A public bank in California would be costly, risky and unnecessary
But lawmakers were pushing forward anyway. AB 2243 would have established a taxpayer-funded commission to study the feasibility of a public bank and how it could act “as an additional financial tool to lower borrowing costs, strengthen local lending partnerships and help finance urgent public needs like affordable housing, infrastructure, climate resilience and small business growth,” according to a press release from the bill’s author, Assemblyman Matt Haney, D-San Francisco. The bill died (for now?) without a vote ...
California’s ‘Scarcity Mindset’
The late, great comedian Sam Kinison once said that instead of sending food to starving nations, we should send U-Hauls because, he would scream, “there wouldn’t be world hunger if you people would live where the food is! You live in a desert, understand that?! Nothing grows out of here!” It’s a classic bit, but also wrong. Famines these days are always and everywhere man-made – the result of misguided government policies. So, too, is ...
Time to right size the Farm Bill
The first Farm Bill was passed in 1933 to stabilize food production and protect the land the U.S. food supply was grown on. The economic collapse of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl were hardships, in part, to be corrected by the New Deal and the Farm Bill. The last Farm Bill was passed in full in 2018 with three continuing bills passed since to provide short-term funding solutions to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance ...
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