California lawmakers are on the verge of approving legislation to trim prison sentences for repeat nonviolent felonies.

Current law adds an additional year to offenders’ sentences for each previous prison or jail term.

The bill approved by the state Assembly on Thursday would remove the mandatory one-year enhancement. The bill returns to the Senate on Friday for a final vote on Assembly amendments that excluded certain sex crimes from the measure, as lawmakers wrap up their work for the year.

Supporters said the longer sentences clog prisons and jails, are costly to taxpayers, and do little to deter criminals. Corrections officials say about 10,000 inmates currently have the one-year bumps in their sentences, while legislative analysts estimate that the change could save tens of millions of dollars a year in lower prison and jail costs. …

Click here to read the full article from the Associated Press

California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday signed two bills that limit medical exemptions for vaccines of schoolchildren.

Under SB 276, California’s Department of Public Health would investigate medical exemptions from doctors who have granted five or more in a year. The bill was first introduced by Democratic state Sen. Richard Pan in February and was approved by the legislature last week. Newsom also signed SB 714, a companion bill, which includes changes proposed by him, such as “allow(ing) a child who has a medical exemption issued before January 1, 2020, to be allowed to continue enrollment until the child enrolls in the next grade span.”

Newsom’s approval of the stricter regulations comes a week after health officials in New York City said a massive measles outbreak that spread across parts of Brooklyn since October has ended. The crisis reignited a nationwide conversation about vaccinations and the need to implement tighter vaccine laws. California is among a handful of states — including New York — that do not offer personal, philosophical or religious exemptions from school vaccination requirements. …

Click here to read the full article from CNN.com

A legal vestige from California’s Wild West days is no more.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill striking down a law that makes it a crime to refuse a police officer’s request for help.

The California Posse Comitatus Act of 1872 made it a misdemeanor for any “able-bodied person 18 years of age or older” to refuse a police officer’s call for assistance in making an arrest.

Posse comitatus derives from medieval English common law, but saw widespread use in America’s early days, including as a tool of enforcement for the Fugitive Slave Act. …

Click here to read the full article from the Modesto Bee

California will now provide free tuition for the first two years of community college for first-time students who attend full-time. California governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation to allow the California College Promise program to help cover 33,000 more students for a second year of tuition-free college. California’s 2019-2020 budget includes an additional $42.6 million to support the program.

“This is real help for students trying to improve their lives and build their future,” Newsom said. “No one can argue with the fact that the full cost of attending institutions of higher learning is still far too high — both in California and across the country. But by offering two years of community college tuition-free, California is taking a meaningful step toward chipping away at the cost of higher learning for students and their families.”

According to Newsom’s office, California’s community colleges are the largest system of higher education in the U.S., serving about two million students, or approximately 25% of the nation’s community college students. The California community college system includes 115 colleges and 78 educational centers, which awarded more than 160,000 degrees and 96,000 certificates in 2017-2018. …

Click here to read the full article from Forbes.com

Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, recently made headlines for criticizing the “Medicare for all” proposal popular among Democratic presidential candidates. In an interview with Vice, Reid said that the proposal would be problematic in the 2020 election. “How are you going to get it passed?” he asked.

But Reid’s sensibility isn’t shared by the Democratic electorate. A POLITICO/Morning Consult poll out this week found that nearly two-thirds of Democratic primary voters would be more likely to support a presidential candidate who favors “Medicare for all” than one who wants to build on the Affordable Care Act.

This is a mistake. The high costs and low-quality care that accompany “Medicare for all” are unlikely to be popular with general election voters.

“Medicare for all” would reduce access to care, even as it mandates that all Americans submit to government-sponsored insurance coverage. It envisions paying doctors and hospitals at Medicare’s current rates, which are estimated to be about 40% lower than those paid by private insurance. Right now, nearly one-quarter of America’s rural hospitals are at high risk of closing due to financial problems. If hospitals like these are forced to take a 40% cut, many will be forced to close. Doctors, facing a similar pay cut, will likely retire early.

This would surely create a massive shortage.

Giving everyone ostensibly “free” health care would also lead to new demand for care. Combine hospital closures and physician retirements with increased demand, and “patients might face increased wait times and reduced access to care,” as the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office puts it.

Just look at the extraordinary wait times in Canada, whose system bans private coverage for anything medically necessary and bears a close resemblance to “Medicare for all.” Patients wait a median of 19.8 weeks to receive treatment by a specialist after referral from a general practitioner. In 2018, the average Canadian family of four paid up to $13,311 in taxes for their supposedly “free” healthcare system.

Senator Reid isn’t the only prominent Democrat to express skepticism about “Medicare for all.” David Axelrod, former senior White House adviser for President Obama, recently argued that the plan wouldn’t pass even if Democrats take both chambers of Congress, as well as the White House.

“Americans don’t generally want to destroy the private health care system,” Axelrod said. Will Democrats heed the counsel of two of their more successful political hands? Only time will tell.

Sally C. Pipes is president, CEO, and Thomas W. Smith Fellow in Health Care Policy at the Pacific Research Institute. Her latest book is The False Promise of Single-Payer Health Care (Encounter). Follow her on Twitter @sallypipes.

Presidential candidates are slowly starting to talk about the gig economy. Not in the vague way they express disdain for a business model that exploits workers. No, they’re starting to take sides, weighing in on one of the most consequential legislative battles taking place in the country: the fight over California bill AB 5.

The sweeping bill, backed by labor unions, would make it much harder for companies to classify employees as independent contractors, a common practice that has allowed businesses to skirt state and federal labor laws. The law would essentially rewrite the rules of the gig economy, and businesses of all kinds are panicking. lt’s why Uber, Lyft, Instacart, Postmates, and other well-known gig companies have launched aggressive lobbying and public relations campaigns to defeat the bill.

The bill passed the state Assembly earlier this summer and is now held up in the Senate as business groups beg for exceptions and compromises. In the past few weeks, 2020 contenders have stepped into the fray. …

Click here to read the full article from Vox.com

Democratic party delegates congregated in San Francisco this past weekend for their national committee summer meeting. As the Republican National Committee pointed out, they couldn’t have picked a better location:

“It’s only appropriate the Democrats chose San Francisco for their summer meeting this year. As the home to some of the most destructive ‘progressive’ policies in the nation, including higher taxes and government overregulation, this is the perfect opportunity for voters to see what they would be getting into with a Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, or Elizabeth Warren presidency.” – RNC Spokesperson Samantha Zager

Interesting reading on San Francisco:

• According to the San Francisco Chronicle, as of May 2019, San Francisco saw the number of homeless people in the city rise by 17% since 2017, “despite creating hundreds of new shelter beds and spending more than $300 million annually on homelessness.”
• According to the City-Journal, “San Francisco is the nation’s leader in property crime.” Many law enforcement officials believe this is due to Proposition 47, “which in 2014 downgraded possession of illegal narcotics for personal use and theft of anything under $950 in value from felonies to misdemeanors.”
• San Francisco Gate explains that the “San Francisco housing market is so expensive that it’s driving people out in droves,” going on to explain that the “median home sale price is $1.6 million,” and “60% of tech workers say they can’t afford homes.”
• Attributing to many of the city’s problems, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, is the fact that “the city has so many rules and regulations that it has become nearly impossible to build anything.”