Kamala Harris We Have Become a Nation of Baby Killers
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With Democrats holding all the political ability in California for near the final decade, the Golden State has evolved into a laboratory of big blue ideas. Put a price on carbon? We've done it. Ban set on weapons? We've done that too. Gun control, minimum wage hikes and ii years of free community higher are likewise realities here.
Autonomous candidates for president — with rare exceptions — don't typically betoken to California every bit a model, at least not explicitly. But many of the major policies that one-time Vice President Joe Biden is proposing are already in place hither to some degree. Below are some key ways Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris want to make the Usa more similar California, and a flake about what the state's policy experiments reveal so far.
CalMatters reporters Felicia Mello and Judy Lin contributed to this report.
Boost the minimum wage to $15 per hour
What Biden and Harris are proposing:
Dorsum in 2016, doubling the national minimum wage was a key point of contention between Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders. In the four years since, the party institution has come up effectually to Sanders' view. During the primary, all the major Democratic candidates called for a $15 national wage floor — Biden included. In his first speech as a 2020 candidate, the former vice president told a crowd in Pittsburg that the wage hike is "well past time" and that "it's time to start rewarding work over wealth."
That shift reflects the influence of the "Fight for $15" campaign that labor unions take waged around the country.
What California is doing:
California was the get-go country to approve a $xv minimum wage when lawmakers and and so-Gov. Jerry Brown cut a deal with labor unions in 2016. The unions agreed to take a minimum wage measure off the ballot if the country passed a law increasing wages. Brown won a provision that allows the state to suspend wage increases during economic downturns. California's law gradually phases in wage increases over eight years, with a $fifteen minimum required at all businesses in 2023. In July, Gov. Gavin Newsom said that despite the pandemic-induced economic downturn, he would non filibuster the adjacent hike, slated for January 1, 2021.
How's it going here?
Critics said the forced raises would lead employers to lay off people and replace them with machines—as one Los Angeles business owner did when he learned he'd have to pay his dish washers more than. But empirical enquiry suggests that for the most part, pay increases are not pushing people out of jobs. An economist at the Academy of Massachusetts, Amherst, studied seven states, including California, that take raised wages and institute minimal impact on employment. However, we haven't yet hit the $15 requirement. In 2020, the state'southward minimum wage is $13 for workers at companies of 26 employees or more, and $12 at smaller businesses.
A more recent report past the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Part estimated that a $15 federal minimum would boost the income of 27 one thousand thousand workers, merely come at the expense of i.three million jobs.
Give workers paid family unit leave
What Biden and Harris are proposing:
In belatedly July, Biden announced a new $75 billion annual program to boost child and elderberry intendance. Part of plan: 12 weeks of paid family and medical get out. Biden says he will pay for information technology, at least in part, past endmost a tax break for real estate investors who earn more than $400,000 per year.
His proposal is hardly an outlier inside his own party. During the main, all the major Democratic candidates said they wanted Americans to be able to have at least 3 months off piece of work — with pay — to care for a new baby or seriously ill family unit member. One-time candidate and New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand introduced legislation that would create a national family unit leave programme giving workers two-thirds of their normal pay for up to 12 weeks, and 34 Democratic senators co-sponsored the pecker. Even the Trump assistants supports a policy that it characterizes every bit expanding paid family go out, though the legislation doesn't really provide families with additional money.
What California is doing:
In 2004, California was the commencement state in the nation to create paid family leave, offering workers vi weeks of fractional pay to care for a newborn or sick family unit member. Workers pay for information technology through a 1% payroll revenue enhancement that goes into the Country Inability Insurance fund. Gov. Gavin Newsom has expanded the program, giving workers 8 weeks of paid family leave starting on July 1.
How's it going here?
Though businesses feared increased costs and turnover from giving workers paid family exit, a Harvard study of the program's first six years showed that didn't turn out to be the case. Simply while about all workers pay into the programme, but one-half of eligible mothers and a quarter of eligible fathers took paid family go out in 2017, state officials report. Many depression-wage workers don't take paid leave because they can't afford to get by on partial earnings (the program gives workers 60% to lxx% of their normal paychecks, depending on their income). Other workers don't take it considering they may lose their jobs if they do. In Baronial, the California Legislature passed a bill that would make it illegal for virtually businesses to fire an employee who takes paid leave.
Legalize marijuana
What Biden and Harris are proposing:
During the primary, Biden used the issue of marijuana to put some actress ideological distance between himself and the candidates on his left. Rather than calling for an out-and-out end to pot prohibition, Biden supports legalizing marijuana for medical use nationwide. He also said that recreational apply should be decriminalized — meaning fines, rather than jail time. And for states like California that take already fully legalized weed for adults, Biden has said the feds should respect that.
But now that Harris is on the ticket, that ideological gap has tightened upward. Despite her refusal to back legal cannabis as a prosecutor, as a California senator, Harris introduced a nib that would decriminalize cannabis use and tax and regulate the industry where states permit it. As presidential candidate, she was fifty-fifty more definitive, saying that she is "admittedly in favor of legalizing marijuana."
California progressives promise that Harris volition accept an edifying influence on her running mate. "Joe Biden is going to have to evolve effectually legalization and I think Senator Harris equally vice president will push that," said Oakland congressperson Barbara Lee in an interview in late August.
What California is doing:
California is i of 11 states that have sanctioned cannabis. Gilded State voters made medical marijuana legal in 1996 and approved recreational utilize in 2016. The law allows adults age 21 and over to possess upward to an ounce of marijuana, and grow up to half-dozen plants for personal apply. Commercial growers and dispensaries must get a license from the country and pay taxes. Cities are allowed to ban the sale of cannabis, and smoking it in public remains illegal. The police too downgraded penalties for nearly every criminal offense involving marijuana, assuasive people with by convictions to petition the courtroom to be resentenced or cleared.
How's information technology going here?
Marijuana has get a major lobbying force in the statehouse, where Gov. Gavin Newsom is a champion for legalization. Still, creation of a legal marketplace has proved rocky. The black marketplace remains huge — roughly three-quarters of California weed still is being sold illegally, according to an audit released by the United Cannabis Business Clan, a merchandise group. Most cities in the country have banned dispensaries, setting off a legal battle over how much local control the country law provides. Tax revenues from legal sales are coming in beneath expectations, and producers are pushing dorsum against the state'due south motility to increase revenue enhancement rates. Marijuana remains an all-greenbacks enterprise because federal constabulary prevents cannabis businesses from using banks. The criminal justice bear upon of legalization is also nascent: In the first year after legalization, only ten% of eligible people took steps to have their prior cannabis crimes downgraded or cleared. Some prosecutors are working with a nonprofit to identify and inform people who could have their records cleared.
End cash-bail
What Biden and Harris are proposing:
Biden has proposed eliminating cash bail, which his campaign calls a "modern-mean solar day debtors' prison." Rather than paying to exist released from jail pre-trial, those accused of crimes should be assessed in a way that is "fair" and not-discriminatory, he said. He has not provided additional details on what such an ideal system would look like.
Both Biden and Harris accept, in political parlance, "evolved" on this issue. Having been one of the principal authors of federal criminal offence legislation from 1994 that helped cement "tough on law-breaking" every bit a Democratic Party issue, Biden put out his justice platform early in his current presidential entrada — in part to address concerns from criminal justice advocates within his political party. Too Harris, who declined to challenge cash bail as a prosecutor in California, has co-authored legislation that would do so in the Senate.
What California is doing:
In 2018, California enacted a constabulary to eliminate cash bond in California. The new police gives judges the power to decide whether someone who is arrested should be kept backside bars based on the risk they are deemed to pose to themselves or to others. But that bill has yet to go into effect.
How's it going here?
It isn't. Non yet. Immediately after the bill was signed into law, California's bail bond industry petitioned for a referendum, meaning that voters will be asked to proceed or cypher cash bond. If you lot have your election in front of yous, that's Prop. 25.
The lesson for a Biden-Harris administration: If you're serious nigh eliminating cash bail across the country, expect some push button back.
Pledge to go 100% greenhouse gas emission-costless
What Biden and Harris are proposing:
Biden never wed himself to the "Green New Deal" proposal that Democratic Socialists and climate activists have clamored for all campaign season. During the primary, the youth-led Sunrise Movement graded his climate plan an F minus. Simply subsequently securing the nomination, Biden put out a more detailed climate plan that the Washington Mail service hailed every bit "the nearly ambitious blueprint released by a major party nominee for president."
The central goal of the $2 trillion plan: Make the U.S. electricity filigree 100% carbon emission-gratuitous by 2035 and to nada out net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Though Biden flirted with the idea of putting a price on carbon emissions either by tax or a credit market early in the campaign, he has since backed away from that thought. His new plan relies instead on regulations, subsidies and make clean free energy mandates to reach its goal.
What California is doing:
This is the state that regulates the mileage on cars and their tailpipe emissions, mandates electric trucks, cracks downwards on idling tankers, subsidizes rooftop solar energy and caps statewide emissions while maintaining a market where industry bids for the right to pollute.
All in service of a couple big picture green goals.
One is the state'due south renewable energy standard, which requires California to rid its grid of carbon emissions past 2045. Ready in 2002, the standard has a built-in series of intermediate goals that ratchet tighter every decade.
But electricity generation accounts for but 16% of California'southward greenhouse gas neb. What about the residuum?
California has a goal for that also. In 2018, so-Gov. Jerry Brown signed an executive lodge to "achieve carbon neutrality as soon as possible, and no afterward than 2045." No i is entirely clear how the country will actually meet that goal, merely California'south cap-and-merchandise program is the virtually obvious mechanism. The organization, launched in 2013, forces manufacture here to either reduce emissions or pay for permits to spew greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Auctions where companies purchase and sell those permits accept yielded billions of dollars in the past, which the land government plows into programs designed to slow climate change, such every bit incentives for solar panel and discounts on clean cars. The cap-and-trade program covers businesses responsible for almost 85 percentage of the state's greenhouse gas emissions — including oil refineries, food processors, paper mills, cement manufacturers and electricity providers. That makes it the most wide-reaching carbon-pricing arrangement in the The states.
How's it going here?
The land's renewable energy standard is looking pretty good these days. In 2019, the rules required electrical utilities here to buy 33% of its electricity from designated renewable sources. According to the California Energy Commission, they striking 34%. That's significant progress. Over the last decade, greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector have fallen past 40%. That transition was made easier by sharp declines in the price of solar generation and the plummet of the national coal industry.
But while the land'southward renewable free energy standard has been the golden child in its class of climate change fighting policies, cut emission exterior its electric sector has proven to be a bigger claiming.
Though the state'southward cap-and-trade programme has been its signature method of cutting emissions economy-wide, it's been difficult to pinpoint exactly how much credit the complex organisation really deserves. A worldwide economic collapse and the resulting slowdown in product of all kinds of carbon-intensive products has contributed to a glut in pollution permits, cut off a key source of light-green initiative funding and leading some country leaders to rethink the primacy of the program.
And while California has a solid rails record in cut emissions, the new normal of chronic, catastrophic wildfires and unprecedented heat waves threaten to disengage that progress. Some environmental and economical analysts also warn that the depression-hanging fruit has already been picked clean and that additional cuts will come up at a much higher economic cost. Absent more than physical policies or technological breakthroughs, they say, the aspiration of cyberspace goose egg emissions by 2045 is just that — an aspiration.
Ban "set on weapons" and high-chapters magazines
What Biden and Harris are proposing:
Few problems unite Democratic voters like gun policy. And and then while Biden has tacked to the center of his party on health care and climate policy, when information technology comes to gun regulations, his proposals are equally believing as any of his erstwhile master challengers.
Topping that listing is his plan to ban both "assault weapons" and magazines that hold more than than a certain number of rounds — though he has not specified what that limit should be.
Lawmakers have long struggled to ascertain "assail weapons." Biden calls for legislation that would "forbid manufacturers from circumventing the law by making minor changes that don't limit the weapon's lethality."
What California is doing:
California banned assault weapons in 1989 and has been building on that ban ever since. But at that place is no technical definition for the term. For gun restriction advocates, assault weapons fall into that nebulous "you know information technology when you run into it" category of vices. California'south ban nonetheless cobbles together its own definition of banned guns based on a loose assemblage of characteristics: a "semi-automated, centerfire burglarize" with a detachable magazine and at least one of a handful of other suspect features.
In 2016, California voters also approved a ban on magazines that hold ten rounds or more.
How's it going hither?
Banning a broad category of firearms in the Usa is easier said than done.
California'south feature-specific definition of an illegal assail weapon has triggered a cottage industry of firearm add-ons and blueprint tweaks that skirt around the letter of the law, while enthusiastically violating its spirit. Information technology's a never-ending game of legal and regulatory whack-a-mole equally Sacramento bans a particular workaround, simply for a new one to pop up.
The country's high-capacity magazine ban has had an ever tougher go of it. Showtime a district court then Ninth Excursion Courtroom of Appeal judges take ruled that the land's ban is unconstitutional.
Temporarily have guns from threatening people
What Biden and Harris are proposing:
Both Biden and Harris say they support allowing people to petition a courtroom to have firearms temporarily taken abroad from those who pose a threat to themselves or others. These laws — in place in at least 17 states — are known past a few names: "scarlet-flag," "farthermost risk protection" and "gun violence restraining orders." Biden says he wants the federal government to incentivize states to pass red-flag laws past giving grants to implement them.
What California is doing:
California passed a law permitting gun restraining orders later the 2014 Isla Vista massacre, in which a 22-year-old gunman killed six people and wounded 14 others almost UC Santa Barbara. It allows immediate family members and police officers to petition the courts to take a unsafe person's guns removed. An Isla Vista victim's parents advocated for the law after the investigation showed the killer'south parents were concerned most his mental state before he went on the rampage — and had even asked police to check on him — but were powerless to take his weapons. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a beak expanding the law and then that, beginning in September 2020, coworkers, teachers and employers likewise can ask courts to accept abroad someone'due south guns.
How'south it going hither?
Academic research suggests that assuasive parents and constabulary to seek gun restraining orders is helping prevent some instances of gun violence. A UC Davis study reviewed 159 cases and found 21 instances in which court orders were used to forbid mass shootings. But journalistic investigations have found that parents and law rarely use the police, largely because then few people know about it — including those in law enforcement. San Diego law enforcement agencies employ gun violence restraining orders more than than many other cities and accept been awarded state funds to train other agencies to use them. A bill that would take developed more training for police force enforcement stalled in the Legislature in 2019.
Brand college complimentary
What Biden and Harris are proposing:
Biden never got on board with the more than expansive proposals of his Democratic hopefuls — free higher educational activity for all or wiping away all pupil debt. But from early on in his campaign, he's fatigued on an old favorite from his days as vice president: 2 years of customs college, tuition-free.
The one-time vice president said his plan will not only encompass fresh-from-loftier-school teenagers, but older students hoping to learn new skills. The programme would too utilize to merchandise schools.
What California is doing:
The state offers ii years of tuition-free community college for first-time, full-time students. California'southward major state scholarship, the Cal Grant, can also pay for up to total tuition at both two- and four-year schools — up to near $13,000 for a twelvemonth at the Academy of California—for needy students who qualify. Smaller state grants help with living expenses for some students. UC guarantees that students with financial need whose families earn less than $80,000 annually volition not have to pay tuition and fees.
How's it going here?
While California provides more fiscal aid per low-income educatee than any other state, gaps in programs and the exorbitant price of living here still make higher unaffordable for many. Despite headlines that California has made community college free for all, information technology actually excludes two-thirds of community college students — those who attend part time.
And while low-income students who graduated from high school within the previous year and come across bookish requirements are entitled to state scholarships, that guarantee doesn't utilize to those who didn't become directly from high school to college—and hundreds of thousands miss out each year.
Meanwhile, students are spending an average of nigh $two,000 per month on non-tuition costs like housing, food and textbooks — expenses that land aid largely fails to comprehend.
Turn gig workers into employees
What Biden and Harris are proposing:
During the presidential primary, many Democrats took aim at gig companies such every bit Uber and Lyft, arguing that they exploit low-wage workers by classifying them every bit freelancers instead of employees. Converting their condition to employee would brand workers eligible for more job protections and overtime pay. The result is big for organized labor considering it also makes more workers eligible to bring together unions.
Bernie Sanders was the first candidate to call for national legislation to bar gig companies from classifying workers equally freelancers. A few months after, Elizabeth Warren announced support for California legislation that limits which industries can employ gig workers and pledged to enact a similar federal police.
Since so, both Biden and Harris accept said they dorsum that country law and oppose a proposition that would carve out an exemption for app-based drivers. Though Biden has non said whether he supports a similar policy at the federal level, his campaign website stresses that his assistants would prioritize the regulation and prosecution of "employers intentionally misclassifying their employees as independent contractors."
What California is doing:
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation in 2019 requiring many businesses to reclassify independent contractors every bit employees. The law is projected to bear on ane million workers, including janitors, manicurists and gig workers. It also gives the country and large cities new authority to become after companies that don't comply. Throughout the fence over the neb, organized labor lobbied hard for it to laissez passer, while businesses fought to exempt their industries from the new requirements. Some industries won exemptions, but many did not. In his signing statement, Newsom expressed hope of finding a compromise.
How's it going here?
The new law was being challenged from all sides even before it went into effect Jan. 1.
Trucking companies won a reprieve from the law while their courtroom challenge to it proceeds, simply freelance journalists did not. In the months since, the Legislature has carved out more exemption for musicians and interpreters. Gig workers have filed a form-action lawsuit seeking retroactive pay, overtime and benefits.
Gig companies such as Uber and Lyft have continued to argue the state law doesn't use to them. The state disagrees and has sued. The ride-hailing companies briefly threatened to shut down operations in California altogether, but backed down after winning a reprieve from the courts.
The law has also become an electoral hot button issue. I legislator ostensibly already lost his seat considering of it and Republicans are hammering their Democratic opponents for their vote on bill. Uber, Lyft and Doordash have poured more than $110 one thousand thousand into the Proposition 22 entrada hoping to convince voters that their gig workers should retain flexibility as freelancers.
In short: it's messy.
Source: https://calmatters.org/explainers/democratic-presidential-candidates-to-make-us-like-california/
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