A Grand Bargain for California

The deadlock that has existed in the California legislature for a generation reflects a lack of clear vision on the part of both Democrats and Republicans.  Republicans, who in general regard government as out of control, have successfully pushed anti-tax polices to "starve the beast", most notably the 2/3 vote requirements imposed first by Proposition 13 and later by other propositions.  Their policies have managed to cripple many public services without impacting the real major problem with government, the lack of public control over public salaries and pensions.

Democrats, on the other hand, have castigated Republicans for destroying public services, but been unwilling to address the problem of public employee compensation practices.

We cannot solve the problems in California without getting rid of the 2/3 vote requirements in Proposition 13 and other anti-tax adoptions, but we also cannot go on allowing average public sector compensation to greatly exceed average private sector compensation.

We need someone to step forward and develop a grand bargain for California that does some things like:

1.  Repeals all 2/3 vote requirements, and precludes future adoptions imposing any higher vote requirement than the percentage of votes that approve the adoption.

2.  Links public sector total compensation to average private sector total compensation, but with mean, median and mode tests that flatten the overall salary range.  Public sector managers should not be using comparison to private sector salaries to drive their salaries up into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

3.  Requires all public programs to be tested for effectiveness every 5 years and reauthorized every 10 years.