Glowball Wharmining Legislation – Forehead Slap Edition

Friends,

I went to a town hall meeting with our state assemblyman Brian Nestande last night in the Idyllwild School gymnasium. Yeah, he’s a Republican, but this is a pretty Republican town in a pretty Republican district (warning: PDF link. Scroll down to the 64th. Registration was 41.99% as of last May. – ed). Clearly, on his tour of the district he’s been really pounded on by other groups and it showed in his deference to the current assembly leadership. “I don’t want to get into the politics…” he said often while making a point about the broken politics in the legislature. Budgets? They’re terrible and likely to get worse. Legislative analyst projections of revenue? Wrong and increasingly wrong over the last few cycles. He’s recently been selected by his caucus to sit on the budget committee, which is fine (chief of staff for Sonny Bono a decade ago apparently is enough qualification), but his grasp of the details was pretty thin, I thought.

You’d think it would be a friendly crowd and they were pretty respectful on the whole. Questions asked, with petitioners trying to display their own level of wonkery, and questions answered. Teacher salaries, tax burdens, business stimulation, state employee compensation levels.

The standard bits were trotted out and everybody nodded and hummed and listened with finger on chin. The meeting was informative, but pretty staid and was starting to go long. Then the answer without a question came from our host. I’m going to paraphrase because my notes are crap…

“What bothers me about the global warming legislation in the state is that it creates a demand for green technologies. Wind and solar… But it creates the demand from foreign sources. The legislation won’t allow industries to build the equipment here in the state because of the emissions, but it sets up the demand. We’ll have to buy wind and solar from China or Tennessee or Alabama because they don’t have these rules, so we are going to demand these things and spend the money and send that money out of the state. I don’t get it.”

I’d never thought of this problem before, but it seems so obvious, especially in the context of building up the tax base to fund this budget of ours. The budget that, in the words of the assemblyman, “is diverging, between expenditures and revenue, and is getting worse.”

The, um, “green economy” is starting off famously, don’t you think? Here’s your unintended consequence.

– bob

P.S. The question that engendered the most crowd reaction was the complaint that the CalTrans snowplows were dumping snow in people’s driveways. Can’t something be done? Everybody was positively animated. Top issues, people!