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Welcome to the official home and wonderful world of Pulitzer Prize Winning Political Cartoonist Michael P. Ramirez, daily editorial cartoonist for the Las Vegas Review Journal |
California reservoir drought 03-14-19
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An ark? Let's build a high speed rail....What about all the rain? He's from California.
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California’s Rendezvous with Reality
By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON February 28, 2019 6:30 AM NATIONAL REVIEW Years of lax policies and overspending are finally catching up to the Golden State.Californians brag that their state is the world’s fifth-largest economy. They talk as reverentially of Silicon Valley companies Apple, Facebook, and Google as the ancient Greeks did of their Olympian gods. Hollywood and universities such as Caltech, Stanford, and Berkeley are cited as permanent proof of the intellectual, aesthetic, and technological dominance of West Coast culture. Californians also see their progressive, one-party state as a neo-socialist model for a nation moving hard to the left. But how long will they retain such confidence? California’s 40 million residents depend on less than 1 percent of the state’s taxpayers to pay nearly half of the state income tax, which for California’s highest tier of earners tops out at the nation’s highest rate of 13.3 percent. In other words, California cannot afford to lose even a few thousand of its wealthiest individual taxpayers. But a new federal tax law now caps deductions for state and local taxes at $10,000 — a radical change that promises to cost many high-earning taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars. If even a few thousand of the state’s 1 percent flee to nearby no-tax states such as Nevada or Texas, California could face a devastating shortfall in annual income. During the 2011-16 California drought, politicians and experts claimed that global warming had permanently altered the climate, and that snow and rain would become increasingly rare in California. As a result, long-planned low-elevation reservoirs, designed to store water during exceptionally wet years, were considered all but useless and thus were never built. Then, in 2016 and 2017, California received record snow and rainfall — and the windfall of millions of acre-feet of runoff was mostly let out to sea. Nothing since has been learned. California has again been experiencing rain and cold that could approach seasonal records. The state has been soaked by some 18 trillion gallons of rain in February alone. With still no effort to expand California’s water storage capacity, millions of acre-feet of runoff are once again cascading out to sea (and may be sorely missed next year). read more Great News!Friends,
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Kern supervisors approve total abandonment of the high-speed rail
by Emily Erwin, Eyewitness News. BAKERSFIELD NOW Tuesday, March 12th 2019 Bakersfield, Calif (KBAK/KBFX) — In a four-to-one vote, Kern County supervisors approved a resolution that calls for total abandonment of the California High-Speed Rail project at today’s Board of Supervisors meeting. District 2 Supervisor Zack Scrivner proposed the resolution to ditch even a scaled-back version of the rail from Bakersfield to Merced last month. In an interview with Eyewitness News on on March 1 Scrivner called the rail project a “glorified Amtrack and he echoed that same sentiment today. Although not everyone agreed with the resolution. District 5 Supervisor Laticia Perez opposed the resolution during the vote on the matter and some Kern County residents felt the same way. John Spaulding, who represents the building trades, opposes the resolution and said there are already men and women working on the project in the Wasco area. “I think the resolution sends the wrong message,” Spaulding said. Other members of the public sided with Scrivner. One man sited the lack of promised private funding and possible disruption to local communities and farms during construction in his public comment. Abandoning the project would mean California might be required pay back $3.5 billion in federal grant money, something scrivener accepts as the cost of a bad investment. "It's time to abandon this project all together once and for all,” Scrivner said at today’s meeting. The board will send a resolution in opposition to the project to Gov. Gavin Newsom, the California High-Speed Rail Authority, the California State Assembly and State Senate., the board will then wait to see what kind of weight, if any, its position holds with state officials. Because it’s the state that has the final say on the future of the California High-Speed Rail. read more |
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