Bond measures, bond measures, bond measures. We're going to have bond measures
everywhere. This November will have a statewide education bond measure, will have a
statewide environmental spending bond measure, and coming to your local school district here in
the San Joaquin Valley a local bond measure. Vote no on all of them.
Here's the story from GV wire. It's written by Nancy Price. November's
ballot could be the first ever to include bond measures from each of the four
school districts that serve parts of the city of Fresno, and for some Presno
voters, a yes vote could result in a hike in their property tax rates.
Fresno Unified is having a five hundred million dollar bond measure, the biggest
ever for any school district in Fresno County, and a one hundred and seventy
five million dollar bond measure proposed for Sanger Unified School District may already have won
unanimous approval from their seven member school boards. Oh so both the five hundred
million dollar measure and the one hundred seventy five million dollar measure have unanimous approval.
Clovis Unified School Board will take up the districts proposed four hundred million dollar
bond measure at Wednesday's meeting. Actually, that meeting happened already. This article
is a little old, and they approved it, and the Central Unified School
Board could consider a one hundred nine million dollar bond measure at its July twenty
third meeting. The districts are facing an August ninth deadline to get the required
paperwork to the President County Registrar of Voters for the bond measure resolutions to be
included on the November fifth ballot. The same ballot will include Proposition two,
a statewide measure to issue ten billion dollars in bonds to build and modernize facilities
at K twelve schools and community colleges. K twelve schools would get eight point
five billion, and community colleges would get the remaining one point five billion.
The proposition was put on the ballot by state legislators. Why are local bond
measures important. State funding for school facilities typically is available on a matching basis,
which gives a leg up to school districts that can convince voters to approve
bond measures. They are financed through property taxes, and can take decades to
pay off. Yeah, they usually have about a thirty year term to pay
off. In addition to paying for new schools, bond measure money pays for
upgrades at older school's, replacement of aging HVC systems, new cafeterias and gyms,
and other school improvements. If Prop two passes, school districts with successful
local bond measures will be ready to submit applications for matching funding for their projects.
All right, so let's let's dig into all this first. I have
decided to ordain myself. It's not often that when someone is ordained a priest,
they anoint themselves, that they lay hands upon themselves, that they declare
themselves to be a priest. Not a priest in the line of Malkisa Dek
not me. I am a priest in the line of I don't know,
maybe Howard Jarvis Taxpayer Association or something like that. Even though I don't really
like carbage Howard Jarvis Taxpayer Association very much. I want to declare myself a
modern day apostle, but not an apostle against anything all that important, an
apostle against local bond measures. I don't like local bond measures. I think
they are fundamentally the way they are presented to voters is fundamentally deceptive. I
think the way they are talked about in the media is fundamentally inadequate. I
just dislike everything about them, and I think a lot of people don't actually
understand what a bond is. They hear the word, they see that it
has four letters, they see a B and O and en and A D,
an N D A D. They say the word, but I don't
think most people actually know what the definition is. So allow me to enlighten
you. A bond is a loan to a governmental municipal entity. It is
a loan that you need to pay back with interest the way that school districts
or any governmental entity. Rather, the way that a governmental entity pays back
a loan is through taxing the taxpayers most of the time, most of the
time with bond measures, we get taxed through our property taxes. And when
you have to pay back a loan, guess what, you have to pay
it back with interest. That's how most loans work in this great land of
ours. You pay back a loan with interest. So this is the part
about bond initiatives that I hate is that when they're reported on. What do
I see here? I see, oh, five hundred million dollars for Reresne
unified, four hundred million dollars for Clovis unified, one hundred and seventy five
million dollars saying or unified. What was the other one? Central unified.
It's getting Central unified. One hundred nine million dollars Central unified. Okay,
that's the money that the school district gets. They get that money right away.
But what is the burden on the taxpayer? Okay, if you're paying
back a loan, you got to pay back that loan with interest. So
if you've got a thirty year loan, and let's set it at an interest
rate of six percent, by the way, I think interest rates are more
around like eight percent nowadays. And remember we're borrowing, you know how,
Like a lot of you who are maybe thinking about either buying a new home
or something like that, none of you are thinking about refinancing your home right
now, because there's no way you're gonna get an interest rate better than whatever
interest rate was you know, at play in twenty nineteen, for example.
Okay, so Holly and I lucked out. We bought our house in twenty
nine, we have like I don't know, like a three point five percent
interest rate, which we're going to hold on to with our mortgage like grim
death. But if you were trying to buy a new home now, your
interest rate's going to be more around like eight percent, meaning you're going to
have to pay way more interest on the loan. So if you take out
a four hundred million dollar bond loan to help pay for stuff at Close Unified,
guess how much money the taxpayer is going to have to pay back over
the thirty year term of that loan, Probably over eight hundred million. The
interest is going to be more than the principle. So what we're talking about
here is not five hundred million dollars to Fresnel Unified. We're talking a billion
dollars from the voters the taxpayers of Fresnew Unified. We're not talking about four
one hundred million to Close Unified. We're talking about eight hundred million from the
taxpayers of Clothes Unified. We're not talking about one hundred and seventy five million
for Sager Unified. We're talking about three hundred and fifty million for the voters
of Singer Unified. For the property taxpayers of Saner Unified. We're not talking
about one hundred nine million dollars for Central Unified. We're talking about two hundred
and twenty million dollars from the taxpayers of Central Unified. Do you get the
point? So, at the cost to taxpayers of eight hundred for let's say
Close Unified, at the cost of taxpayers of eight hundred million dollars, we
get four hundred million dollars worth of impact. And why are they doing this?
Now? I hadn't connected the dots when I talked about this. I
talked about this in connection with Closes UNIF a couple of days ago, and
I didn't connect all the dots I have. Now I now see the dots
connected. The light bulb went off in my head yesterday. Why are all
these school districts all all of a sudden deciding, Oh, we need to
we need to, Oh we should have a bond local bond initiative. There
was a whole article about Close Unified's deliberations to have a bond measure in the
Fresno b Which is why I think I'm not going to even I'm going to
start relying less and less on the Fresno Bee. By the way, for
like getting stories about local news for show prep, Fresno Bee is only like
physically publishing like two days a week nowadays. I think it is on the
downswing. It's been on the downswing for a while. But I had a
whole story in the Fresno Bee. I was reading about Close Unified's deliberations about
whether or not to propose to try to qualify a bond measure for the voters
who live within Clovis Unified. And the whole discussion was about stuff like,
well, oh, we don't have the funding to finish you know, Clovis
South High School, and oh, we need help with building maintenance, and
no, we need help with keeping buildings up to code. And I was
on the radio ranting and saying, this doesn't make any sense. We just
passed a bond measure for Clovis Unified four years ago. How do they need
another bond measure already? This makes no sense. How does how did you
start Clovis South High School without knowing that you had the revenue to finish it.
How does ongoing building maintenance not get covered by your normal inflow revenues?
Why is the district always so reliant on these extra like special additional bond measures,
such that our property taxes are always going to be sky high. What
the article never stated was there's a two level system here. These local school
districts are all it's not a coincidence that they're all doing bond measures right now.
They're doing them right now because there's a state bond measure on the ballot.
Also, Proposition two, which you'll all be voting for or against,
hopefully against, is a state wide ten billion dollar bond measure, which again
is not just ten billion dollars for schools. It's twenty billion dollars from California
taxpayers over time to get ten billion dollars worth of benefit. It's a loan
to the state that the state will have to pay off with interest, just
adding more and more and more to our state's bond and pension debt, which
is already astronomically high. So because there's a state bond measure and therefore state
money that's going to be available, the way that local school districts get the
state money is by raising their own local bond measure money. So what Clovis
Unified is hoping to do is get you know, they can raise four hundred
million dollars. They can raise four hundred million dollars through their local bond measure,
plus then they can get an extra four hundred million dollars in matching state
funding or maybe some amount in matching state funding to go along with the four
hundred million they've raised locally. They can get some of that pig of ten
billion dollars that the state is raising through its proposition too, assuming the proposition
to pass passes. So it's not I don't believe at all. So it
just seems so disingenuous for Close Unified to pay. Oh, we really need
this funding. We really need this funding to help us finish Clovis South.
You don't want a half finished high school, do you, voters, And
they try to give you this kind of sob story stuff to sort of put
a gun to your head. They don't want the money because I'm I'm highly
suspicious that they don't actually need this money. I don't think they need this
money to finish Clovis South. I don't think they need this money to you
know, fix up ongoing building maintenance. They want money from the state and
they need to have a local bond measure in order to get it. That's
what's going on here. So I say vote no on all of it,
all of it, the whole concept of the bond measure for a state that
is already the most overtaxed state in the Union, that we're going to voluntarily
add on more taxes to ourselves, because that's what a bond is. It's
setting up more taxes. Clovis Unified. Now, I haven't dug into the
weeds with Fresnow unified, but Clovis Unified. Clovis Unified is trying to say,
well, this bond measure wouldn't increase your taxes. Blooney. What they
mean is that we're already paying in our property taxes. Okay, I live
in Clovis. You know what I'm going to do the breakdown when we return,
when we return the phony blooney way that some of these school districts are
trying to say that their new bond measures won't increase your taxes. It's deceptive.
That's next on the John Girardi Show. My wife and I have certain
popular words or phrases or expressions that we hate that we find really annoying and
tiresome. The phrase fake news was like kind of funny and fun when Donald
Trump said it the first time, but it's been beaten to death. At
a certain point in about twenty nineteen, my wife was like, if I
hear anyone call anything fake news ever again, I'm gonna lose my mind.
There are all kinds of little words and phrases like this that my wife and
I think get massively overused. And one of these phrases that gets massively overused,
especially in conservative circles, is the phrase cancel culture. I hate the
phrase cancel culture. I think it is stupid and I think it reflects a
fundamentally wrong headed view that most conservatives have about the concept. So cancel culture
refers to efforts usually undertaken by left wing people in groups to ostracize and drive
out of polite society persons or concepts that are distasteful to the modern day current
iteration of the left, even if such things were historically very widespread opinions,
historically very widespread American values or concepts, or just anything that is right of
center that maybe forty percent of the country believes in. We have seen the
concept of cancel culture lead to people getting fired from their jobs for holding mainstream
conservative positions. I think the most famous example of this was the guy who
founded Mozilla, the company that makes the Firefox search engine, got fired from
his own job when it was revealed that he had he either voted for or
gave some money to Proposition eight, which is the California state proposition that got
passed in two thousand and eight that defined marriages being between one man and one
woman, and which the courts subsequently overturned. By the way, the history
of Prop eight getting overturned and how that happened is so unfair and stupid as
to absolutely boggle the mind. But you know, that's the story for another
day. And the idea of cancel culture it gets applied to people getting fired
from their jobs, hordes of liberal activists swarming to someone's place of employment to
try to pressure the employer into firing someone for expressing a mainstream conservative opinion.
It applies to the censoring of certain concepts, mainstream American concepts. You know,
Donald Trump predicted that at some point some of these canceled culture types,
we're going to get rid of statues of George Washington. And that's precisely what's
been starting to happen that George Washington, because he owned slaves, is therefore
to be banished from our public spaces. Right now, there's a news story
about the city of Chicago that the ultra left wing mayor of Chicago is removing
a statue of George Washington from Chicago's city Hall. Now, the problem is
when conservatives complain about it, they complain about it in these neutral liberal terms.
And by liberal I don't mean like the modern day lefties, I mean
classical liberal terms. So classical liberalism the idea that everyone is free to choose
their own concept of the good, that basically we don't impose on everyone one
single knowable standard of the good. Everyone chooses the good for themselves, and
that is the freedom that people enjoy, is the freedom to choose what is
the good for themselves. And that kind of sense of classical liberalism has always
been in tension with, frankly, the Bible, the Bible, which has
a very clear account of what is the good and what is not the good,
and the American liberal tradition and the Biblical and Christian traditions have always had
this sort of tension between each other. But a lot of modern day conservatives.
They're basically trying to fight against liberal quote cancel culture by saying that the
idea of canceling people because of what they think is wrong. Shouldn't we have
you know, even though it's private businesses and the First Amendment doesn't necessarily apply
to them. Is this good for civic discourse? Is it good for people
to be fired just because of the views that the strongly held views that they
hold for things, to search out people's private lives for views they express about
blah blah blah, this isn't right, blah blah blah blah blah. And
I think they miss the point largely. The problem is not cancel culture or
the idea of canceling people, or the idea of ostracizing people from polite society.
All cultures cancel. All cultures have taboos, All cultures have some kind
of sense of morality and a sense of if someone goes outside of the bounds
of moral society, then they need to be ostracized to some extent. If
someone is so far afield from what is good and true and right, we
need to ostracize them somehow. All right, This is a conservative talk station.
It allows people to express a lot of conservative viewpoints. If I came
on this microphone and started talking about how white supremacism is totally awesome and Adolf
Hitler was a totally awesome guy and had some really good ideas about the Jews.
If I did that, I heart would rightly take me off the air.
Okay, power talk, and Squires would run into the studio and unplug
my microphone. Okay, why well, cause Nazism is bad. It's really
bad, and it's not cancel culture to say, hey, uh, Nazism
is so bad that you shouldn't be on our station anymore. Cyonora, buddy.
The problem isn't having a culture that cancels people. The problem is what
kinds of things should and shouldn't be cancelable. What is the morality animating the
culture which decides on what things are within and outside the bounds of acceptable conversation,
acceptable opinion, and what kinds of things are and what kinds of things
Not only what kinds of opinions, but what kinds of manner of expressing opinion
are bad enough that someone needs to lose their job, and what kind of
job do you have? Now this conversation has been turned because there are a
couple of accounts on Twitter that have been really focused since the assassination attempt on
Donald Trump on finding people who tweeted out obviously bad and distasteful things wishing that
the shooter had successfully assassinated Donald Trump, and these Twitter accounts, these right
wing Twitter accounts, have tried to highlight the employer of the person tweeting that
out and say, hey, this is your employee who wishes that Donald Trump
had been assassinated? Is this what you believe? Employer, and has managed
to get some of those people actually fired from their jobs. Now, some
of these people had government employment positions, Like some of the there was someone
who was a staffer for a congressman I think, who said something like that,
Yeah, if you're a staffer for a congressman, you can't go around
saying stuff like that. That's a that's a real issue for your job.
You know, you're you're aiding a position of real power and political influence,
and that's wrong. But some of the people that have been highlighted were,
you know, people who have a job at home depot And it's just this
like there's a certain kind of hardcore conservative range of opinion that says we need
to fight just as dirty as the left does. We need, you know,
if the left's going to fight this hard, conservatives need to fight hard
back. We can't fight a war against these peop We can't fight this already
ideological war against these people, you know, with one hand tied behind you
back. It's ridiculous. They're gonna cancel us. We got to try and
cancel them. We got to try and cancel them right back. And while
usually I agree with that, I think usually, especially when we're talking about,
like, okay, what tactics should Congress take, I think Republicans in
Congress the fact that no one is talking about the idea of hey, Democrats
want to abolish the filibuster to you know, pack the Supreme Court whatever.
Why aren't any Republicans talking about doing the same thing. Democrats will abolish the
filibuster to legalize nationwide legal abortion or you know, abolish the Supreme Court,
you know, or a pack the Supreme Court rather blah blah blah blah blah.
They will abolish the filibuster to do that. There's no question. They
had forty nine of their fifty one senators vote to abolish the filibuster rule just
a few years ago. They're gonna do it someday. Someday they're going to
have a majority in the Senate, and that is precisely what they're going to
do. Why aren't Republicans talking about that anyway? But when it comes to
stuff like getting people fired, have you ever been in a room with someone
who's getting fired. I have. I've had to fire a couple of people.
It sucks. It's the worst part of my job. It's the most
miserable, horrible thing. And not even firing people, just having to lay
off people because we couldn't we couldn't afford to keep paying them. It sucks.
It's terrible. It's a huge disruption in someone's life. I agree that
someone on who works at home depot making a flippant joke that's in bad taste
about President Trump's assassination. I agree that that's bad. I don't want to
get that person fired. Why how does that help our side? They were
even like people getting mad the guy who's as there's this this sort of jokey
like comedy rock band called Tenacious D. And it's Jack Black and this other
guy, Kyle Gas and and they're both also kind of comedic actors and stuff.
And they have this band that plays really funny, silly songs. And
I've loved TENACIOUSD for forever. And of course they're both very liberal guys.
Most people in Hollywood are the guitarists said during a concert, I wish that
shooter hadn't missed, And it's like they're canceling their tour, these grubbling apologies
seeing and I guess I'm just like, he's a comedian. He did a
bad joke. He said a bad joke that was very distasteful. Do I
want that? Scalp aha? I managed to ruin Tenacious D, this comedy
band that never really talks about politics other than through their music at all.
I just don't care for it. And maybe that's just the thing. I
guess, like, if every culture is going to cancel, and the question
is not whether you have a cancel culture, but the things and the conditions
under which you cancel people, I think it's okay to say the conditions under
which we should cancel people are different if people have serious positions of influence and
power in society or government. Yeah, but I don't want to fire a
home depot cashier. That's silly when we return is Biden making it to November.
I feel like we keep updating our expectations on this every day. Next
on the John Girardi Show. My wife and I have certain popular words or
phrases or expression that we hate that we find really annoying and tiresome. The
phrase fake news was like kind of funny and fun when Donald Trump said it
the first time, but it's been beaten to death. At a certain point
in about twenty nineteen, my wife was like, if I hear anyone call
anything fake news ever again, I'm gonna lose my mind. There are all
kinds of little words and phrases like this that my wife and I think get
massively overused. And one of these phrases that gets massively overused, especially in
conservative circles, is the phrase cancel culture. I hate the phrase cancel culture.
I think it is stupid, and I think it reflects a fundamentally wrong
headed view that most conservatives have about the concept. So can the soul culture
refers to efforts usually undertaken by left wing people in groups to ostracize and drive
out of polite society persons or concepts that are distasteful to the modern day current
iteration of the left, even if such things were historically very widespread opinions,
historically very widespread American values or concepts, or just anything that is right of
center that maybe forty percent of the country believes in. We have seen the
concept of cancel culture lead to people getting fired from their jobs for holding mainstream
conservative positions. I think the most famous example of this was the guy who
founded Mozilla, the company that makes the Firefox search engine, got fired from
his own job when it was revealed that he had he either voted for or
gave some money to Proposition eight, which is the California state proposition that got
passed in two thousand and eight that defined marriages being between one man and one
woman, and which the courts subsequently overturned. By the way, the history
of Prop eight getting overturned and how that happened is so unfair and stupid as
to absolutely boggle the mind. But you know, that's the story for another
day. And the idea of cancel culture it gets applied to people getting fired
from their jobs, hordes of liberal activists swarming to someone's place of employment to
try to pressure the employer into firing someone for expressing a mainstream conservative opinion.
It applies to the censoring of certain concepts, mainstream American concepts. You know.
Donald Trump predicted that at some point some of these canceled culture types were
going to get rid of statues of George Washington. And that's precisely what's been
starting to happen. That George Washington, because he owned slaves, is therefore
to be banished from our public spaces. Right now, there's a news story
about the city of Chicago that the ultra left wing mayor of Chicago is removing
a statue of George Washington from Chicago's City Hall. It was announced yes just
yesterday, President Biden has covid he canceled a bunch of campaign events, and
the news has come out that both Hakeem Jeffries, the Democrat minority leader in
the House, and Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, had come to
Jesus communications with Biden telling him he needs to drop out, and that Nancy
Pelosi, who might be the most important power broker of the mall even though
she's not any more the Speaker of the House or the Democrat minority leader,
but she is the most potent point of connection the Democrats have to their donors,
or the most key point of connection Democrats after their donors. She is
actively working to push Biden out. I wonder over the next forty eight hours,
seventy two hours, maybe through the weekend, maybe on Monday, what
is going to happen. I think Biden's been hoping to sort of delay,
delay, delay, delay until after the Democrats nominate him and just hope that
the path of least resistance is taken and that he's the path of police resistance.
But the polls are, the post shooting polls are starting to come out,
and they don't look good for Democrats. I think they're afraid of getting
wiped out in the House as well as losing the presidency. That'll do Itjohn
Girardi Show, See you next time on Power Talk