Monet Politics

The end of the legislative session in California has become a prime opportunity for the Governor to get massive publicity by signing proto-progressive legislation and defusing key campaign issues from his challenger. On some of these counts, Arnold deserves some praise. On others, this looks increasingly like a surface display.

The signing of The Million Solar Roofs Bill is great news for anyone who wants to see California as a leader in alternative energy. It uses free market levers to encourage solar panels on a million roofs in the state. It's a bit redundant, as the Public Utilities Commission already made this a priority last year in response to public support for the plan. But the real losers on this are the California Democratic Party, who blocked this bill last year, supposedly because of vague union concerns. So instead they hand the Governor a big victory on alternative energy in the middle of an election year instead of when he was sinking anyway in 2005. Smart move. The CDP had no business blocking this bill then, and I'm in some ways happy they gave up resistance now, though it shows how incoherent their electoral strategy is, and the opportunity cost of implementing this plan a year late is striking.

Next, the state's top leaders in the Assembly and Senate are piecing together legislation that would make California a leader in fighting global warming by regulating greenhouse gas emissions. We've seen this before, and the bold step made be state government often fades (just see Who Killed The Electric Car). There's some loopholes in the law (like suspension in the event of a natural disaster, for example, or how much businesses could get credit from California for dropping emissions elsewhere), but there's always a push and pull at work here. This could engender a split between the Governor and the CA Chamber of Commerce, who underwrited a lot of his ads this year. So until the result of the final negotiations come out, I'm going to take a wait-and-see approach. Remember that the "historic agreement" between California and Great Britain on reduction of anti-global warming emissions ended up being COMPLETELY VOLUNTARY for corporations.

Finally, the biggest news has been the compromise on the minimum wage, an agreement to increase it from $6.75 to eventually $8.00 an hour over the next two years. Of course, this was a done deal since the beginning of the year; the only question was whether there would be an automatic COLA (cost of living adjustment) or not. There is not one in the final bill. And the deal on the minimum wage now is an attempt to brush away the two vetoes Schwarzenegger put down on this same bill over the last two years. He claims the economy is strong enough to support it now. That's the economy that added a pathetic 900 jobs in July.

Indexing would relieve the pressure on low-income Californians to struggle every few years until an increase kicks in, and would stop this situation where they are held hostage to electoral politics. As SFBrian writes at Calitics:

Indexing does nothing to increase the real wages of the state’s poorest. It merely does what is done for most people in government jobs, ties their earnings to what stuff actually costs. It takes politics out of the equation. If we passed indexing, we could set a real minimum wage once and let the indexing take care of the rest. But now we’ll be back where we started in five years. Hopefully then we will have a Democratic governor who understands the valuable role of the state’s minimum wage workers.

I think that these latest bills are a bit of Monet politics, to paraphrase Clueless; from far away they look good, but upon closer inspection, not so much.