state’s tax marauding politicians aren’t the only ones we should be worried about. Presidential candidate Joe Biden also wants Washington’s share of ...
02 September, 2020Fiscal matters related to COVID-19 has dominated the budget discussions at the State Capitol this spring and summer. In recent weeks, there have been increasingly difficult political discussions over the Newsom administration’s COVID-19 budget spend...
01 September, 2020
Add the hardships it has caused during the pandemic lockdowns to the discouraging sight of rideshare companies desperately trying to save their businesses in California, it’s not unreasonable to wonder why Assembly Bill 5 hasn’t been suspended by exe...
31 August, 2020Ben Smithwick – Helping Citizens Understand a World without Fossil Fuels Ronald Stein, co-author of the new book Just GREEN Electricity – Helping Citizens Understand a World without Fossil Fuels, discusses the dangers of overreliance on renewab...
28 August, 2020Since the death of George Floyd, more than 140 U.S. cities have seen riots and protests, including Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. At least 40 of these cities were forced to impose curfews. In places like Portland...
27 August, 2020There are no state taxes on wealth in the U.S., but California is a good bet to be the first. The idea carries some political popularity, and its promises sound sweet, but what would be the reality if the legislation, Assembly Bill 2088, becomes law?...
26 August, 2020President Trump’s signature was barely dry when cash-strapped governors nationwide cried foul over his executive order to provide $400 of additional unemployment benefits a week for the country’s jobless, after negotiations on a new coronavirus stimu...
25 August, 2020The images of mass power outages across the state during our recent run of extreme temperatures evoked images in many Californians of the last time the state faced mass power blackouts. The year was 2001, when then-Governor Gray Davis bungled the sta...
24 August, 2020Tim Anaya – A Convention Roll Call Unlike Any You’ve Seen There’s been a lot of chatter among pundits and on social media about this week’s “virtual” Democratic convention (and the “former speechwriters”...
21 August, 2020DOWNLOAD THE PDF As if they didn’t have enough to shocks in their lives already, Californians recently woke up to find that Governor Newsom and the Legislature had defunded schoolchildren in the state budget. But the children are now fighting back a...
20 August, 2020In the banner year that is 2020, Californians did not expect to add power outages to their list of forgettable experiences, but that is what many in the state experienced starting Friday, Aug. 14, as the California Independent System Operators ordere...
19 August, 2020Fewer than 800 of the roughly 10,000 students enrolled at Chapman University in Orange have signed an online petition demanding the removal of busts from the campus “in order to create a safer and more inclusive environment for Chapman’s margin...
18 August, 2020When the 2020-21 state budget was enacted a few months back, I made the case that the majority party’s spending plan essentially sets the stage for an upcoming battle over tax increases. Back in 2011, former Gov. Jerry Brown pushed a budget plan that...
17 August, 2020Tim Anaya – Reforming Patient Costs at the Pharmacy In the latest video in the Pacific Research Institute “Escape the Drug Pricing Maze” series, the Professor and Pete must collect 3 keys to finally escape the drug pricing maze. The...
14 August, 2020
Across the country, teacher unions are demanding that school reopenings be postponed and many state and local officials are acquiescing to those demands, which is fueling greater interest among parents in school-choice alternatives. In Florida, the s...
13 August, 2020On August 8th at the State Capitol, I spoke at a rally at the State Capitol supporting the legacy of Proposition 209, California’s landmark 1996 anti-discrimination law, and warning of the consequences of Proposition 16, which would eliminate 209 and...
13 August, 2020Last month, California achieved another first – first in the nation to implement statewide vote-by-mail due to the coronavirus pandemic. There will still be voting locations for those with disabilities or who need language help, but all active voters...
12 August, 2020Congress and the media love naming important sounding working groups. The “Gang of Eight,” “The Squad,” and the “Gang of Six” are some of the monikers embraced by members of Congress. It is no surprise then that the leaders of the biggest technology ...
11 August, 2020Last month the state of California began enforcing its expensive and heavy-handed new business privacy laws despite the economic burdens already borne by business because of COVID-19 and the government’s shut down of the economy. At $55 billion in co...
10 August, 2020Evan Harris – 75th Anniversary of the end of World War II It’s a somber anniversary, but 75 years ago this week, the United States dropped two nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. As a fan of military......
07 August, 2020Humorist Will Rogers regularly uttered world-class comments, but few of his eminently quotable remarks can compete with his observation that a deadlocked Congress which can’t act “is the greatest blessing that could befall this country.” It’s temptin...
06 August, 2020By: Henry I. Miller, M.S., M.D., Kathleen L. Hefferon, Justin R. St. Juliana Like most institutions in American society, academia has been badly shaken by Covid-19. Many universities in the Northeast abruptly closed as the pandemic accelerated. Stude...
05 August, 2020Last year, California became the first state to mandate women on corporate boards. Now the legislature wants to make California the first state to require racial quotas. Assembly Bill 979 introduced by Chris Holden (D-Pasadena) and Cristina Garcia (...
05 August, 2020As the calendar shifts into August, there’s less than a month to go in the wildest legislative session in recent memory. The turning of the calendar also marks the return of the Legislature’s annual end-of-session games. No, I’m not talking about “l...
04 August, 2020A recent survey, conducted by researchers from Harvard and other universities, found that Governor Gavin Newsom’s approval rating had fallen significantly due to the COVID-19 crisis. As Newsom’s actions provoke increasing opposition from Californian...
03 August, 2020Rowena Itchon – A Tribute to Herman Cain Kerry Jackson – Ricky Gervais gives the ‘cancel culture cretins’ a massive serve “Just because you’re offended, doesn’t make you right,” comedian Ricky Gervais says. He could have also said t...
31 July, 2020It would be neither profound nor unique to note that the California dream, immortalized by John and Michelle Phillips’ famed lyrics, ain’t what it used to be. It would be nothing more than a mere statement of a fact which is well-known but neverthele...
30 July, 2020There have been countless times when I’ve walked by a shapeless, twisting sculpture on public property and shuddered at the thought of how much it cost taxpayers. But it never occurred to me to take a sledgehammer and “cancel” the object d’art. Las...
29 July, 2020This week in Washington, Democrats and Republicans are squabbling over the next economic stimulus package. Republicans have proposed a roughly $1 trillion plan, while Speaker Pelosi is pushing a $3 trillion plan. The partisan haggling and negotiati...
28 July, 2020The COVID-19 recession has fueled volatility in the financial markets. Investment portfolios saw sharp drops in March and April but have rebounded recently as the economy opened up in some areas. This volatility has negatively impacted public pensio...
27 July, 2020Kerry Jackson – Don’t “Abolish the Police.” Privatize Them. Defund the police? Increase funding? Do nothing? Here’s a video that proposes something few would ever think of. Rowena Itchon – On Joe Biden’s $2 T...
24 July, 2020Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden last week unveiled his version of the Green New Deal. The plan, which can be summed up as AOC meets CA, shows just how far Biden is willing to lunge toward the left coast’s environmental agenda. AOC’s Green N...
23 July, 2020Advocates have fought to make California a part-time legislature for a while now. Strangely, the coronavirus pandemic has given these advocates what they want in the interest of public health. The California State Legislature has largely been sidelin...
22 July, 2020A “white supremacist” organized exhibits for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for nearly 20 years? How did his hateful bigotry go undetected for so long in a city whose vanity is in large part fueled by its Wokeness? Gary Garrels, the museum’s ...
21 July, 2020Last week, as millions of Californians filed their tax returns on the delayed July 15 tax deadline, there was good and bad news on the tax increase front in Taxifornia. Split Roll Tax Increase Campaign Based on Class Warfare I wrote last month that ...
20 July, 2020One of the most important questions in America today is how to improve the quality of education for underrepresented minorities so that they can succeed in life. Two huge political earthquakes offer two vastly different answers: racial preferences an...
17 July, 2020Another national list, another nearly rock-bottom ranking for California. It’s become too predictable. When WalletHub, a prolific producer of lists, says that California is 48th among the states on “taxpayer return on investment” (forget for the mome...
16 July, 2020Last week, presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden unveiled his economic platform in Pennsylvania, calling for an end to the “era of shareholder capitalism.” It seems that Jack Lew, former treasury secretary and a member of the Biden brain trust, n...
15 July, 2020Recently, I attended a webinar hosted by the Legatum Institute, a UK-based think tank, where they discussed the results of their latest “Prosperity Index”. According to the Index’s executive summary, Legatum hopes that “nations around the world (will...
14 July, 2020California’s coronavirus pandemic lockdown isn’t over. There was even a partial reversal of the state’s reopening on the first day of July when Gov. Gavin Newsom hit the “dimmer switch.” But not much can come between California and its plastic bag ba...
13 July, 2020Kerry Jackson – Thomas Sowell – Common Sense in a Senseless World The full one-hour documentary won’t be out until early next year. In the meantime, the world around us is likely to become more senseless by the day. Maybe the greate...
10 July, 2020As if small businesses weren’t hurting enough, California’s senate voted last week to pass Gov. Newsom’s proposal to mandate job-protected family leave for businesses with as few as five workers. If SB 1383 becomes law, very small business would be ...
09 July, 2020Political partisanship can be found in every part of society. What you say, or even what you do not say, is ripe for political criticism these days. It is no surprise then that social media, where a majority of the world devotes multiple hours each.....
07 July, 2020DOWNLOAD THE PDF One of the several responses to the death of George Floyd has been activists’ demand to defund police departments. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti was one of the first mayors to surrender to the mob and pledge that he would move a......
06 July, 2020Tim Anaya – Celebrate America with 4th of July Fireworks Since most fireworks displays have been cancelled this year (outside people in my neighborhood illegally setting them off every night), I thought we would all enjoy watching some virtual ...
03 July, 2020On Monday, Gov. Newsom announced via press release that he had signed the 2020-21 state budget. Naturally, much of the budget press coverage typically focuses on the debate between the Governor and the Legislature and the total state spending picture...
02 July, 2020When Tim Anaya first told me about a California senate bill that would give renters who lost their jobs during the coronavirus shutdown until 2034 to pay back their rent, I thought I didn’t hear him right: “Did you say 2024?” (I thought four years wa...
01 July, 2020Recently, I attended the graduation ceremony for the Discovery ChalleNGe Academy, which targets high school dropouts and produces quality-educated young people with strong values, life skills, and self-discipline. With so many children falling throu...
30 June, 2020Californians who are struggling to make ends meet during these tough economic times are going to be in for sticker shock come July 1: gas prices will rise yet again. What’s behind the increase, you ask? It’s not due to rising demand as people begin...
29 June, 2020Rowena Itchon – “Project Home: 3D Printing the Future” I ran across this teaser on the upcoming documentary “Project Home: 3D Printing the Future” by the Moving Picture Institute. The first 3D printed homes are located ...
26 June, 2020On July 1, three days before we celebrate our American freedom, and while we’re still feeling the effects of a three-month loss of that liberty, the state tax on gasoline will increase by 3.2 cents per gallon. It should be enough to ensure California...
25 June, 2020Recently, I moderated a PRI Webinar on Cybersecurity, Data Privacy, and Regulation During the Coronavirus Pandemic. It was a fantastic look at the current state of data privacy, the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, and where state and federal reg...
24 June, 2020At long last, Gov. Newsom and Democratic leaders have reached a budget agreement. Now lawmakers will race to pass the final legislation as the clock ticks down toward the June 30th deadline for the Gov. to sign a balanced budget. For many days, News...
23 June, 2020Last week’s podcast featured PRI fellow and attorney Erik Jaffe, an expert in constitutional law. We asked Erik to give us his perspective on the U.S. Supreme Court’s major cases this session — LGBTQ rights, DACA, abortion regulation, and Trump...
22 June, 2020Tim Anaya – How Medicines in the U.S. are Sold In the latest video in PRI’s “Escape the Drug Pricing Maze” video, the Professor and Pete reach the most difficult part of their journey: understanding how medicines are sold. It’...
19 June, 2020In the early days of the pandemic lockdowns, San Francisco Mayor London Breed declared a temporary moratorium on evictions of small and mid-size businesses “due to a loss of income related to lost revenue or other economic impacts caused by the COVID...
17 June, 2020The California Assembly voted last week to place on the November ballot an initiative to repeal Prop. 209, the 1996 constitutional amendment ending preferential treatment based on race and sex in public education, employment, and government contracti...
16 June, 2020Kiefer Sutherland taught us in “Designated Survivor” the importance of having strong processes in place to ensure continuity of government during an extreme crisis. Spurred on by the coronavirus, lawmakers are trying to put a legislative emergency co...
15 June, 2020Tim Anaya – PRI Webinar on Data Privacy During COVID-19 Crisis In case you missed it yesterday, check our PRI’s webinar featuring an all-star panel discussing cybersecurity, data privacy, and regulation during the COVID-19 crisis. Evan Ha...
12 June, 2020Download the PDF In late May, a panel of federal judges resurrected a couple of previously dismissed climate change lawsuits filed by San Francisco and Oakland, and also allowed six other community-based suits to go forward. The plaintiffs aren’t con...
11 June, 2020Across the state, main streets have gone from being closed to being boarded. For California entrepreneurs, doing business in the state has hit a new low. It’s too early to get insurance data on what the vandalism, arson, and looting has cost business...
10 June, 2020The University of California Board of Regents just announced that “the endowment, the pension and all of our working capital pools are fossil-free at the University of California”. The Regents justify the divestment based on their belief that “contin...
09 June, 2020The sight of criminals running free in our streets gets the blood up. But while the looting and violence, as ugly as they are, will decelerate, there’s a relatively invisible hand of crime that has the potential to cause harm on a long-term basis. At...
08 June, 2020Tim Anaya – Digging Up Ways to Lower Costs for High Value but Expensive Drugs In the latest video in the “Escape the Drug Pricing Maze” video, Sage the Detective Dog digs up clues on biologics and gene therapies – drugs that offer t...
05 June, 2020While Californians are focused on surviving the COVID-19 lockdown, some state legislators are using the crisis as cover for a stealth effort to overturn Proposition 209, the 1996 voter-passed initiative that prevents government discrimination based o...
04 June, 2020After months of “sheltering in place” in our homes due to the COVID-19 crisis, and with so much distressing news on television every night, we’re all look for a little bit of an escape. Since we can’t really travel anywhere yet, we’ll have to settle...
04 June, 2020Support for Medicare for All continues to rise in PRI’s Single-Payer Poll Watch. The June update shows the overall average support at 57 percent, while opposition slightly dropped to 34 percent. Last month’s update showed a ten-point jump in support ...
03 June, 2020California’s Assembly Bill 5 has not been broken, but given a couple of recent developments, it might soon be showing some cracks. On May 20, Assembly Bill 1850, which would exempt some professions from AB5, a law that virtually outlaws independent c...
02 June, 2020Listen to a special presentation of PRI’s webinar featuring a panel of policy experts, education specialists, and homeschooling practitioners discussing the coronavirus impact on education in the United States. They discuss the many options available...
01 June, 2020In my last blog post, I previewed the Assembly’s unusual “Committee of the Whole” hearing on the state budget, comparing it to Seinfeld’s Festivus “Airing of Grievances.” Little did I know how clairvoyant I really was. Last Tuesday’s five hour sessio...
01 June, 2020Listen to Lance Izumi, senior director of PRI’s Center for Education, discuss the push by Democrats to repeal Prop. 209 and restore affirmative action in California (ACA 5) and other topics in higher education on “The Phil Cowan Show̶...
29 May, 2020Kerry Jackson – California: The Exodus from the Golden State Anyone who still doesn’t think California’s future is questionable at best, bleak at worst, needs to spend 10 minutes watching this video. Ben Smithwick – Protectin...
29 May, 2020It’s said that timing is everything — it’s especially true in politics. And it’s why those who want to bring back racial preferences in California’s public education, government employment and contracting, chose the here and now to try and repe...
28 May, 2020California, like the rest of country, is slowly opening cities and counties after more than two months of shelter-in-place and stay-at-home orders. California Governor Gavin Newsom has been the unequivocal face of the pandemic response. As the state ...
27 May, 2020Last week, the center of the budget universe moved upstairs at the State Capitol as budget subcommittees in the Senate and Assembly held hearings to explore all aspects of Gov. Newsom’s plan to close the budget deficit he pegs at $54 billion. A few i...
26 May, 2020While America is dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting havoc and deaths, it is easy to forget about the significance of Memorial Day. Yet, of all the nation’s patriotic holidays, none carries deeper emotion and impacts the lives of or...
25 May, 2020Rowena Itchon – A Memorial Day Tribute 2020 Kerry Jackson – This Doctor Won’t Take Health Insurance – and Charges Just $35 a Visit Meet the Pittsburgh doctor who doesn’t take health care insurance and charges only $35 for most...
22 May, 2020Year to date, the Dow Index of the U.S.’s 30 largest companies is down 14 percent; the S&P 500, which tracks 500 large-cap companies, is down 8 percent; and the NASDAQ, an electronic system that trades many of the world’s fastest growing companie...
21 May, 2020Given that California has more than 33 million internet users, it is clear that the state loves its broadband access. And recent action from Washington, DC has the potential to make California’s online experience even better and inspire more innovat...
20 May, 2020Policies intended to force Americans into electric vehicles, and taxpayer-financed subsidies that have propped up the EV industry aren’t consistent with those who believe government has limits. But this doesn’t mean that a company such as EV maker Te...
19 May, 2020Gov. Gavin Newsom released his May Revise budget plan on Thursday – a dramatically different budget from his January plan that anticipated a $5.6 billion surplus. California now faces a $54.3 billion deficit. In a press conference that lasted more t...
18 May, 2020Kerry Jackson – I Miss Baseball If you love baseball, and miss your freedom, this one will move you. Tim Anaya – Californians Could Save $2,000 A Year if State Government Embraced Free Market Energy Policies From PRI’s latest study ...
15 May, 2020Even as House members consider themselves non-essential workers (they’ve decided to vote from home), it hasn’t stopped some lawmakers from coming up with bad ideas for the next stimulus package, including relief for states and municipalities with pre...
14 May, 2020KCBS news anchors Jeff Bell and Patti Reising spoke with Lance Izumi, Director of the Pacific Research Institute, about the announcement by University of California President Janet Napolitano recommending that all 10 campuses in the UC system suspend...
13 May, 2020Outside a few conspiracy theorists, no one believes the COVID-19 lockdowns are a test run for eventually shuttering economic sectors to mitigate global warming. That said, the climate alarmists have surely been watching the public’s reaction, and the...
13 May, 2020Back in 2012, I wrote a book entitled Obama’s Education Takeover that warned about the harmful impact that the Common Core national education standards would have on student achievement, especially in California. Now a just released study confirms m...
12 May, 2020With conventional schools shut down because of COVID-19, school officials are scrambling to provide students with education services through the use of online-learning tools. However, some types of schools are having greater success in transitioning ...
11 May, 2020There’s been a growing debate in California and nationally about extending workers’ compensation benefits for workers who are impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. Some states are moving to make front line workers battling COVID-19 to be eligible for...
11 May, 2020Listen to Lance Izumi, senior director of PRI’s Center for Education, discuss online learning and homeschooling during the COVID-19 crisis with host Renee Giachino on the Center for Individual Freedom’s “Freedom Line” podcast....
08 May, 2020Rowena Itchon – Love in the Time of Coronavirus Watch some of our front line medical personnel battling COVID-19 and helping people stay alive take a much-needed break to recreate the iconic scene from Titanic, with an usual, personal protectiv...
08 May, 2020Three California counties have earned the title of “free counties.” They “earned” the label for reopening ahead of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s announcement that Phase 2 of the statewide reopening would begin soon. Some small businesses outside of the “free c...
07 May, 2020California Attorney General Xavier Becerra has officially filed suit against Uber and Lyft for violating Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5). The action is a clear signal that the state’s policy leaders are determined to maximize the economic damage from this ill...
06 May, 2020Roughly 30 million people have filed for unemployment since the coronavirus pandemic wreaked havoc on the nation’s economy. Economists estimate that the unemployment rate now ranges from 15 to 20 percent – numbers not seen since the Great Depression...
05 May, 2020
Watch the latest Pacific Research Institute webinar featuring a panel of policy experts, education specialists, and homeschooling practitioners discussing how schools and parents have transitioned to schooling at home through the use of distance and ...
04 May, 2020When is California going to lift the shelter-in-place orders? As temperatures soar and people gain cabin fever after weeks of being stuck inside, it’s the question on everyone’s minds these days. In his April 28 press conference, Gov. Gavin Newsom s...
04 May, 2020Kerry Jackson – When Will California Reopen? Question asked: Some states begin re-opening from stay home orders – is California close behind? The bet here is California will be the last state to fully open. Rowena Itchon – Blue Angels Fly...
01 May, 2020“Healthy people have rights too,” complained my 89-year old mother, who’s miffed because we’ve refused to take her to her favorite grocery store. Mom has joined the tens of thousands of people across America who believe that enough is enough. From C...
29 April, 2020The coronavirus pandemic has put public health top of mind for a majority of Americans, despite the overwhelming concern about how the U.S. economy will survive in the coming weeks. As the coronavirus pandemic continues to unfold, the political and p...
29 April, 2020Speaker Pelosi and her allies in Congress received significant pollical pushback for using the COVID-19 crisis to enact their budget wish list in the $2 billion “phase 3” stimulus. Recently, Rowena Itchon wrote on Right by the Bay about tens of milli...
28 April, 2020Earlier this month, Gov. Gavin Newsom acknowledged that the COVID-19 pandemic could be the crisis that his party has been looking for to permanently establish a progressive “nation-state.” “There is opportunity for reimagining a progressive era as it...
27 April, 2020Tim Anaya – Taking a Time Machine to a Lower Drug Price Future In the latest video in the “Escape the Drug Pricing Maze” series, Professor Salvare takes Pete Paystoomuch in a time machine to learn how drugs become cheaper after high...
24 April, 2020During the COVID-19 crisis, the efforts of the United States Army have been very prominent, especially Army researchers working on a vaccine and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ incredible work building field hospital facilities around the country.&...
23 April, 2020In case anyone has forgotten (and many long have), April 22 is Earth Day. And while the coronavirus pandemic has put a chill on this year’s worldwide 50th jubilee celebration, it hasn’t caused its demise. If anything, progressive climate change advo...
22 April, 2020In her March 25 Forbes editorial, Sally Pipes documented how the private sector is rising to the health challenges of the coronavirus. Whether it is Moderna launching clinical trials for a COVID-19 vaccine or Gilead Sciences investigating whether one...
21 April, 2020Much is always written about “innovation.” How to manage it. How to inspire it. How to benefit from it. How to create an environment where it blooms. So much lip service is paid to innovation that unfortunately many people tune it out. Certainly, ign...
20 April, 2020Rowena Itchon – Coronavirus Etude – For Piano and Disinfecting Wipe For those piano players wondering how you can safely play during COVID-19, check out this special performance the composer/arranger of this very appropriate tune for a ti...
17 April, 2020
This afternoon, the Senate Budget Committee will hold its first hearing on the state’s response to the coronavirus. Today’s hearing promises to be memorable for two reasons. It will be the first hearing with “social distancing” practices that have b...
16 April, 2020It’s been recently said that with Chesa Boudin as district attorney, San Francisco has two public defenders: Manohar Raju, the appointed public defender, and Boudin, the former public defender who critics might say acts more like a legal advocate for...
15 April, 2020One of the intriguing reports to come out of the coronavirus pandemic is the partisan divide — not just among lawmakers — but even rank and file voters. Recent polls have consistently shown that Republicans are less concerned about the co...
14 April, 2020
Lance Izumi, senior director of PRI’s Center for Education, joins us to discuss a situation caused by the coronavirus pandemic that millions of parents never though they’d find themselves in – homeschooling their kids. He shares advice from experts ...
13 April, 2020The United States and China are engaged in a no-holds barred attempt to salvage their economies during the coronavirus pandemic. We’re all familiar with the actions taken in the recent weeks by the United States. The Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury...
13 April, 2020Tim Anaya – The Crossroads of Innovation and Affordability In the latest “Escape the Drug Pricing Maze” video, On the first step toward escaping the Drug Pricing Maze, Professor Salvare takes Pete Paystoomuch down the path of drug i...
10 April, 2020Observers wondering just how different this year’s state budget would be got confirmation this week that the 2020-21 budget will be far different from envisioned in January. In a memo to the Capitol community released on Tuesday, the Assembly Budget ...
09 April, 2020Lance Izumi, PRI’s Senior Education Fellow, talks about the benefits of distance or online learning and homeschooling since schools are closed during the coronavirus pandemic. Izumi talks about the many technological and time-saving benefits fo...
09 April, 2020
With conventional schools shut down across America due to the coronavirus, many parents are considering homeschooling, but have questions about how to begin and how to get the best results for their children. Someone who has answers for these parents...
08 April, 2020Voters will likely have a chance in November to decide if Proposition 13 will remain as it has since its passage in 1978, or if it will turn it into a chimera that treats homes and businesses differently, bleeding the latter for tens of billions......
08 April, 2020In recent years, California has undergone a significant change in its approach to criminal justice. As PRI’s Kerry Jackson writes in his book, Living in Fear in California, once California’s prison population reached an all-time high of 160,000 in 20...
07 April, 2020Public banks, it seems, are the next wrongheaded progressive movement in state overrun with them. The Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors voted last month “to reach out to nearby jurisdictions proposing a viability study, the first step in the cre...
06 April, 2020Tim Anaya – Nothing Good Ever Happens Outside The House Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a huge fan of Larry David and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” This is ironic because I’ve never watched an episode of “Seinfeld...
03 April, 2020
While several states are rethinking their single-use plastic bag bans for health reasons during the COVID-19 pandemic, California, which led the nation down the misguided path to prohibition, has yet to act. It should have been the first to suspend i...
02 April, 2020
Along with other sectors of society, education has been greatly affected by the coronavirus, with schools closed across America. Yet, as in other fields, innovators in education have responded with learning mechanisms and models that allow students t...
01 April, 2020
In his “Breaking Down Barriers to Opportunity” series, PRI’s Dr. Wayne Winegarden has argued that one of the most important ways that elected officials can help to lift people up the economy ladder is by embracing policies that encourage entrepreneur...
01 April, 2020
That’s what Pres. Trump said in a tweet on the record-shattering $2 trillion phase 3 stimulus package. Right by the Bay doesn’t question the need for government to step up to help the economy get through the coronavirus pandemic. But even during thi...
31 March, 2020Coronavirus is impacting everything and anything it touches. In the March PRI Single Payer Poll Watch, average opposition to a single payer plan overtook support, continuing the trend of growing opposition to a single payer health care plan PRI notic...
30 March, 2020Tim Anaya – Escape the Drug Pricing Maze Watch Professor Salvare guide Pete Paystoomuch through the drug pricing maze, showing how the direction policymakers take on drug pricing policy could impact the affordability and availability of current...
27 March, 2020A clearer picture formed this week about how the coronavirus will affect the state budget, with action in Sacramento and Washington. Director of Finance Keely Bosler sent a letter to lawmakers that the department will “reevaluate all budget changes w...
26 March, 2020While Governor Gavin Newsom and the Democrat-supermajority in the Legislature effectively eliminated most charter-school expansion in California, the charter school landscape is much different in neighboring Arizona. When Governor Newsom signed the a...
25 March, 2020All the Woulda-Coulda-Shouldas Layin’ in the sun, Talkin’ ’bout the things They woulda coulda shoulda done… –Shel Silverstein As of this writing, the Trump Administration has pledged to spend more than a trillion dollars...
24 March, 2020This podcast is a recorded panel discussion from PRI’s second annual policy conference in Sacramento. The panel focuses on education. As the attack over charter schools has increased, one false narrative is that they don’t serve the needs of specia...
23 March, 2020Until recently, terms like social distancing and even the coronavirus were nonexistent. Now these terms could come to define the beginning of a pending global recession the likes of which have yet to test modern economic markets. As parts of Californ...
23 March, 2020Tim Anaya – Week to Week Political Roundtable on Coronavirus In case you missed it, last night I joined the Commonwealth Club’s Week to Week Political Roundtable. Due to the shelter in place orders in Sacramento and San Francisco – ...
20 March, 2020The coronavirus and the massive economic shutdown that has accompanied it as large parts of California are sheltering in place is significantly complicating work on the May Revise of the Gov. Newsom’s budget, due in just weeks. California’s nonpartis...
19 March, 2020The Legislative Analyst’s Office recently issued its Review of the Draft 2020 High-Speed Rail Business Plan. It’s not a ringing endorsement of the project. Three of the report’s five key oversight issues confirm what’s been known all along. Californi...
18 March, 2020While the statewide assault on charter schools by politicians in Sacramento has garnered headlines, it is the effort to undermine specific successful local charter schools that really pulls at one’s heartstrings. Take, for example, Willow Creek Acade...
17 March, 2020
The uncertainty over the coronavirus has negatively impacted the financial markets. Hit the hardest in the short term have been the travel and hospitality industries – with much talk of layoffs, bankruptcies, and industry bailouts. The Dow Jones and...
16 March, 2020By Lance Izumi and Michele Steeb As Gov. Gavin Newsom noted in his 2020 State of the State address, California had the second highest increase in state homelessness in 2019. But a newly released report by State Auditor Elaine Howle found that Califor...
13 March, 2020Tim Anaya – Making the Perfect Irish Soda Bread With all the talk of coronavirus frightening us these days, I think we should focus on things that bring a smile to our faces this weekend, like St. Patrick’s Day. Even though the parades a...
13 March, 2020Nearly three dozen bills intended to revise or repeal Assembly Bill 5, which restricts workers’ freedom and could potentially kill the burgeoning gig economy, have been introduced in Sacramento. Here is some of the latest, and most important, news ab...
12 March, 2020If there was one constant in the national media coverage of Super Tuesday, it was criticism of California’s election system. More than one observer commented on the fact that California’s heavy use of vote-by-mail ballots meant that hundreds of thous...
11 March, 2020Baby I’ll spill the facts Well honey it ain’t your money ‘Cause baby I got plenty of that I love you for your pink Cadillac. – Bruce Springsteen If you’ve ever admired the gal who managed to steal The Boss’s heart with her pink Cadi...
10 March, 2020This year marks the 40th Anniversary of the “Miracle on Ice,” one of the biggest upsets in history when the United States hockey team beat the USSR in the semi-final game of the 1980 Winter Olympics. Anyone who watched the Olympics live or saw the......
09 March, 2020PRI’s second annual “California Ideas in Action” conference was held a few weeks back. This year’s conference featured PRI scholars, policy experts, and real life changemakers discussing how free market ideas can address the ...
06 March, 2020As a former legislative staffer in the California State Assembly, I often asked myself when reviewing legislation, “do we really need this bill?” I asked myself the same question when I came across the introduction of a bill mandating gender-neutral ...
05 March, 2020That sound you hear this morning is millions of California voters feeling relieved that the primary election is finally over in the Golden State. Many are rejoicing the fact that they won’t have to see any more campaign advertising the next time the...
04 March, 2020It’s not uncommon to find people who think San Francisco is one of the most beautiful cities, if not the most beautiful city, in the world. Neither would it be shocking to learn that people are finding it to be one of the most unlivable......
03 March, 2020Title: California Considers Imposing Climate Change Education By Kenneth Artz A bill under consideration in the California legislature would require schoolchildren to learn humans are causing dangerous climate change, in order to graduate. A.B. 1922 ...
02 March, 2020Unions target Betsy DeVos as she defends children By Rebecca Friedrichs Union bosses have tried to run Education Secretary Betsy DeVos out of office since the day she was nominated. Why? Because DeVos champions education freedom scholarships and redu...
02 March, 2020Our colleague Wayne Winegarden wrote a marvelous piece for his Forbes column on “Bernie’s Math Problem.” To fund free health care, free housing, free college and so on, the Democrat frontrunner plans to make “billionaires pay their fair share of tax...
02 March, 2020Tim Anaya – Happy Leap Day 2020 Saturday is Leap Day – the one time every four years when we actually observe the date February 29th. This begs the question – what are you going to do with your extra day this year? In this......
28 February, 2020One would think that the rise of Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) to the top of the Democrat presidential nomination list equals growing enthusiasm for the Medicare for All plan he champions. But Sanders’ rise to frontrunner status isn’t doing much to b...
27 February, 2020Love it or hate it, for a variety of reasons when California enacts public policy the impact is felt across the country. And so, it has been again with the January 1st implementation of California’s Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), the so called “gig employmen...
26 February, 2020Last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom delivered his annual State of the State address at the State Capitol. And in an unusual twist, he devoted the entire address to one topic – homelessness. Typically, the State of the State outlines a governor’s policy wi...
25 February, 2020Data privacy is one of the defining public policy debates of the new decade. As other countries push data privacy regulation heralded as global standards, California is headed in the other direction with the rollout of the state’s Consumer Privacy Ac...
24 February, 2020Tim Anaya – How Would Single Payer Health Care Change California ICYMI – Check out this recent interview with PRI’s Sally Pipes on the “California Insider” program from the Epoch Times, where she discusses CaliforniaR...
21 February, 2020Regular Right by the Bay readers know that I have written often about the Legislature’s efforts in recent years to change California’s elections rules for political advantage. The latest of these is a bill enacted in the final weeks of the most impor...
20 February, 2020The projected cost of the California bullet train has whipsawed up and down like share prices in a volatile market. The latest forecast adds $1.3 billion to the estimated price tag. Now at $80.3 billion, it’s a long way from its humble beginnings of ...
19 February, 2020Last week, California’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s office was on a roll – releasing several, often-critical analyses of some of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s high profile budget proposals. Particularly pointed was its analysis of Newsom’s proposal to cr...
18 February, 2020Tim Anaya – Watch Sally Pipes on “After Words” on Saturday Night As part of the promotion of her latest book, PRI President, CEO, and Thomas W. Smith Fellow in Health Care Policy Sally C. Pipes will appear on “After Words̶...
14 February, 2020Back in 2017, concerned over the sclerotic growth of the U.S. economy, PRI published a series of studies titled Beyond the New Normal by economist and PRI senior fellow Wayne Winegarden. Up until that point, annual real GDP growth averaged just 1.9 p...
13 February, 2020Reeling from multiple massive state wildfires that its actions likely triggered, Pacific Gas & Electric, or PG&E, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this time last year. The investor-owned utility faces a June 30, 2020 deadline to come up with a...
12 February, 2020At what point did the lawmakers who voted for, and the governor who signed, California Assembly Bill 5 realize it’s lousy policy? It should have been the moment the idea was first conceived. But that didn’t happen, the legislation became law, and now...
11 February, 2020Noted education reformer Larry Sand of the California Teachers Empowerment Network talks with PRI's Lance Izumi about opportunities to expand school choice in California despite recent legislative setbacks last year targeting charter schools. They d...
10 February, 2020The backlash over California’s Assembly Bill 5, legislation that robs workers of their freedom, was likely not expected by lawmakers. They’re accustomed to an electorate that agreeably goes along with whatever policies they impose, no matter how inva...
10 February, 2020Tim Anaya – What You Need to Know About the Wuhan Coronavirus With all the media stories and online misinformation about the Wuhan Coronavirus, we thought it would be good to sit down with our Dr. Henry Miller to set the record straight. This ...
07 February, 2020PRI is fortunate to be home to several former speechwriters for Presidents and Governors, including me. Anyone who has been a speechwriter watches a big public speech like this week’s State of the Union address or Gov. Newsom’s upcoming State of the ...
06 February, 2020One of the first national health care polls of 2020 shows the continued lukewarm support for a national single-payer health care plan. Adding the January 2020 Kaiser survey to the Pacific Research Institute (PRI) Single-Payer Poll Watch brings the av...
05 February, 2020San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin is no crime fighter. He’s among the new breed of decline-to-prosecute prosecutors whose elections have been funded by George Soros (and his political machine). The uber-wealthy agitator is determined to us...
04 February, 2020The March primary election is a month away. While we are already being bombarded with television advertising for the Democratic presidential race, there hasn’t been much discussion of ballot measures. That’s because in 2011, Democrats in the Legisla...
03 February, 2020Tim Anaya – Celebrating National School Choice Week This week, we’re celebrating National School Choice Week, and the power of school choice to meeting the individual needs of students. Whether a student is attending a public, private, c...
31 January, 2020San Francisco has added yet another tax, this one to fund a climate initiative. Though maybe it’s an overused phrase, “death by a thousand tax hikes” is still a descriptive expression, and it applies here. The 1% surcharge being added to some diners’...
30 January, 2020This week is National School Choice Week and it is important to remember that education choice includes not just private, charter, and traditional public options, but also homeschooling options as well. My upcoming book, co-authored with the amazing ...
29 January, 2020This week’s observance of National School Choice Week in California comes at a time when the movement to expand charter schools in the Golden State and increase school choice options for every student is at a particularly low ebb. Recall that last fa...
28 January, 2020Lance Izumi, PRI’s Senior Director of the Center for Education, talks about School Choice Week on the Phil Cowan Show on AM 1380 The Answer. Founded in 2011, School Choice Week is a national celebration and advocacy week for effective education...
27 January, 2020
The week of January 27th is National School Choice Week, which is appropriate since a potentially landmark case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court could have wide-ranging implications for California parents who want more education options for th...
27 January, 2020In a state where the private sector continues to be marginalized in favor of more government, Gov. Gavin Newsom has plans for California to set up a generic drug label of its own. It would be the first state in the country to go into......
27 January, 2020Tim Anaya – What’s Going on with the Wuhan Flu A growing public health crisis the Wuhan Flu outbreak in China. The first case in the U.S. was just reported in Seattle. Should we be concerned about the growing threat from this coronavirus?...
24 January, 2020Housing affordability is once again at the top of Sacramento Democrats’ policy agenda this session. Several bills have already been proposed to try and bring down state housing costs. Addressing the state’s housing crisis is now running into conflic...
23 January, 2020A state homelessness task force is recommending that local governments be hauled into court if they aren’t moving people off the streets. It’s unlikely to help. The most probable outcome is an increased burden on the courts and a higher dose of polit...
22 January, 2020If you were able to make it through California Governor Gavin Newsom’s almost three-hour budget briefing, you’ve probably been following the enormous funding proposals included in the $222.2 billion budget estimate. You can save 167 minute of your ti...
21 January, 2020Today, we join all Americans in remembering the memory and lasting legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Presented here are quotes from some of his most memorable speeches which continue to inspire millions today. ShareTweetPinShare...
20 January, 2020Evan Harris – Secretary of State Mike Pompeo Joins the Commonwealth Club of California Sec. Mike Pompeo sat down with Carl Guardino, CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group on Monday, Jan. 13 at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. Secre...
17 January, 2020Last month, Pacific Research Institute launched the “Single-Payer Poll Watch” to keep an eye on the latest public opinion around single-payer healthcare. Much like RealClearPolitics, the poll watch compiles questions from national polls on single-pay...
16 January, 2020With nearly 40 million people and more than 70,000 farms taking up nearly 25 million acres, California is always thirsty. It is, as well, mostly dry. Deserts make up one-fourth of the state and semi-arid land occupies up at least that much, if not mo...
15 January, 2020I have written before on the benefits and drawbacks of the various universal basic income (UBI) proposals bubbling up the last few years in the American political scene, specifically the economic, political, and moral dimensions of these policies. A...
14 January, 2020Gov. Newsom’s announcement of his 2020-21 State Budget plan on Friday was another whopper, his speech clocking in at roughly 2 hours and 47 minutes. Last year, reporters who were used to covering a 30 minute press conference where caught off guard b...
13 January, 2020Tim Anaya – The Royal Shocker That Happened While Everyone Was Focused on Foreign Affairs In public relations 101, there’s the old adage of the Friday news dump – drop major news or do a document dump either during some other major ...
10 January, 2020A Washington newspaper has reported that U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the socialist from Vermont, has received 300 endorsements from California. That goes a long to explaining why things keep going wrong in the state. “The campaign released endorsements...
09 January, 2020As each new year begins, the increases in the list prices of drugs are announced. And, following these announcements, the political class complains that something must be done. This year, following the price announcements, Speaker Nancy Pelosi tweete...
08 January, 2020Despite technological advancements to the movement of goods, trucks will still transport and deliver and incredible amount of goods in 2020. But automation and self-driving research are not the biggest threat to truckers anymore. California’s contest...
07 January, 2020At a recent White House roundtable with students, teachers and policymakers, President Trump said that children trapped in failing government schools “would be forgotten no longer,” and urged Congress to pass his Education Freedom Scholarships propos...
06 January, 2020New Year’s resolutions are about goals and aspirations. Unfortunately, California’s new 2020 laws serve mostly the aspirations of state politicians and interest groups, not hard-working Californians. Take AB5, a law that forces thousands of independ...
06 January, 2020Lance Izumi joins co-hosts Cara Candal and Bob Bowden from the Pioneer Institute to talk all things charter schools on the Learning Curve podcast. Lance discusses his new book, Choosing Diversity, and the wide range of both the student populations se...
03 January, 2020Ben Smithwick – The Best of the 2010’s Happy New Year! Here is a great recap of some of the major stories from the past decade – from the election of President Trump to the market disruption caused by the sharing economy – and the declin...
03 January, 2020In 1967 Arthur Koestler wrote The Ghost in the Machine, which was essentially a critique of the hypothesis that the human mind could be viewed as a machine, a sort of chemical computer. He went on to consider that if were a computer, then what......
02 January, 2020We made it to New Year’s Eve 2019 – the last day of the year and the last day of the decade. In between getting ready for a great party and enjoying some champagne, today is a time to look back on the year that......
31 December, 2019As our nation enters a pivotal presidential election year, it will be critically important to promote and defend free markets and individual freedom in California and throughout the country. The Pacific Research Institute remains committed to advanci...
30 December, 2019The last week of December is naturally a time to look back on the year that was. Here at PRI, we are particularly proud of the growing popularity of our weekly “Next Round with PRI” podcast and our daily “Right by the Bay” blog. Thanks......
26 December, 2019Tim Anaya – Darlene Love sings her holiday classic on David Letterman For more than 25 years on his late night show, David Letterman would host a performance of what he said was the only Christmas rock song that he actually liked, “Christ...
25 December, 2019The holidays are about traditions, and we at PRI think there is no better tradition than enjoying a great glass of California wine or other adult beverage while talking about public policy. Once again this year, we are pleased to present a list of so...
24 December, 2019The California policy gadfly is back with a new ballot initiative in 2020. Last year, San Francisco real estate developer Alastair Mactaggart used the threat of a ballot measure to all but force the state legislature to enact dramatic new privacy reg...
23 December, 2019Kerry Jackson – “Full House” San Francisco Real Estate Parody Remy is world-class clever. In a 90-second video he can say what most writers can’t get across using hundreds of words. Tim Anaya – How USMCA is Good for Cali...
20 December, 2019PRI’s Lance Izumi joined the nationally-syndicated Lars Larson Show to share his thoughts on why America is failing behind the rest of the world in education. Recent data from the Program for International Student Assessment, an international s...
19 December, 2019December is about half gone, and, as the Counting Crows’ Adam Duritz once sang, “it’s getting cold in California.” In another song from the same 1996 album Duritz also sang that it’s been “a long December and there’s reason to believe may...
19 December, 2019Reviewing the 2019 education landscape shows some states taking giant steps backwards, while others made great strides, and this contrast is nowhere more stark than between California and Florida. In California, the education theme was “let’s take ch...
18 December, 2019Health care has dominated the early Democrat presidential debates, with progressive candidates battling “moderates” over the question of a public option versus a Medicare for All plan that would outlaw private insurance. As the public has focused mor...
17 December, 2019Two days before Thanksgiving, financial services firm Charles Schwab announced it was relocating its headquarters from San Francisco to Texas. The Wall Street Journal’s explanation: “The brokerage giant heads for a state that doesn’t punish finance.”...
16 December, 2019Rowena Itchon – Brexit and this week’s UK Election If you’re following the British elections and Brexit, here’s a terrific interview with Dan Hannan, Conservative Member of the European Parliament by Nick Gillespie of Reason. Kerry Jackso...
13 December, 2019Nearly two decades ago, before “ban everything” fever was sweeping through California, San Francisco committed to eliminating a staple of human progress: the modern landfill. The idea, concocted in 2002, was to reach a “zero waste” existence by 2020,...
12 December, 2019The California School Boards Association (CSBA) and proponents of the “Full and Fair Funding” proposal – a $15 billion annual tax increase for school funding – announced last week that they were pulling the proposal from the November 2020...
11 December, 2019Lance Izumi, PRI’s Senior Director of the Center for Education, recently sat down with the Epoch Times to discuss a few of the many issues plaguing California public schools. ShareTweetPinShare...
10 December, 2019You won’t read this headline anytime soon, but it is consistent with the recent changes to California’s electric-car rebate program enacted by the state’s Air Resources Board. Both California and the federal government offer generous tax credits to p...
10 December, 2019A state overflowing with natural resources and more than 840 miles of direct access to the largest body of water on Earth seems to always be suffering through a dry spell. Even though seven years of drought ended earlier this year, and winter storms ...
09 December, 2019Results for the latest administration of the Program for International Student Assessment, a key exam given to 15-year-old students worldwide, show poor performance in reading and math among U.S. students, with the Common Core national standards and ...
06 December, 2019Tim Anaya – Texas vs. California: Which is Better? Prager U’s Will Witt asks Texas college students to compare the Lone Star State versus California. Their answers are both amusing and quite insightful – even for liberal college stu...
06 December, 2019California’s attorney general has become one of the most powerful political offices in the state. The powers granted to the Golden State’s top cop are numerous and impactful. The attorney general is often front and center for state and federal lawsui...
05 December, 2019Amid much fanfare, several Silicon Valley firms have announced plans to collectively contribute billions to “affordable housing” programs. Last month, Apple announced “a comprehensive $2.5 billion plan to help address the housing availability and aff...
04 December, 2019Stanford University offers a puzzling paradox. On one hand, hardly a month passes without news of a genuinely significant breakthrough in some field of science or technology. One week it might be the discovery that an unorthodox arrangement of wind t...
03 December, 2019Thanks to the support of hundreds of liberty-minded individuals, 2019 was a banner year for the Pacific Research Institute. The generosity of our supporters is what allows us to champion freedom, opportunity, and personal responsibility by advancing ...
03 December, 2019Lance Izumi recently joined the Kern Citizens for Sustainable Government podcast to talk all things California education reform and his recent book Choosing Diversity about school choice. Click here to listen. . . ShareTweetPinShare...
02 December, 2019The flood of lousy legislation that has poured out of Sacramento for the last two decades or so truly astonishes in its volume. As fourth-rate as the lawmaking has been, though, nothing has been worse than Assembly Bill 5, an existential threat to bo...
02 December, 2019
With Thanksgiving falling late this year, you have one less week to get all of your Christmas shopping done. If you are like me, you’re a bit overwhelmed trying to find the perfect gift for everyone on your shopping list. To give you some inspiratio...
27 November, 2019Last week the Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) published its latest fiscal outlook for California. The headlines were so great that you could almost hear the champagne corks popping in Sacramento. Not only has the state budget in California run sur...
26 November, 2019Recently, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution recognizing November 2019 as Homeless Children and Youth Awareness Month and, importantly, highlighted lack of education as a key characteristic of homeless youth. The Senate resolution noted that young p...
25 November, 2019Rowena Itchon – Sally Pipes Debates Single Payer at UC Berkeley Watch Sally Pipes’ debate on single-payer health care in front of students at UC Berkeley. https://www.facebook.com/CalTV/videos/451529945478105/ Ben Smithwick – On Efforts t...
22 November, 2019Last month the D.C. Court of Appeals settled, for now, the question of how much freedom consumers will be guaranteed to make their internet experience the one they want. The Court upheld the current Federal Communication Commission’s Restoring Intern...
21 November, 2019When the California Air Resources Board opens its new headquarters in two years in Riverside, it will be basking in the radiance of the “world’s largest permanent collection of artworks addressing air quality and the effects of climate change.” The c...
20 November, 2019The United States tweet first, tariff second trade policy against China continues to define American -Chinese relations. As both nations pursue the “Cold War light” escalation through tariffs, the United States continues to drum up new regulations to...
19 November, 2019Lance Izumi, PRI’s Senior Director of the Center for Education, discusses Senator Elizabeth Warren’s disasterous education plan on the David Webb Show (SiriusXM Patriot Radio Channel 125). ShareTweetPinShare...
18 November, 2019When I was on vacation recently in Europe, our tour guide would tell us stories every night about her time living as a young bride in Greece with her late husband and young daughter. As we departed, she said she would love to be our......
18 November, 2019Tim Anaya – Kerry Jackson Talks CA’s Power Outages, Homelessness, Rent Control on National TV In case you missed it, PRI’s own Kerry Jackson was a guest on “The Daily Ledger” on One America News Network discussing Califo...
15 November, 2019The newspaper comic strip They’ll Do It Every Time that was published for nearly 80 years through 2008 “illustrated minor absurdities, frustrations, hypocrisies, ironies and misfortunes of everyday life,” says Wikipedia, typically showing “deceptive,...
14 November, 2019Lance Izumi, PRI’s Senior Director of Education Studies, talks about Senator Elizabeth Warren’s disastrous education plan with Nick Gosnell on WIBW in Topeka. Click here to listen. . . ShareTweetPinShare...
13 November, 2019With great fanfare, the Los Angeles City Council – in partnership with the LA Unified School District – last week enacted new pilot program called “Opportunity LA” to establish “children’s savings accounts” for every first grader in the city. The ac...
13 November, 2019The NCAA recently caved to California and the federal government by unanimously supporting compensation for student athletes. The NCAA board of governors approved a two-year process to determine a framework to compensate student athletes for their na...
12 November, 2019As we celebrate Veterans Day and honor the men and women who have selflessly served our nation, it is important to understand that this special day is about both people and about ideas. At his final speech to the Corps of Cadets at West Point......
11 November, 2019Tim Anaya – Peter Thiel on Conservative Bias in Silicon Valley As a preview of coming attractions for this weekend’s PRI Baroness Thatcher Gala in Newport Beach featuring Peter Thiel, here’s video of a recent interview on Fox Busine...
08 November, 2019
Download the Brief Introduction Pacific Gas and Electric of San Francisco began in October 2019 a series of electricity blackouts called “public safety power shutoffs.” The objective was to prevent its equipment from starting wildfires during hot, dr...
07 November, 2019
Recently, Senator Elizabeth Warren released her education plan titled “A Great Public School Education for Every Student,” but the scheme should have been named “My Big Fat Payoff to the Teacher Unions.” The publicity splash in Warren’s plan is her c...
06 November, 2019Gov. Gavin Newsom announced last week that he was going to name an energy czar “in the wake of Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s prolonged power outages,” says the Sacramento Bee, because. According to the governor, “the entire system needs to be re...
06 November, 2019Californians are rightfully outraged over what my colleague Kerry Jackson has termed, “The Great Blackouts of 2019.” Naturally, whenever there is a crisis or a scandal in state government like the blackouts and the PG&E bailout and bankruptcy, vo...
05 November, 2019The results of the 2019 National Assessment for Educational Progress, often called the “Nation’s Report Card,” came out recently and California’s scores once again tanked, with one of the likely causes being the national Common Core standards and ali...
04 November, 2019This week, PRI released a new study by Senior Fellow in Business and Economics, Dr. Wayne Winegarden about how government-created barriers to opportunity were standing in the way of low-income and immigrant entrepreneurs starting a business and worki...
01 November, 2019This summer, Facebook unveiled their plans to incorporate Libra, a digital cryptocurrency, into the Facebook platform. By the end of 2020, billions of Facebook users will be able to use Libra like any other currency. In previous Right by the Bay post...
31 October, 2019NCAA Will Let Athletes Profit Off Their Names, Images And Likenesses By Adam Elrashidi The NCAA’s board said each division has to draft and enact the necessary rules no later than January 2021. The NCAA, the national governing body for collegia...
30 October, 2019California’s 55 electoral votes won’t go to President Donald Trump in the 2020 election, but he can expect the state’s farmers support. The White House announced on Oct. 22 it will pump water where it’s vital for human needs rather than hold it back ...
30 October, 2019A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece on the National Council on Teacher Quality’s excellent research on California’s failed teacher quality policies, and now the organization has followed up by releasing a new analysis showing that California is AWOL whe...
29 October, 2019Amid much fanfare, Major League Soccer last week announced that Sacramento has been awarded the 29th MLS franchise. Attention now turns to building a new $252 million stadium in the downtown Sacramento railyards before the team’s launch in 2022. Unf...
28 October, 2019Rowena Itchon – Who Is Giving Away the Most Free Stuff? Guess which presidential candidate is giving away the most “free” stuff. Check out John Stossel’s Free Stuff 2020. Evan Harris – Mr. Zuckerberg Goes to Washington (Again) Mark Zuckerberg e...
25 October, 2019Last week came news that the California School Boards Association finally submitted its long-discussed ballot measure to the state Attorney General’s office to begin the process of qualifying it for the November 2020 general election ballot. Accordin...
24 October, 2019Analysis of California Governor Gavin Newsom’s first year as governor is in the “Monday morning quarterback” phase as the media, supporters, and opponents measure his legislative priorities against his campaign promises. Since passing the largest sta...
23 October, 2019Lance Izumi, PRI’s Senior Director for the Center for Education joined the Lars Larson Show to discuss U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s latest education proposal, that includes banning federal funding of charter schools and supporting a ca...
22 October, 2019While many adults are perplexed by today’s young people, a number of important books offer insight and answers to why, according to the cover of one of them, “Today’s super-connected kids are growing up less rebellious, more tolerant, less happy—and ...
22 October, 2019The California state motto is “Eureka,” Greek for “I have found it.” Says State Symbols USA, “famed Greek mathematician Archimedes is said to have exclaimed ‘Eureka!’ when he finally discovered a method for determining the purity of gold.” The motto ...
21 October, 2019Tim Anaya – Mark Zuckerberg on the Power of Expression Caught between a rock and a hard place amidst strict criticism over political censorship and calls for the government to break it up, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the case this week at...
18 October, 2019Recently, I had the opportunity to spend two weeks traveling throughout England, Ireland, and Scotland. Though each of the places we visited were very distinct from one another – the hotels that we stayed at had one thing in common – bulk dispensers ...
17 October, 2019California’s state government has embraced a policy of resisting nearly every federal government policy pursued by the Trump Administration. Legislation, executive orders, and lawsuits serve the dual purpose of forwarding the state’s progressive agen...
16 October, 2019The response by states to the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Janus ruling, which said that it was unconstitutional to require non-union government workers to pay fees to public-employee unions, has ranged from underhanded attempts to save the unions’ ...
15 October, 2019My last column began a conversation our nation desperately needs to have – forcefully pushing back against the dangerous and misguided myths promoting by proponents of socialism in the U.S. surrounding the supposed socialist success stories in ...
15 October, 2019Benjamin Franklin was right that “nothing is certain but death and taxes,” though he could have added a third certainty in California – paying significantly more than the national average for gasoline. California drivers are living a real life ...
14 October, 2019Tim Anaya – Freedom of Speech Apparently Ends When You Enter an NBA Arena This week’s controversy over the NBA and China apparently extended to home. Adding insult to injury, as this video produced by the Daily Caller shows, NBA security ...
11 October, 2019The initial report on Stockton’s “basic income” experiment, in which 125 residents in low-income Zip Codes receive $500 a month, shows that most of the money that can be tracked has been spent on necessities. But that’s only part of the story. Forty ...
10 October, 2019Watching leftist politicians such as New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio goading students to go on “strike” to protest climate change underscored for many American parents the increasing political indoctrination going on in the nation’s public schools...
09 October, 2019Now that dust has settled after the signing of perhaps the hottest bill this legislative session – Assembly Bill 5 – what’s next for those who work in the gig economy? A panel of free-market advocates and subject matter experts recently got together ...
09 October, 2019While California’s teacher unions are winning expensive battles on the strike lines and are flexing their political muscle in Sacramento, new research shows that state teacher-quality policies are failing to ensure that every public-school classroom ...
08 October, 2019One issue that was pushed on the backburner in this year’s very eventful legislative session was single-payer health care. Surprisingly, even though the Senate actually passed a single payer bill (SB 562) last session, a single-payer bill wasn’t even...
07 October, 2019
Evan Harris, PRI’s Media Relations and Outreach Manager, spoke with Newsy about California Governor Gavin Newsom signing Senate Bill 206, the Fair Pay to Play Act, into law. The new law will allow NCAA college athletes to receive compensation and end...
04 October, 2019Tim Anaya – How One Irish Family Transformed Their 4 Bedroom Home into an 89-Room, 4-Star Resort This week, I returned from a two week tour of England, Scotland, and Ireland. At our final destination in Limerick, I had the opportunity to stay a...
04 October, 2019Gov. Gavin Newsom sent out a press release Wednesday announcing that he will sign “the first major overhaul to the charter schools law since its enactment 27 years ago, and will address longstanding challenges for both traditional public school distr...
03 October, 2019With the deadline for California Governor Gavin Newsom to sign or veto legislation fast approaching, one public policy issue that received little to no attention at the end of California’s legislative session is the state’s pending data privacy law. ...
03 October, 2019When Proposition 47 was passed, no small number of critics said it would lead to increases in property crimes as it downgraded theft to a misdemeanor if the value of the stolen goods or bad checks is less than $950. The threshold had been $450.......
02 October, 2019DOWNLOAD THE BRIEF California lawmakers won’t give up on their crusade to force everyone in the state into electric cars (before eventually removing us out of our cars altogether). That electric vehicles neither sell nor perform up to reasonable expe...
01 October, 2019The history of failure, destruction, and death lying in the wake of nearly every socialist experiment is well-known in our country today. Modern-day proponents of socialism cannot point to a single instance of their failed dogma being successful in a...
30 September, 2019Tim Anaya – Let Charter Schools Teach PRI’s Lance Izumi has extensively covered the passage of AB 1505, which would impose new restrictions and regulations on charter schools in California. In this video, Reason TV’s John Stossel ex...
27 September, 2019Lance Izumi joined the Andy Caldwell Show on AM 1440 and AM 1290 in Santa Barbara to discuss California’s recent charter school compromise and what parents should look out for now that schools are back in session. ShareTweetPinShare...
26 September, 2019One of the most contentious battles of this year’s legislative session was AB 5, with labor and gig economy companies duking out over the definition of who is an employee and who is an independent contractor. In this battle over the “new economy” and...
26 September, 2019Last week, I accompanied Sally Pipes to New York where she participated in a debate sponsored by Intelligence Squared. For a decade now, Intelligence Squared has been hosting debates on all issues concerning public policy, from the Middle East, to dr...
25 September, 2019California policymakers have indicated that when the state converts to a renewables-only energy framework in 2045, wind and sun will be the only sources permitted. Categorical renewables such as hydroelectric power and nuclear will not be considered....
24 September, 2019The free speech battles on college campuses today are perhaps unparalleled since the time of Mario Savio at Berkeley in the 1960s – although the cast of characters is much different today with conservatives being afraid to speak freely about their be...
23 September, 2019Tim Anaya – How Rent Control Hurts Renters In the wake of the Legislature’s passage of AB 1482, so-called “rent gouging” legislation (which is really just another name for rent control), this great video from Prager U featurin...
20 September, 2019Since 2011, the California State Legislature has been itching to bring back redevelopment agencies. Governor Jerry Brown’s nixing of the 70-year-old program scored the California state budget several billion dollars during the Great Recession in 2011...
19 September, 2019President Trump said many times during the 2016 election that the American people would “win” so much under his administration that they would get tired of winning. Now that the 2019 legislative session is over, Gov. Gavin Newsom may be making the sa...
18 September, 2019I have long adhered to the proposition that we should extend grace to our ideological opponents. In fact, when discussing fellow Americans, I reject wholesale the increasingly common language of combat in politics (e.g. political “enemies,” culture w...
17 September, 2019Gov. Gavin Newsom will not after all appoint a homelessness czar, as he had promised he would during the 2018 campaign. Now, if he would just disband the homelessness task force that was formed in the spring. While running for governor last year as t...
16 September, 2019Lance Izumi, PRI’s Senior Director for the Center for Education, joined the Phil Cowan Show on AM 1380 The Answer to discuss the deal recently announced between the California Charter School’s Association and the California Teachers Assoc...
13 September, 2019Kerry Jackson – President Trump to the Rescue on CA’s Homeless Problem? California’s homeless problem has become so troubling that the president, who has been in a running feud Sacramento, has even decided to try to help. Evan Harri...
13 September, 2019On Thursday night, the Democratic presidential candidates will meet for the next presidential debate in Houston. One surprising candidate who qualified for the Houston debate and has attracted a small but growing following of supporters (known as the...
12 September, 2019Recent headlines blared that Democrat lawmakers, the California Teachers Association, and the California Charter School Association had reached a compromise in the charter school wars in Sacramento. For many charter-school supporters, however, the “...
11 September, 2019Gov. Gavin Newsom and lawmakers have made it clear they believe rent control is one of the solutions to California’s housing shortage. According to the Los Angeles Times, an agreement announced late on the Friday evening before the Labor Day weekend ...
10 September, 2019
Association of American Educators executive director Colin Sharkey joins us to discuss a new survey from their Teacher Freedom project on the attitudes of teachers one year after the historic Janus decision and shares insight on what teachers think a...
09 September, 2019Water policy is one of those topics that can leave newcomers and casual listeners feeling inundated. The regulations that govern state and federal water policy are laced with a flood of acronyms and terms, with a steady gush of changes to state water...
09 September, 2019Tim Anaya – Channeling My Inner Phil Donahue In case you missed it, check out the video of a recent PRI luncheon with UC Berkeley Law Professor John Yoo and PRI’s Dr. Steven Hayward – also a Berkeley prof – on the battle for f...
06 September, 2019Recently, headline after headline trumpeted that the College Board, which administers the SAT, eliminated students’ so-called “adversity score,” which was supposed to inform college admissions officials about the challenges students face or don’t fac...
05 September, 2019I loved the classic children’s book Where the Wild Things Are when I was a kid. If I were to write a story about the political version of Where the Wild Things Are, I’d set it on the floor of the State Assembly during the......
04 September, 2019It seems you can’t scroll through your social media feed or morning newsletter without reading commentary about inverted yield curve and recession. A 2020 economic recession is the talk of political pundits, financial talking heads, and presidential ...
03 September, 2019
Lance Izumi, PRI’s Senior Director of Education Studies, joins us to discuss perhaps the most controversial education legislation in recent memory – a so-called compromise that would impose significant new requirements and restrictions on charter sch...
02 September, 2019
Watch C-SPAN’s national TV coverage of PRI’s recent lunch event with University of California Berkeley Law Professor John Yoo, who served as the deputy assistant U.S. attorney general during the George W. Bush administration, and PRI seni...
30 August, 2019Tim Anaya – Remembering a Sacramento Culinary Icon News came on Thursday that Sacramento’s cooking icon Biba Caggiano passed away at the age of 82. Anyone who has spent any time on the Sacramento political scene has spent more than one e...
30 August, 2019On this Labor Day, we salute California’s hard-working men and women with a much-deserved three-day weekend while enjoying the unofficial end of the summer season. This Labor Day, we celebrate the fact that California’s public employees who don’t wan...
29 August, 2019Los Angeles County has adopted a “sustainability” program that officials expect “to enhance the well-being of every community in the county while reducing damage to the natural environment and adapting to the changing climate.” This is considered sma...
28 August, 2019Despite evidence of a recent slowdown, the American economy is strong according to nearly all traditional economic indicators and has been for multiple years. Nearly a decade of economic expansion has led to record highs being recorded in the stock m...
27 August, 2019Supporters behind the split roll ballot measure that would remove Proposition 13’s tax protection for commercial properties had it been approved are apparently junking the initiative in favor of what they believe will be a “new and improved” plan. “T...
26 August, 2019Lance Izumi, PRI’s Senior Director of the Center for Education, joined the Lars Larson Show to discuss kids returning to school and the dangers of a one-size fits all system. ShareTweetPinShare...
23 August, 2019Tim Anaya – What Would Have Happened if the US Bought Greenland in 1946? This week brought the unusual dispute between the Trump Administration and Denmark after being rebuffed over a proposal to purchase Greenland. In the coverage of the issu...
23 August, 2019Earlier this year, I wrote about the #Build2020 plan put forward by Assembly Democrats to make it easier to raise taxes at the local level for special taxes and general obligation bonds to pay for things like libraries, hospitals, parks, and other po...
22 August, 2019In late April, Senator Elizabeth Warren beat out other 2020 presidential contenders to the college-aged voter pulpit by introducing a sweeping student loan forgiveness plan. With the previous debate about the nation’s massive $1.57 trillion student l...
21 August, 2019Recently, I had a health scare that sent me to the emergency room for a few hours. The care that I received at UC Davis Medical Center was excellent. I drove myself to the emergency room at 6:30 in the morning. Upon registering, I saw......
20 August, 2019California leads the country in electric vehicle sales, but it’s apparently not enough to satisfy the Sacramento meddlers. The same legislator who would outlaw gasoline and diesel automobiles now wants to increase the publicly-funded subsidy that is ...
19 August, 2019It is back-to-school time for students across America, which means that it also a time for parents to be aware of the signs that schools may not be providing the quality of education they want for their children. Here are the top five warning signs.....
16 August, 2019Tim Anaya – Don’t Mess with Bingo Players One of the reasons why I love going on cruises is getting to play bingo every day. I’ve learned over the years not to mess with bingo players, whether you call out bingo when you haven’...
16 August, 2019California, which would like to think of itself as the recycling capital of the universe, has lost its largest bottle and can recycling chain, rePlanet. The company shut down all 284 sites across the state on Aug. 5 and terminated its workforce of as...
14 August, 2019Even though the state has slipped in the rankings over the past several years, California is still an innovation hub with an economy that is firmly grounded in innovative industries from videogames to internet, and technology hardware to movies. Ther...
13 August, 2019CalPERS and CalSTRS – the two largest public employee pension funds in both California and the nation –just announced their annual investment returns for the 2018-19 fiscal year. Once again, it’s not good news for California taxpayers. Both funds re...
12 August, 2019
Claremont Institute President Ryan Williams joins us to discuss their current work on what they see as the growing threat from identity politics and multiculturalism, their recent censorship battle with Google, and how we can encourage a more balance...
12 August, 2019Rowena Itchon – Yes, I Really Did Work for Ronald Reagan When people learn that I worked at the Reagan Speechwriting office, people ask me if I ever met the President. My brother recently came across this old video in 1986 when the staff did......
09 August, 2019Renewable portfolio standards (RPS) can be considered the flagship environmental policy for state government in the US. The RPS programs have been adopted by 29 states and apply to half of the national electricity market. The staple of any RPS progra...
08 August, 2019San Francisco has most recently been known more for its quality of life problems and lack of affordability than the home of Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge. You would think that city officials would be doing everything they can to lure both touri...
07 August, 2019Recently, The Washington Times published an op-ed that I authored where I describe how the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, to use the newspaper’s headline, “Careen Left.” But the reality is that the political ...
06 August, 2019By Lance Izumi and Rebecca Friedrichs Reports reveal that 10-15% of teachers have said “No thanks” to funding unions since the U.S. Supreme Court set them free from forced unionism through the Janus decision in June 2018. While these numbers might su...
05 August, 2019Caltrain, a commuter rail in the San Francisco Peninsula, has announced a grandiose plan that would remake, says The Mercury News, “a once-sleepy suburban line into a truly urban transit system.” “Caltrain’s vision contemplates BART-like ‘show-up and...
05 August, 2019Ben Smithwick – How Private Charities Can Help Address California’s Homeless Crisis This is a must-watch short documentary profiling three programs of Catholic Charities of Los Angeles. The film demonstrates the importance of creating a p...
02 August, 2019Every other year, I always take a big trip somewhere around the world. This fall, I’m excited to be traveling to England, Ireland, and Scotland for the first time. As I prepare for my trip, the UK is in the midst of great political turmoil......
01 August, 2019A new poll found nearly half of Californians don’t believe they can afford to live in the state. It’s not necessarily big news, but it does confirm why so many wish to flee. The Quinnipiac University poll, taken July 10-15, tells us that 45% of......
31 July, 2019If you’re in California, the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) wait times have moved from the butt of bad jokes to a pressing policy issue. Californians were waiting up to six weeks to get an appointment at some DMV offices and efforts to decrease w...
30 July, 2019As the national teacher unions careen farther and farther left, they now brazenly proclaim politics and power as their goals, while openly dismissing quality education as their priority. Education analyst and retired Los Angeles teacher Larry Sand ob...
29 July, 2019As PRI has documented extensively, last year’s landmark Janus ruling has not stopped California’s public employee unions from continuing to siphon off dues from disaffected members. Our Kerry Jackson has written that, “long before the Janus ruling wa...
29 July, 2019Kerry Jackson – Brewing Beer to Save Water Environmental protection doesn’t have to be achieved only by government decree. Ben Smithwick – How to Raise Successful People The always brilliant Esther Wojcicki discusses her latest book...
26 July, 2019Perhaps the most controversial bill of this year’s legislative session is legislation responding to last year’s state Supreme Court ruling that has the potential to disrupt how millions of people work in California. In the Dynamex ruling, the Court e...
25 July, 2019You may have heard about Libra, Facebook’s newest venture aimed at the cryptocurrency and blockchain industries. Facebook released a whitepaper on Libra in June, detailing how the company plans to use Libra as a decentralized blockchain, low-volatili...
24 July, 2019California’s homeless crisis continues to wage out of control on the streets of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and communities across the state. State and local politicians have given lots of lip service about “taking action” to solve the pr...
23 July, 2019California’s 2018 crime data has been released and the news is mostly encouraging, though a bit mixed. The violent crime rate is slightly down (1.5%) after growing for three straight years, and four of the last seven, according to data released this ...
22 July, 2019Tim Anaya – Is FaceApp a Russian Agent? Like many of you, I’ve watched with amusement everyone posting their “old age” photos this week using the FaceApp. However, you should always be careful before so willfully submitting yo...
19 July, 2019DOWNLOAD PDF California is the most fun state in the country. So says the website WalletHub. It can’t be fun for everyone, though. Many would say living in California is a miserable existence. If the standard for fun is measured by the vast opportuni...
18 July, 2019What’s in President Trump’s tax returns? It’s a mystery that has stumped cable television pundits since he refused to release them during the 2016 campaign. At times, the furor has been so high that I’m surprised that Matlock or Jessica Fletcher we...
17 July, 2019California has lived on the trope of being the hub of technology startups and innovation for decades. California’s economic success has long been touted and celebrated, none more so than the technology gold rush in the Bay Area. But despite Californi...
16 July, 2019
California State Board of Education member and Natomas Charter School co-founder and retiring Executive Director Ting Sun joins us to discuss what makes her school so special. Natomas Charter School is one of the schools profiled in Lance Izumi’s bo...
15 July, 2019About the same time two of California’s largest cities were named among the seven worst-run municipalities in the country, we learn that the state’s — and the country’s — largest county had the worst population outflow in the U.S. in 2018. The livin’...
15 July, 2019Kerry Jackson – Bono on “the idea of America” U2 frontman Bono’s radical view about America wouldn’t be welcome in most university faculty lounges. Tim Anaya – Getting an Early Warning About the Next “Big One...
12 July, 2019Home ownership provides basic financial literacy, drives wealth creation, and increases free cash flow for individuals and families. However, it can be difficult to differentiate between having surplus cash and wealth. Having surplus cash is havin...
11 July, 2019San Francisco’s homeless crisis may soon have a new victim – luxury shopping in the City. The City by the Bay has long been known as home to the world’s best shopping. It was home to now-defunct high-end retailers like I. Magnin, and the Joseph......
10 July, 2019Listen to Lance Izumi, senior director of PRI’s Center for Education, discuss the latest issues in the debate over school choice and education reform with guest host Katy Grimes on “The Phil Cowan Show” on AM 1380 The Answer in Sacr...
09 July, 2019Not often does Sacramento get it right in the eyes of the defenders of liberty. A bill allowing athletes at public and private California colleges to earn money from endorsements, however, is likely to earn their approval. Senate Bill 206, the Fair P...
09 July, 2019As President Trump delivered his well-received patriotic Independence Day tribute to America, the braying leftist college professoriate erupted in social-media fireworks, underscoring the importance of offering saner higher-education alternatives to ...
08 July, 2019Citing an oft-used U.S. Census Bureau statistic that women earn 80 percent of what their male counterparts earn, presidential hopeful and California Senator Kamala Harris said that if elected, she would end gender pay discrimination by requiring com...
08 July, 2019By Lance Izumi and Rebecca Friedrichs Ever wonder why government agencies like the DMV make simple chores like registering a vehicle a lot more frustrating, and expensive, than they need to be, or why the lines are so long? Mariam Noujaim, longtime h...
07 July, 2019Tim Anaya – Kate Smith Sings God Bless America Legendary singer, the late Kate Smith, ran afoul of today’s PC mob earlier this year. Critics went back in time to parse her body of work, and declared some of her performances from 80 years ...
04 July, 2019Recently, I gave a seminar presentation on my research on underperforming regular public schools in middle-class and more affluent neighborhoods in California, which allowed me to do some updates based on the most recent data. The seminar, sponsored ...
03 July, 2019Many California legislators seem to believe in open borders — not just the border to Mexico but also the borders to Arizona, Nevada, and Oregon. Businesses are slipping out of state through those boundaries at an alarming rate because of the difficul...
02 July, 2019In June 2011, a group of Republican lawmakers gathered at a Ford dealership in downtown Sacramento for a celebratory press conference. They were gathered to celebrate what they were calling, “Freedom from Higher Taxes Day,” the day when temporary tax...
01 July, 2019Tim Anaya – New PRI Poll Shows Strong Support for Gene Therapies PRI released the results of a new national poll this week showing that Americans strongly support and see a lot of value in gene therapies. Unlike traditional medications, gene th...
28 June, 2019Though no legislation has been passed yet, California officials have made it clear they want to outlaw automobiles powered by internal-combustion engines. But it’s a near certainty they won’t be able to secure an all-electric fleet within their timet...
27 June, 2019SAN FRANCISCO – A new poll from the California-based nonpartisan think tank, the Pacific Research Institute (PRI), shows that Americans overwhelmingly support innovative gene therapies, which change the focus of medicine from treating illnesses to cu...
26 June, 2019This week marks a milestone for PRI’s weekly “Next Round” podcast as we celebrate our 100th episode. When we first started the podcast in July 2017, our podcast had a different name, “Another Round with PRI” (I won’t go into the story of why we......
25 June, 2019
In their continuing war against charter schools, teacher unions have persistently argued that charter schools, which are mostly non-union, have a large negative financial impact on the regular public school system. New research, however, contradicts...
24 June, 2019Over the last couple of years, several state legislatures have considered online privacy legislation. Most of these efforts failed, including in California, but the misguided effort was brought back by a San Francisco real estate developer, Alastair ...
24 June, 2019Tim Anaya – John Stossel on San Francisco’s Homeless Crisis This week, PRI released a new issue brief on San Francisco’s homeless crisis, authored by our Kerry Jackson and Wayne Winegarden. With homelessness in San Francisco on my m...
21 June, 2019READ THE PDF For a large majority of Americans, their home is their most valuable asset, while also serving as a major portion of their retirement portfolio. For others, owning their home provides a source of stability and community for themselves an...
20 June, 2019After being soundly defeated in the Senate 0-57 (43 Democrats voted “present”), the Green New Deal continues to languish in the House. Roll Call reported the following excuse from Speaker Nancy Pelosi: “I can’t say we’re going to take that and pass ...
19 June, 2019When Sacramento unwisely decided that 100% of retail electricity sales in the state would have to be generated by renewable sources by 2045, most reasonable people would have thought that hydroelectric power would be included in the portfolio. But it...
18 June, 2019
In this special episode - recorded at a recent PRI luncheon in San Francisco - PRI Senior Fellow and UC Berkeley Professor Steve Hayward and UC Berkeley Law Professor John Yoo share their thoughts diversity, equality, and the attacks on free speech o...
17 June, 2019This year’s state budget debate is in the history books. On Thursday, the Legislature’s liberal supermajority passed the main budget bill and some of the trailer bills required to implement the budget. The 2019-20 state budget is also Gov. Gavin New...
17 June, 2019Tim Anaya – Cancer Treatments and Financial Returns This week, PRI’s new Center for Medical Economics and Innovation released a new issue brief on the issue of cancer treatments and financial returns. It analyzes an oft-quoted study by th...
14 June, 2019What’s a summer without a reading list? And what’s a think tank without ideas? So, we just couldn’t help ourselves and came up with the list below compiled from PRI’s staff. Lest you stop reading now because you think that all the books are wonky.....
13 June, 2019Last week, the non-partisan Public Policy Institute of California released their latest survey of Californians stand on a host of issues. Writing about the poll results, veteran Los Angeles Times political columnist George Skelton summed up the surve...
11 June, 2019Anyone thinking that California can’t become more anti-business or add another punitive tax hasn’t seen the recent news out of San Francisco. Political leaders there are campaigning for an increase in the city’s “IPO tax,” which is both unnecessary a...
10 June, 2019Rowena Itchon – Remembering D-Day, 75 Years Later Perhaps the most moving D-Day celebration speech of all time: Ronald Reagan at Pointe du Hoc, 1984. Tim Anaya – Living in Fear in California PRI’s Kerry Jackson has just published a ...
07 June, 2019A funny thing happened on the way to teacher-union political hegemony: common sense kicked in and the people threw the unions for a huge loss with the defeat of the proposed parcel-tax increase in Los Angeles. In fight after fight across the country,...
06 June, 2019While most traditional public schools continue to adhere to a one-size-fits-all model of curriculum, instruction, and learning, sometimes dubbed the ‘McDonaldization’ of education, public charter schools have the flexibility to implement more individ...
05 June, 2019In the classic work Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll, the character Humpty Dumpty says that “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” Responding, Alice (of Wonderland fame) says, “The question is.....
05 June, 2019In The Wealth of Nations, the 18th century economist and philosopher Adam Smith observed about the chicanery of some businessmen, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspir...
04 June, 2019PRI has a helpful calculator that shows how much a union member could save throughout his or her working years from not paying union dues. In California, the average fee-paying teacher owes $650 a year while the average worker owes $1,000. A 45-yea...
03 June, 2019Tim Anaya – Why Are So Many Californians Moving to Arizona? This week, I’ve been in Arizona for Heritage Resource Bank conference. It’s really the first time I’ve spent any time in the state outside changing planes. Arizona is...
31 May, 2019California has regressed from the land of opportunity to the land of crisis. A chronic housing shortage, growing homelessness problems, the highest poverty rate in the nation, and runaway public employee pension liability are ripping at the seams of ...
30 May, 2019The Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP) Committee has just released a bi-partisan bill authored by Senators Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Patty Murray (D-WA) that would make health care more affordable and more transparent for patients...
29 May, 2019On Friday, the Legislature faces the big “house of origin” deadline. All bills that were introduced this year must pass their “house of origin” by the 31st. In other words, bills that were introduced in the Assembly must pass by Friday night and vi...
28 May, 2019Tim Anaya – Memorial Day Tribute This week on What We’re Watching, we present a special tribute to America’s fallen heroes throughout our history. We will never forget the bravery and dedication to duty you showed so that we could ...
24 May, 2019There have decades of bipartisan rhetoric about the virtues of home ownership, with politicians competing with one another to see who can propose the worst ideas for responsible homeownership. Some policies, like preferential tax treatment and credit...
23 May, 2019Bill Gates, a key godfather of the Common Core subject-matter standards, wrote five years ago that the national standards “will improve education for millions of students,” but a groundbreaking new study shows that Common Core has actually decreased ...
22 May, 2019With more than 800 miles of coastline and a great big ocean out there, California shouldn’t be always be scrambling for water as if it were in the middle of the Sahara Desert. But politics tend to make goods scarce rather than plentiful. But sometime...
22 May, 2019In 1987, it was the talk of the South Bay neighborhood where my parents lived: a tax rebate check of $236 from the state government for every household up and down the street. My mother was delighted. At the time, my sister was going to......
21 May, 2019Last week, hundreds of bills died a quiet death. The scene of the crime was not the Bates Motel, but rather 2 committee rooms at the State Capitol. And the murder weapon wasn’t a candlestick or other choices from the game of Clue. In fact,......
20 May, 2019Rowena Itchon – Is Universal Basic Income the Safety Net of the Future? Universal basic income is a topic that PRI has covered extensively, especially the proposal by Stockton Mayor Andrew Tubbs. Even some of the free-market side see basic inco...
17 May, 2019They were warned. They wouldn’t listen. But they should have. A university study confirms what so many of us already knew — and what several other studies have corroborated: Minimum wage hikes kill jobs. Scholars at the University of California...
16 May, 2019DOWNLOAD THE PDF Jerry Brown left office in January as one of the most popular governors in California history. He also left successor Gavin Newsom with a few headaches. Among the more prominent unresolved issues are the high-speed rail project, the ...
15 May, 2019Listen to Lance Izumi, Senior Director of PRI’s Center for Education, discuss his recent article on Southern California NAACP chapters breaking away from the state and national groups to support charter schools on the Phil Cowan Show on AM 1380...
14 May, 2019Earlier this year, Governor Gavin Newsom proposed a so-called “data dividend” because, he says, “California’s consumers should also be able to share in the wealth that is created from their data…” The Governor provided almost no details then, and few...
14 May, 2019Years ago, in perhaps one of the most well-known episodes of her long-running talk show, Oprah Winfrey gave away shiny-red Pontiacs to all of the unsuspecting members of her studio audience. Uttering a phrase that has gone down in pop culture history...
13 May, 2019While a powerful front of liberal lawmakers and groups push for a moratorium on the creation of new charter schools in California, individual chapters of the NAACP have broken ranks to support charters that are improving the education for thousands o...
10 May, 2019Ben Smithwick – How Entrepreneurship Can Alleviate Poverty in Africa Magatte Wade is one of the most prominent female African entrepreneurs. In this TED Talk, Wade discusses the challenges of doing business in her native Senegal and shares her ...
10 May, 2019A central theme of my previous columns has been the importance and primacy of the individual. Economic policymakers cling to their blackboard models but forget that even for unambiguously “net-positive” interventions, there are millions of people bei...
09 May, 2019The Sacramento Bee has come up with one of the more interesting lists we’ve seen lately. It’s a catalog, via video, of “some of the most left-leaning laws that have come out of Sacramento since the Democrats” — who are enjoying “their biggest l...
08 May, 2019“A penny saved is a penny earned,” said Ben Franklin. So, imagine what saving $1,000 each year by opting out of paying union dues can do for a government worker’s bottom line. The U.S. Supreme Court’s Janus decision affirmed the right of government ...
07 May, 2019My colleagues and I have written often about California’s pension crowd-out, or how state and local governments budgets are increasingly gobbled up by public pension payments. Last fall, PRI’s Wayne Winegarden released a new study showing that, using...
06 May, 2019Kerry Jackson – Inequality Myths Watch this great video from John Stossel explaining why the standard line of Bernie Sanders and his supporters about “the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer” simply isn’t true. In ...
03 May, 2019The old adage goes that you should never talk about religion or politics at the dinner table. Working in a political world, I try to heed that advice whenever I leave work. The last thing I want to face when going out for dinner with......
01 May, 2019Silicon Valley and Wall Street aren’t the only ones celebrating IPOs this year – Sacramento is doing its share of the partying. That’s because the state is expected to receive a deluge of tax dollars over the next several years thanks to capital gai...
30 April, 2019The skills and education of every American will form the basis of our nation’s long term success, as well as the solution to many of the most divisive issues in American politics. Issues such as wage stagnation, income inequality, unaffordable housin...
29 April, 2019Gov. Newsom is playing hot potato. Starting to get heat from angry Californians about gas prices soaring past $4 per gallon, the Associated Press reports that he asked the California Energy Commission for a report on “why prices are higher than in th...
29 April, 2019Tim Anaya – How Does the 15 Percent Solution Work? In his latest study in the “Beyond The New Normal: How Much Should We Spend?” series, Wayne Winegarden talks about the “15 Percent Solution,” or the ideal level of gove...
26 April, 2019Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat from San Francisco, is one of the more active members of the California Legislature in terms of pursuing bills in hopes of easing the state’s housing crisis. But with that drive comes controversy. As he did last year, Wi...
25 April, 2019Over the last two months, riots at public schools across the country have underscored why parents choose safer charter schools for their children. In April, ten Stamford, Connecticut high school students were charged with numerous crimes, including f...
24 April, 2019When Right by the Bay heard that Assemblyman Kevin Kiley’s vigorous defense of Teach for America (TFA) landed him in the “dog house” (the smallest office at the Capitol), we couldn’t help but be intrigued, for nothing in politics is worse than being ...
24 April, 2019There’s a new target in California’s war on plastics: those handy bottles of shampoo, conditioner, body wash, and lotion that hotels hand out to guests. Assembly Bill 1162, approved by the Natural Resources Committee and surely to get the same favora...
23 April, 2019At a recent congressional hearing, freshman Democrat Katie Porter from Orange County took to her soapbox to grill JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon about income inequality at the company. Using the example of Patricia, who is employed as a full-time, e...
22 April, 2019Lance Izumi, senior director of PRI’s Center for Education, discusses how the media is targeting charter schools as a place for rich, white kids on the nationally-syndicated Lars Larson Show. ShareTweetPinShare...
19 April, 2019Listen to Lance Izumi, Senior Director of PRI’s Center for Education, discuss his new book Choosing Diversity on “The David Webb Show” on Sirius XM Patriot, Channel 125. ShareTweetPinShare...
19 April, 2019Tim Anaya – Praying for Notre-Dame As we prepare to celebrate Easter and Passover this weekend, our thoughts are in France following the devastating fire that destroyed a significant portion of the Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral. It seemed fitt...
19 April, 2019Download the PDF They are not as unpopular in California as President Trump is, but private prisons are becoming a preferred target of politicians. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has a large blue-plate special of problems to solve, is at the forefront of a c...
18 April, 2019When Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order “to address the shortage of housing for Californians,” he got it right, or at least halfway. The order directs “the Department of General Services (DGS) and the Department of Housing and Community Deve...
17 April, 2019The old adage is April showers bring May flowers. Well, after a very wet winter, it looks like spring has finally sprung in California. As soon as the seasons change, Golden State drivers are typically hit with another unwelcome phenomenon brought ...
16 April, 2019Right by the Bay has sounded the alarm on the affordable housing crisis, especially our colleague Kerry Jackson, who has written about it here, here, and here. But until we get real reform, like Sam in Casablanca, we plan to play it again and again....
15 April, 2019Listen to Lance Izumi, senior director of PRI’s Center for Education, discuss his latest book Choosing Diversity on the Terry Maxwell Show on KNZR Radio in Bakersfield. The interview begins at the 45:15 mark. Click here to listen to the interv...
12 April, 2019Tim Anaya – Celebrating 40 Years of PRI If you were at our recent 40th Anniversary Gala in San Francisco, you had the chance to watch this great look back at some of the people and events that have shaped PRI over the years. Now......
12 April, 2019Lance Izumi, senior director of PRI’s Center for Education, discusses the Sacramento teachers strike on the “Phil Cowan Show” on AM 1380 The Answer in Sacramento. The interview begins at the 1:34:45 mark. ShareTweetPinShare...
11 April, 2019A dominant narrative in recent American politics, on full display as the Democratic presidential candidates race left to do battle in their upcoming primaries, is that America is a land of inextricably fixed “haves” and “have nots.” The challenge of ...
11 April, 2019PRI’s senior director of education studies Lance Izumi discusses his new book Choosing Diversity on “The Andy Caldwell Show” in Santa Barbara. The interviews begins at the 42:00 mark. ShareTweetPinShare...
10 April, 2019The state Senate held a joint informational hearing last month that, on the surface, looked to be a step forward for those who believe the California Environmental Quality Act needs reform, if not a top-to-bottom overhaul. But apparently the hearing ...
10 April, 2019Lance Izumi, senior director of PRI’s Center for Education, discusses his new book Choosing Diversity with host Lillian Cauldwell on Passionate World Talk Radio. Click here to listen to the interview ShareTweetPinShare...
09 April, 2019Lance Izumi, Senior Director of PRI’s Center for Education, joins Jeff Bell and Patti Reising on KCBS Radio in San Francisco to discuss the move by Texas Tech University to stop using race as a factor when admitting students to its medical scho...
09 April, 2019Yesterday, my colleague Rowena Itchon wrote about Sacramento’s “taxfest” – the various proposals introduced this year to raise taxes on hard-working Californians. That’s only part of the story. A group of lawmakers wants to make it easier to ...
09 April, 2019By Lance Izumi and Michele Steeb Over the past two years, President Trump has promoted bold reforms designed to address the opioid crisis. Congress, in a rare bipartisan effort, wholeheartedly supported Trump’s significant reforms, but these in...
08 April, 2019Will Rogers said, “The only difference between death and taxes is that death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.” But Rogers never came up against the current California legislature, which these days isn’t just holding a legislative se...
08 April, 2019
One of the key traits that distinguishes charter schools from traditional public schools is the diversity of educational experiences promoted by the ability to choose, writes Lance Izumi in his new book Choosing Diversity, published by the Pacific Re...
05 April, 2019Kerry Jackson – The Sensible Environmentalist Watch this video and imagine a debate between him and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. ShareTweetPinShare...
05 April, 2019
Costly regulations serve as a barrier to entrepreneurship, small business growth, innovation, and job opportunities to lift people into the middle class, concludes the first paper in a new series from the California-based, free-market think tank, the...
03 April, 2019The wave of teacher strikes across the country, with their focus on killing education reforms such as charter schools, have focused attention on the ideology of teachers. Many Americans are now asking: “Why are teachers so liberal?” Tom Rademacher, ...
03 April, 2019I’ve written extensively about the ongoing troubles at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Last year, the DMV first made headlines with the scandal over long wait times brought about by a lack of any realistic plan to help millions of Californians upda...
02 April, 2019Right by the Bay is celebrating (or lamenting) April Fool’s Day by creating the following quiz on weird and goofy laws beginning in 2019 in California. If you get a perfect score, you get a one-way ticket to Texas (April Fool’s!). True or False: Sur...
01 April, 2019Gene therapies have the potential to dramatically improve the lives of millions of Americans living with life-threatening diseases. Watch the new PRI video to learn how policy obstacles are standing in the way of making gene therapies a reality for m...
29 March, 2019You would think that California’s current $21.4 billion budget surplus would be plenty of money to fund the spending wish list of those thwarted over the past 8 years by former Gov. Jerry Brown’s adherence to the principle of subsidiarity. Think agai...
28 March, 2019It can cost a half-million dollars more to build the same-size house in California as it does in Texas. The number of adults surprised by this is roughly zero. While California ranked no. 3 in new home construction in 2017, housing supply still lags ...
27 March, 2019California is proving once again that it’s the worst place to do business in America. This time, the state is attempting to collect up to eight years of back taxes from Amazon sellers whose products were temporarily stored in Amazon warehouses throug...
26 March, 2019
Every day, charter schools play an important role in meeting the diverse needs of California’s students. PRI’s Lance Izumi, Fortune School CEO Margaret Fortune, and EdVoice’s Bill Lucia share real-life charter school success stories and explore idea...
25 March, 2019DOWNLOAD THE PDF It was inevitable. California lawmakers’ assault on choice continues in 2019. The plastic-bag ban already in effect is not enough to satisfy their appetite for micromanaging others’ lives. After successfully outlawing single-use plas...
25 March, 2019Tim Anaya – What Crime Victims Have to Say About Gov. Newsom’s Actions on the Death Penalty This week on Right by the Bay, I wrote about Gov. Newsom’s startling actions on the death penalty. My piece argues that justice for crime vi...
22 March, 2019Enough already. I’m tired of people snickering that USC, my old alma mater, isn’t worth the half-million-dollar bribe that actress Lori Loughlin allegedly paid to get her two daughters in the school. Here’s just a sample of the put downs: John Podho...
21 March, 2019In early 2018, Pacific Research Institute released my publication An American Education Agenda, which included my five top reform recommendations for the federal government. It is heartening to see that President Trump and his administration have ad...
20 March, 2019Governor Gavin Newsom’s move to have State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond create an expert panel to review the financial impact of charter schools on regular public schools, and put out a report by July, smells like an attempt to ...
19 March, 2019California cities have a choice: They can comply with the new governor’s effort to increase homebuilding or they can continue to put up with lousy roads. That isn’t exactly the way the new governor’s deal is going to work, but it is a loose if......
19 March, 2019
Watch Lance Izumi, senior director of PRI’s Center for Education, discuss the college admissions scandal with host Chance Seales on “The Why” on Newsy. ShareTweetPinShare...
18 March, 2019A combination of powerful aggressive teacher unions and compliant state and local politicians have produced a perfect storm that threatens to destroy the future of charter schools and the children who benefit from them. Charter schools are publicly f...
18 March, 2019Gov. Gavin Newsom triggered a firestorm on Wednesday by signing an executive order ordering a moratorium on the death penalty. His action effectively grants a reprieve from lethal injections for the state’s 737 death row inmates. According to Polit...
18 March, 2019Tim Anaya – Beware the Ideas of March Today is an infamous day in history, when Julius Caesar was assassinated by his fellow Roman senators in 44 BC. Deep down, it’s a day that has every politician a little nervous. Watch this reenactment...
15 March, 2019In another First in the Nation policy to come out of California, the L.A. City Council voted 14 to 0 to pass an ordinance requiring companies doing business with the city to disclose whether they or their workers have ties to the National Rifle Assoc...
14 March, 2019Spring is in the air, which of course means it’s time to start thinking about the federal budget. Our latest Beyond the New Normal analysis examined what it would take to transform our current unaffordable federal budget. And while it would take poli...
13 March, 2019This week on PRI’s “Next Round” podcast, I sit down with Senator Mike Morrell, R-Rancho Cucamonga. Among the topics that we discussed was his legislation to ensure safer schools for all students (Senate Bill 709), also known as the Sexual Abuse-Free...
12 March, 2019A proposal to draw water from the desert to slake perpetually dry Southern California seems no closer to reality now than it did when the idea emerged well more than a decade ago. The project has, according to California Water News Daily, “received n...
11 March, 2019Last week, PRI held its inaugural “California Ideas in Action” Conference in Sacramento. For those of you who weren’t able to join us, below is your chance to watch 4 great panel discussions showcasing how free-market ideas are bes...
08 March, 2019Last week, PRI held its inaugural “California Ideas in Action” policy conference in Sacramento. A capacity crowd came together near the State Capitol for a half-day conference exploring how free-market ideas can address California’s most pressing cha...
07 March, 2019I recently explained in these pages how government welfare programs keep people at a sustainable level of poverty instead of helping people escape poverty. Little of the actual results of welfare policies resemble the promises made by their proponent...
06 March, 2019“Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases,” said Ronald Reagan, “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” Uber and Lyft are on the move. And guess what?......
05 March, 2019Washington, DC is currently in the grips of techno dystopian group think. Lobbyists and activists with something to gain, and politicians looking to reap rewards, have dreamt up an absurd imagined society where there is great injustice caused by tech...
04 March, 2019Tim Anaya – A California for Everyone At this week’s PRI “California Ideas in Action” conference in Sacramento, we were pleased to be joined by John Gamboa of The Two Hundred and California Community Builders. He spoke of the ...
01 March, 2019When Barack Obama called college an economic imperative, he did a disservice to millions of young people. When the current cast of presidential hopefuls call for college that’s free, they do a disservice to America. For years, liberals have romantici...
28 February, 2019Welfare programs treat the symptoms of poverty, not the cause. As a result, they will never be the solution to ending poverty, nor are they designed to be a lasting solution. We have created a massive, cumbersome bureaucracy to administer an ineffect...
27 February, 2019Last June, then-Gov. Jerry Brown and Sacramento’s political leaders dropped a proposed tax on drinking water. But Gov. Gavin Newsom, following the California Way, apparently aims to bring it back. Newsom, the Los Angeles Times reported “has embraced ...
26 February, 2019With great fanfare, a group of Democratic lawmakers announced last week their latest effort targeting people who commit the worst social faux pas imaginable – drinking a Big Gulp! Led by Bay Area Democrat Assemblyman Rob Bonta, lawmakers introduced l...
25 February, 2019Rowena Itchon – Vintage Reagan President Reagan’s last speech to the White House Photographer’s Association is vintage Reagan. His speech starts at about 10:45. Kerry Jackson – Is the Global Temperature Record Credible? One remark from th...
22 February, 2019They say that age and cunning always beats youth and exuberance. But when it comes to the latest dust-up between the Left’s old guard and the new Far Left, how it all plays out in the end isn’t so clear. The Left’s old guard has......
21 February, 2019