Why California’s Government Isn’t Working

Bloated by corporate cash, let down by a rotten political system and a perversion of direct democracy, what’s the way back for a once-golden state?

By David Dayen, The American Prospect

While voters were sticking a knife in the oligarchy across the country this year, that particular aspect of the blue tsunami ended at the border of California.

Proposition 40, the billionaire wealth tax, failed. Worse, the competing initiative placed on the ballot to confuse voters, Prop 42, could very well pass. (It’s up by about 580,000 votes, but there are nearly five million left to count; the no side would need something like 56 percent of the uncounted vote to win.) Prop 42 bans all taxes on personal property and assets and is an almost direct copy of something that Texas passed three years ago. While it was sold as protecting retirement accounts and exempts real estate taxes, an enterprising lawyer could certainly try to use it to nullify the state’s vehicle registration fees (which certainly can be construed as a tax on personal property) or business equipment taxes, further adding to the series of fiscal straitjackets California has imposed on itself over the years.

And incredibly, the statewide ballot measure that is most emblematic of California’s political and policy failure, and the selling of the state to the highest bidder, is a different one.

Prop 38 sounded straightforward enough: a bond measure for immunology research, pitched as a fill-in for the Trump administration’s cuts to basic science. Sounds great, until you learn that one billionaire named Gary K. Michelson wrote the measure, funded it, and runs the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy, which is the only entity eligible under the initiative for $4.2 billion in bond funds. So it was literally a ballot measure put on by a billionaire to pay himself.

The institute currently has three employees despite promising to hire 51 last year; it certainly looks and feels like state voters were being asked to finance a bust-out. And it is currently leading 55-45; unless a substantial number of votes swing against Michelson at the last minute, he’s going to get his money.