Minimum Wage Referendum Expected and Desired - UPDATE

San Diego's 10News is reporting that a campaign to repeal an expected rise in the minimum wage is being organized by the San Diego Small Business Coalition. (I urge you to "like" their Facebook page.)

San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer vetoed the measure, but the San Diego City Council is expected to override it. If that happens, Jason Roe, spokesman for the San Diego Small Business Coalition, says he has already begun to fundraise and has "substantial commitments from small businesses." 

Roe says the group is ready to launch a ballot drive to repeal the hike. Some 34,000 signatures must be gathered in a month to get it on the ballot in June 2016.

Meanwhile Council President Todd Gloria is already asking people not to sign the expected petition.  Pretty clear that the referendum fight is game on.  The petition is a great idea that I will support by getting signatures and making donations.

If the minimum wage hike stands, it is going to be a nightmare to have a different wage in San Diego than in neighboring communities.  Enforcement will be tough.  How will the City Attorney collect records from out of town businesses?  Further, such a measure erodes the competitive edge of San Diego businesses at the margins.  The minimum wage hike will only hurt the working poor and punish businesses.  All the energy expended on an issue that only helps a very small 2% of the workforce is all the proof I need that something foul is afoot.  Minimum wage hikes are a back door way for unions to get wage concessions without bothering to bargain or strike.  When some thug tries to stop me from gathering signatures on my petition, I guarantee that they will have been paid by a union.

UPDATE - From the U-T:

The San Diego City Council voted Monday to override Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s veto of gradual increases in the local minimum wage to $11.50 an hour by 2017, starting the clock on a referendum campaign that business leaders have said they’ll pursue.
If opponents can collect the 34,000 valid signatures required for a referendum by Sept. 17, the wage increases will be held in abeyance pending an election in June 2016.

What You Should Be Reading

• The supposed death of the Tea Party has been greatly exaggerated.  
• Meanwhile the left is pinning their hopes of defeating Carl DeMaio's challenge to Scott Peters by tying Carl to the Tea Party.  (I guess its not good enough to actually be LGBT to get support from that community, you have to be the right kind of LGBT.)  
• The VOSD fact checks claims and counter-claims in the Peters-DeMaio race regarding Peters' role in the pension scandal.  While they take DeMaio's claims to task, they also note that Peters' did not in fact solve the problem.  His involvement in the pension mess is surely a liability that no amount of left-leaning fact checking will wash away.  To be fair, I like a lot of the VOSD reporting, despite their clear bias.
•  Having a tough time blogging, research getting tough?  Consider hiring a virtual assistant (VA) for $5 per hour.  Wait, will the city attorney come looking for me if my VA is in India, but I benefit from the work?  (Seriously, I have considered this, as the research and editing is slowing down my writing.)

Wouldn't you rather be doing internet research for me?

Public domain image of 1903 Chicago "sweatshop" workers.

CA-52 Getting Interesting - #ACA Toxicity

To see the impact of the health care law's implosion on political campaigns, look no further than my own 52nd Congressional district here in San Diego.  Scott Peters, the incumbent,is expected to face a tough re-election campaign against the well-known Carl DeMaio.  (I supported DeMaio for Mayor last year.)  While DeMaio has a Republican primary to get past, his high name recognition and backing of the GOP central committee makes him the likely nominee.  DeMaio has been hammering Peters on the health care issue, even though the election is a year away.  Peters has said he would support a House Republican bill to allow individuals to keep their health care.  That Peters would be support a GOP bill on this issue is evidence of how toxic the issue has become.  Leading Democrats are attacking Fred Upton (R-MI) over his legislation, doubling down on the President's argument that the public doesn't understand how bad their policies really are and that this is just another GOP plot to undermine the law.  Scott Peters has been supporting the law until recently.

Carl DeMaio

Scott Peters

What You Should Be Reading

• The always brilliant Victor Davis Hanson plots the endgame for the ill-named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  Bottom line, Obama will usurp authority to gut the law, declare victory and move on. 
• Holman Jenkins asks "Why have the stock prices of the insurance industry have enjoyed a huge run-up if the ACA is supposed to reign in special interests?"
• Dean reports on the end game for socialism in Venezuela and it's not pretty. Money quote: In this context, “free-market economists” can also mean “anybody that can rub two brain cells together”.
• Left Coast Rebel dissects the supply and demand of Lithium and its potential impact on future electric car production.  Left wing dreams of an electric utopia may have to be put on hold.

Listening to Scott Peters This Week

I had a chance to listen to my Congressman, Scott Peters (CA-52) earlier this week.  I should have posted sooner, but not much of what he said in the 15 minutes was very newsworthy.  He comes across as a bit soft spoken and very reasonable sounding, and frankly a lot more appealing personally than the incumbent he defeated in 2012, Brian Bilbray.

He spoke about his work on the House Armed Services Committee, which is important to San Diego, as well as the Science and Technology committee.  He has urged flexibility in how the Pentagon allocates its funding to allow each service to reduce civilian employee furloughs, which was popular with his audience.  He discussed the increasing importance of defending against cyber attacks, but didn't really cover any new ground.

On the budget, he said that the freshman class was characterized by an attitude of wanting to get a deal done that reduced the budget deficit through some sort of compromise.  He said that lack of progress could be attributed to bad blood and memories of previous battles on both sides of the aisle.  He believes that President Obama has actually called for reasonable compromise with the GOP, specifically that entitlements must be reformed.  However, he characterized that in the context of asking for more tax revenue as part of a larger bargain.  I was also struck by the number of times he referred to the Democrat leadership with the term chain of command.

The audience questions were mostly related to cyber threats, furloughs and the direction of the fiscal year 2014 budget. But as I said, little new ground was plowed.

Thinking About 2014 Elections in San Diego

Two local elections to watch in 2014.

Let's see how Scott Peters does without a national Democrat trend at his back in the CA-52.  I predict that multiple Republicans will find the prospect of challenging Peters to be enticing and will jump into the race.  Peters won by slightly more than 2% of the vote, and there shouldn't be any more redistricting in the interim.  I predict another close race.  Fans of limited government should be looking for a fierce candidate who will take up consistent fiscally conservative positons to challenge Peters.  In other words, someone unlike Bilbray.  It is possible he might run again; his comments that he lost due to the tide, which may contain some truth, make me wonder if he will run again.

City Council District changes:

Council Districts in 2010

Council District in 2012

Source: San Diego City Map Gallery.

The other interesting development is that Lorie Zapf now lives in Council District 2, where Kevin Faulconer is term limited out in 2014.  I have read that she expects to run for that seat in 2014 and will not move from her current home in Bay Ho.  Whether the new district will be more or less Republican remains to be seen.  However, Kevin Faulconer did win handily in the June 2010 primary with 61.5% of the vote.  The new district loses Downtown and picks up Bay Park, where I reside, and Bay Ho, where Zapf resides.  I would expect Zapf to have an advantage.

I need to pay more attention to the city council and local issues, because I don't trust the new mayor to implement Prop B to save the city money.  Further, we often have a better chance to have an influence in local elections.

Bilbray and Peters Race Reportedly Close

The U-T is reporting that Democratic sponsored polls are showing a dead heat in my home district, the CA-52, in the race between Brian Bilbray, incumbent Republican and Scott Peters, former City councilman and Port commissioner. One poll was at 40-40 and another at 45-45. While the polls are of likely voters, the real question will be what the actual turn out will look like between Republicans and Democrats. With two huge tax hike initiatives on the state ballot, I am predicting that conservative turn out will be higher because tax hikes tend to bring out those voters. Democrats will have less incentive to vote as Obama is a shoe in to take California's electoral votes. Additionally, Carl DeMaio's campaign will be emphasizing pension reform. Bilbray's campaign will be attacking Peters on that issue for his votes during the time he was on the council. I believe this tilts the field against Peters. From the U-T:

Peters has acknowledged that his vote to underfund the pension system was a mistake but said he's the only candidate in the race to do any meaningful pension reform. He has pointed to negotiating a new pension plan to save the city $23 million a year.

Sounds like a tough sell in this environment, so I am predicting a Bilbray victory, despite these polls.

CA-52 - A Competitive California House Race?

My home got redistricted into House CA-52, which was a boon for me as I had previously resided in Susan Davis' district, which was heavily gerrymandered to ensure that no Republican would ever seriously challenge her. (She has never fallen below 60% in any election effort.) Now I live in one of the few competitive districts in California, featuring a race between Brian Bilbray (R) and Scott Peters. Peters, former city council member from La Jolla, edged out environmental activist and former assemblywoman, Lori Saldaña for second place in the "open" primary system.

Brian Bilbray has been my Congressman before, when I lived at a different address in San Diego, so its kind of strange seeing his name on the ballot again, after I had moved into a Democratic district. Honestly, he has never been my favorite Republican member of Congress; but to be fair, he has always been in districts with substantial numbers of Democrats.

Meanwhile, Scott Peters has taken flack for his terms as council member and as port commissioner. Dave Maass takes up the issue of how the campaign will play out in the most recent issue of San Diego City Beat. Based on interviews with both Peters and Bilbray he sees Bilbray attacking Peters for his part in the current pension mess in San Diego, with Peters claiming that he was on the council that started to fix it. Bilbray also stated that he would attack for Peters being self funded, pouring his own money into the campaign. I think that is a laughable non-issue, Peters has plenty of other baggage and certainly many Republicans have been self funded.

But Maass makes the good point that it is going to be difficult for Peters to distance himself from pension issues. Saldaña attacked along these lines as well, so the meme is out there, as my kids like to say. Peters believes he can set the record straight, but in an interview with the La Jolla Light, Peters labels "The reconfiguration of “The Throat” (the once precarious and highly congested intersection of Torrey Pines Road and La Jolla Parkway)," as his most significant achievement while in office. Hardly resetting the narrative.

The OBRag holds out Scott Peters as a solid Democrat, with "solid Democratic values." Which is really my problem with him, becausem as defined by the left, solid Democrat means unwilling to tackle the nation's fiscal crisis with anything more than doubling down on current policy.

• Unapologetic about supporting the ACA, which represents a doubling down on a regulated utility approach to health care insurance that so far has just increased costs.
• Unwilling to discuss alternative approaches to Medicare's delivery model. Tinkering with prescription costs isn't going to solve the problem of unfunded entitlements in the system. Paying for "outcome based" health care isn't going to deliver cost reduction either. Further, no Democrat has really proposed a serious reform along these lines.
  
• Saying that social security isn't in that bad of shape.

Ultimately, we aren't going to repeal the ACA and start over on serious health care reform with Democrats in control of the House. This is the main reason I oppose Scott Peters. But could the Democrats please get serious about the looming financial crisis. Medicaid expansion is unlikely to move forward as planned given the Supreme Court ruling, but look at the rest of these liabilities and ask why they isn't serious discussion on the left about what to do.

Scott Peters dismisses Paul Ryan, but he and his fellow Democrats aren't offering any serious alternatives to the entitlement problem. See also KT Cat's blog.