Brad Bollinger: Choosing higher education over prisons
David Crane, special adviser to Gov. Schwarzenegger on jobs and the economy, was particularly blunt last October when he spoke to the annual San Rafael Chamber of Commerce Forecasting the Future conference.The highly successful financial services entrepreneur said he went to the capitol full of idealism about how to build a 21st Century California economy, only to discover it was the public sector unions that really run Sacramento, not free-market economic ideas.
He called pension and benefit promises made with unions during the high-tech boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s a historic theft – his word – committed against the taxpayer.
A few months later sitting around a table of education and business leaders, a highly respected and typically optimistic North Bay community college leader was unusually downbeat.
In the wake of draconian