Adam Eran: The real outrage is that private banks receive far more money than any social safety net program would need, but the proposed cuts impact only safety net programs.
About Adam Eran
Adam Eran is a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. He has been known to remodel train stations on his lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. He translates ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, and writes award-winning operas. He manages time efficiently. Occasionally, he treads water for three days in a row.
Despite the many proposals of marriage he receives that seem to believe so, Adam Eran is not a super hero. Instead, he is a concerned public citizen of the capital of California with an active library card, enough education to be a danger to himself and others, and enough experience not to take himself too seriously. OK, that last part isn't true.
The name itself means "man awake."
Niello’s Reform Favors Oligarchs
By
Adam Eran: In the wake of Reagan’s policies, although it was previously the world’s largest creditor, the U.S. became the world’s largest debtor. Now we have a middle class economically eviscerated by the lost equity in their homes, who tapped this equity during the housing bubble to sustain their consumption.
7 Myths That Drive the Debt Ceiling Debate
By
Adam Eran: The metaphors that frame the current Federal budget and debt ceiling debates are completely inaccurate, and if the media coverage is any indication, the public has swallowed them hook, line and sinker, too.
Walter M. Plumbs the Depths of Homophobia
By
Adam Eran: Intolerance is costly in other ways, too. The U.S. doesn’t get the cheaper, more effective single-payer health care now because racist Dixiecrats in Congress were concerned that federally-sponsored health care would mix the races in Southern hospitals.
A “Conservative” Response Puts Eran in His Place
By
Adam Eran: My best wishes to Ms. Cronan, and anyone else commited to willful blindness about facts, with an added plea: Please, be careful not to bump into the furniture. Meanwhile, I will refrain from calling Ms. Cronan “the barbarian.”
Deception Alert: “Liberal” Huffingtonpost Distorts the Education Debate
By
Adam Eran: Waiting for a race of cyborg/celebrity super-teachers distracts from the egregious income inequality and the childhood poverty that worsens educational outcomes in the U.S.
Disaster Capitalism in the Budget Debate
By
Adam Eran: Historic tax reductions on the wealthy, and the Wall-Street-Fraud recession, have reduced public revenues, and this reduction now makes otherwise too-popular-to-cut programs vulnerable. But are such cuts really necessary?
Design to Fail: Of Supertrains and Sprawl
By
Adam Eran: One recent such sprawl-enabling designed-to-fail project is California’s proposed high speed “supertrain.” This would take years and cost billions to build.
California Budget Deficit Not a Real Problem
By
Adam Eran: The bottom line here is that State spending disproportionately goes to lower-income people, while recent tax cuts have disproportionately favored the wealthiest taxpayers.
Amnesty Shmamnesty
By
Adam Eran: Would the oligarchy that is the military-industrial-prison-media complex stoop so low as to incite a war, even promoting Iran as a backwater deserving of U.S. “shellacking”? And is the Pope really Catholic?
The California Budget Mess Backstory
By
Adam Eran: So the origin of California’s tax reductions, and even its current budget deficit, is arguably oil price inflation. If we want a stable economy, and government without deficits, we need to stop kidding ourselves that spending is a the root our budget problems, and attend to our energy addiction.
Reagan v. F.D.R.
By
Adam Eran: Acting together solved problems in FDR’s philosophy. Such action was the problem, in Reagan’s. Now we have experienced roughly 40 years of each. Which one produces better results?
Human Nature = Prejudice
By
Adam Eran: Vedantam suggests education, rather than confrontation, is what gets us beyond prejudice. The Obama presidential run ignored the obviously bigotry coming from his opponent’s proxies, and suggested, without recrimination, that we give Obama a chance. That tactic, not Reverend Wright’s understandable anger, was what worked.
Could Consume-atives Be Deficient?
By
Adam Eran: Consume-atives proclaim we should cut something but seldom propose anything specific. The plan is for bankruptcy court to sort that out, rather than making consume-atives a target for blame. “Take 10% off the top” is another, meaningless Republican proposal in recent budget negotiations. What does that mean, though? Let 10% of the prisoners out? Only treat 90% of the sewage?
Peak Oil 102: What To Do Now
By
Adam Eran: A recent U.N. study found that raising livestock caused more climate change than all human transportation combined. Currently U.S. agriculture is not even “solar.” We burn ten calories of petroleum to produce one calorie of food.
Peak Oil 101
By
Adam Eran: The acute problem of the Gulf oil spill makes the cost of corruption-afflicted government front page news. Lax Federal offshore drilling oversight under Bush 43 has cost us dearly. However, our society’s vulnerability to any trouble with this critical resource should also remind us of the chronic problem: peak oil.
Bush Recession Comes Home to Roost
By
Adam Eran: Tax cuts caused the current budget deficit, not crazy spending. Local government revenues fell 57% after Proposition 13. Even more egregious, the consume-atives™ (they do not conserve), now complain that State funding for local governments to fill that revenue hole meddles too much in local affairs.
Niello’s April Foolery
By
Adam Eran: Appropriately for April Fool’s, Republican California Assemblyman Roger Niello’s editorial appears in the Sacramento Bee protesting California’s public policy response to climate change (AB32). As evidence that AB32 is misguided, he cites the discredited Varshney study and the similiarly biased California Manufacturers and Technology Association (CMTA) oil-industry-funded study of AB32.
Civic Discourse Jumps the Shark
By
Adam Eran: When the nation’s most trusted newsman is Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart, it’s no surprise that sensible debate about public policy is at least hard to find. Lately, however, such policy debates have become positively surreal.
California State Senator Cox on Climate Change: Ignorance Is Bliss
By
Adam Eran: The one thing we don’t want to do is subsidize even more petroleum consumption. If we gave oil producers a special tax break (like the “depletion allowance”), or paid for the military protection for those increasingly important overseas oilfields, gas would be artificially cheaper at the pump, and we would have abandoned the “magic of the marketplace” for crony captalism, where a few favored interests get the lion’s share of public policy benefit.
There You Go Again, Assemblyman Niello
By
Adam Eran: Niello apparently believes government’s taxes, spending and regulations never produce any real benefit; they only kill jobs. Never mind that better regulation would have prevented the sub-prime meltdown that has sent our economy into a tailspin, or that taxes have been cut for the last 30 years without any unusual upturn in the economy.
McClintock Press Secretary Slams Eran, Eran Talks Back
By
Adam Eran: Bill George, the press secretary for Congressman Tom McClintock protests that in some previous editorials, I’ve maligned his boss with “utterly preposterous charges.” Unfortunately, I’ve done my homework, and Mr. George’s specific answers are either wrong, or misleading.
Niello Sponsors a Whine-Fest for Business, As Usual.
By
Adam Eran: Niello’s hearing is yet another bit of evidence that, no matter what the facts, the Republican narrative remains constant: We must reduce taxes and regulation, even if lack of effective regulation produced the current less-than-optimum outcome. And although “deficits don’t matter,” no matter how low they are, taxes are too high, especially on the wealthy.
Citizen Chuck in Health Care Land, and the End of Civilization as We Know It
By
Today, as I left the market, a paid signature gatherer asked me to endorse cutting state spending. I asked her if she knew that, after adjusting for inflation and population, California’s state spending has grown insignificantly in the past two decades. The state’s deficits exist because we reduced taxes, starting with proposition 13.
McClintock’s Neocon “Morality” Tortures the Truth
By
Oddly, McClintock yearns for the golden era when California was a more highly taxed state and could afford “the finest highway system in the world and the finest public school system in the country. California offered … FREE university education.”
Budget Baloney
By
The shrill attacks on government spending — “it’s always wasteful! it *never* invests!” — have already begun. The anti-tax crowd has begun its triumphal victory dance, spinning the defeat of proposition 1A’s rather modest extension of taxes as an endorsement of their prejudices. But this is one voter who turned down the convoluted logic of [...]
Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
By
“Men…think in herds; …go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses…one by one.” — Charles MackayRepublican Assemblyman Roger Niello‘s recent editorial “Performance Based Budgeting Deserves a Look,” is his bid to appear as a man who has recovered his senses. In it, he reminds us that California’s state budget process is imperfect. The [...]
Raising Taxes Is Good for the Economy
By
by Adam Eran – The Census Bureau reports that California ranks 10th among states in income, but only 22nd in tax burden. Nevertheless, the Republican mantra has been that higher taxes are so damaging that government should avoid them at all costs — especially in downturns like the current one. This sentiment is so pervasive [...]
PCL offers monthly Open House Events on the 2nd Saturday at 2pm and 3rd Thursday at 6pm. Click here to learn more.
Recent Comments