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Hi... this podcast is on California politics... Podcast 14. We're gonna talk about California as a trendsetter.
Well, we only have a week for California politics, but I think this may be the most important week
because you're learning about the government that probably has even more impact on your day to day lives than the federal government.
And the first thing to know about California state government is that its sheer size and economic power, number of people, even the degree to
which we set trends for the country and the rest of the world, that's what makes California special politically
and it's worth studying all on its own.
And if you consider that, depending who you talk to, we're the eighth or ninth largest economy in the world
then you can't deny that we have influence on an international scale.
So knowing how this government works, or doesn't work, for you is very important.
Now remember the idea of federalism, which divided power between the cities, states and federal governments...
well that means that California has its own constitution, has its own laws and rules,
and the structure of the state government is going to be similar to the federal government, but it's not exactly the same.
There are three branches: a legislative, executive and judicial branch,
but they're gonna be configured differently than the branches at the national level that we've talked about,
and it has a unique political culture.
So the state governments of any other state Alaska, Hawaii, whatever, will be different from California's
but each of those 50 state governments do have the three branches.
But not every state has what we call the initiative process. That's a process of direct democracy,
in which the citizens can petition to have new laws put on the ballot and directly vote on them... I'm going to talk more about that later
but it's a really essential part of California politics.
I think it's worth looking at that "fast facts" California box, which is on page 5 of your California primer book, because if you look
at that and some statistics it should become obvious to you that we're very distinct from the rest of the country;
you probably already knew that. But we have many more members of Congress that we send to Washington than even New York,
another populous state. We have more foreign born persons here 27% than New York,
and we're very different ethnically from the U.S. population; U.S. is still 75% white, while in California we're 41% white;
and we have nearly the same percentage of latinos here. We have many more people of Asian descent; 13% than the rest country
where it's only 3.6%... so this is gonna make a big difference in what values we have as a people, what policies we prefer...
and especially what type of legislators we send to Sacramento to make laws.
So the state, and by extension the counties and cities that we live in, they're really the main providers of services that we need every day.
That might include police, or K-12 schools... so the state's the one that's collecting taxes to pay for all that, and that could include
income tax, property tax, corporate tax... there's sales taxes, excise taxes... plenty of taxes to go around
which you'll all, as you grow older and make more money, are gonna find out, but keep in mind that this tax policy varies a lot by state.
For example, some states like Washington and Texas don't even have a state income tax.
Of course you still have to pay federal income tax but they don't have a state income tax.
Other states, for instance, Oregon, do not have a state sales tax and those of you who live close to border up there know this
because people would rather shop across the border in Oregon to save some of those dollars they would have to pay in California on goods.
Of course there are always tradeoffs on tax policy. We may have a state sales tax here in California,
but our property taxes, which have been set at a relatively low level by proposition 13, which passed in 1978,
that put our property taxes at a fairly low level compared to other states.
So we have a legislature here; it has two houses just like the federal level except they're called "The Assembly" which has 80 members,
and the senate that has 40 members. for total of 120 legislators.
Assembly districts have about 465,000 people per district, while senate districts have 931,000
and this is a much higher number than you have in any other state because there's so many people here and so few districts.
So these legislators often have very broad base constituency to worry about.
There are four legislative leaders, one for each party in each house
and for quite some time the Democrats and had a majority in both houses,
in fact they recently achieved a and 2/3 majority, which is truly unique.
Currently, the most powerful legislative leaders are Darrell Steinberg, he's the Senate president protem,
and John Perez, who is the first openly gay, Speaker of the Assembly.
So let's discuss a few other unique aspects of California. I already mentioned how diverse we are here
and if you look at the trendlines, it looks like we're going to continue to get more diverse,
even though we're already a majority minority state. By that I mean more than 50% of our residents are minorities.
Well first, California is a "blue state" and I say blue state meaning we're mostly Democrat
but there is a significant and very vocal minority of Republicans, especially if you look at the southern parts of the state, Orange County,
and the eastern parts of the state. So if you had to color California, we would look very blue on the west and on the coastline
and very red on the eastern half the state.
So at the state government level, both houses are controlled by Democrats, as I said, as is the Governor's Office right now and other
offices in the executive branch.But many county governments are actually controlled by Republicans rather than Democrats,
So it's possible to live in a fully Republican area of the state where you can't find a lot of Democrats,
even though you may not be familiar with that up in Humboldt County.
Of the 75% of Californians who are registered to vote: many more Democrats. So you have 44% Democrats;
quite a bit higher than... there's about 29% Republicans;
and a good a good number, 21% of voters, are what we call "declined to state a party preference."
And it's difficult to know how these independent voters lean, but we do know that
many of them tend to vote one way or another even though they call themselves "declined to state."
Alright, second thing to know about California politics is that we have the biggest and most impactful
direct democracy process in the whole country.
That was the initiative process I was talking about. I'm gonna talk more about this in detail because it's so important.
but you should know that we have the ability, as a people, to pass both statutory laws and constitutional amendments
by a process that allows us to gather signatures, get the law on the ballot - we call them propositions then they're on the ballot -
and then we vote on them, and we only need 50% plus one vote for that to pass.
And the interesting thing is, these laws can override laws already passed by the people we sent to pass laws - the legislature.
And once these propositions are in place as laws, there's another catch, which is that we can't change those laws
unless we passed another proposition.
So you can imagine, this gets very tangled over time, as we pass many, many propositions.
And we may pass something 30 years ago that doesn't make sense 30 years later, but it's still on the books.
Okay. Another important thing to know about the legislature is that we would call it a "professional legislature"
meaning that the state legislature is a lot like the U.S. Congress in how it's setup.
It has a high level of complexity, and it considers a lot of bills,
and, of course, there's a high level of compensation that legislators receive; so we call it a professional legislature.
But on the other hand, it's unprofessional in some ways. For instance, legislators have a limited time there.
We passed a proposition in 1990, called proposition 140, which limited the number of terms that people could spend in the legislature.
Originally you could spend 6 years in the Assembly and 8 years in the Senate, maximum.
Then we passed another initiative in 2012 which lowered the total of the number of years to 12 years, but allowed a single legislator to spend
that 12 years in one position. So you get a little more time in your position but not much.
And so, what does this mean when we have term limits? Well, the effect was to deprofessionalize the legislature
because many legislators, knowing that they only had a limited amount of time there,
really spent a lot of time campaigning for the next state office or finding their next job, as would most people.
A recent example of that is a representative actually gave up his seat in the State Assembly because he won a seat on the Los Angeles City
Council; he was looking for job security. So this has had some detrimental effects on the legislators themselves.
Okay. Another important thing to know about is the governor's role.
And the governor, his greatest power is in budget making. He has to propose a budget and then get passed in the legislature.
But because we have what's called a "plural executive" here in this state, meaning there are many executive offices that we elect
- which is not always the case and other states -
the governor's powers are somewhat restricted in these other policy areas.
So we elect all sorts of offices: we elect the governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, superintendent of public instruction,
the insurance commissioner, the secretary of state,
the treasurer, the comptroller, and a five member board of equalization.
Those are all executive offices that we actually vote on directly, so these people are gonna be independent of each other.
Sometimes they can be from different parties and you're not exactly going to get a cohesive executive platform, right,
when you have this many people elected to that many offices. So the governor's limited in power by the plural executive.
Okay. The next thing to know about is that there's an annual budget process and, unfortunately,
each year it's often a disaster waiting to happen. And I'm going to go more into this in the following podcast, but
I think what you need to know is that balancing the budget in California is made very difficult
by a couple of propositions, mainly the most famous one: Proposition 13, passed in 1978...
this froze property tax rates at 1% of the property's assessed value
and restricted the amount that that tax could rise by 2% per year
even if property values rose more than that you can only raise the tax amount by 2%.
So there's another huge impact that Proposition 13 had, which was it required the legislature have
two-thirds support, in each chamber, to raise any taxes or to have any fees.
So you might like that if you are against any raising of taxes, because it's very hard to get two-thirds of a single party
into power in the legislature.
And when that passed, within one year the state's revenue from property taxes was cut in half, in a single year.
So that meant we had to rely on other sources of revenue if we were going to pay for K-12 schools, infrastructure, police and all that.
So it put us in a bind that actually we still are dealing with, on a year-to-year basis.
One of the problems with relying so heavily on income taxes and sales taxes rather than property taxes
is that when you get yourself into a recession, as we did in 2009,
while the state spending might still go up, but at the same time revenue's going way down, because people aren't making as much money
so we're not getting that revenue and income taxes and sales taxes.
So this put the state in an incredible bind, in a deficit, is what we call it, and we're still digging our way out of that deficit,
a structural budget deficit.
Well... this does affect you, believe it or not. As students, a lot of you might be thinking about, well,
when the recession hit, why were we hit so hard with tuition bills at this time, and in decreased class availability, and all that?
Well it's for the exact reasons I'm talking about: revenue went way down, our spending went way up...
so California's promise of a low cost, quality four-year education was put in jeopardy.
We actually did a lot to save it by passing another proposition - Prop 30 - in November 2012.
But if that proposition hadn't passed, you guys would be facing even more fee increases and
worse class availability than you have now, if you can believe that.
Alright... we'll talk more in detail about direct democracy in some aspects of California politics in the next podcast. I'll see you then!