GARDEN GROVE, CA — Orange County Supervisor Janet Nguyen today announced that she will be a candidate for State Senate in the new 34th district and that she had already secured the support of the Senate’s Republican leaders, including Senate Minority leader Bob Huff and Senate Republican Caucus Chairman Ted Gaines. Nguyen currently represents 60% of the 34th district as a County Supervisor.
“The people of our area work hard to build a better life for themselves and their children,” said Nguyen. “They care about our schools, the local economy and the safety of their neighborhoods. They want and deserve results and care little about the partisan debate in Sacramento.”
Nguyen said that her priorities for the district are to make sure local schools are fully funded, give tax and regulatory relief to small businesses, increase public safety and make sure that seniors maintain access to quality health care. She says the state legislature needs to reduce waste, control spending and concentrate on growing the economy and bringing jobs back to the state.
“Janet Nguyen is a public servant who works tirelessly for the people of her district. She will be a great addition to the State Senate and I am pleased to endorse her,” said Senate Minority Leader Bob Huff.
“Last year, California voters chose to raise taxes. Now we need more responsible representatives in Sacramento who will use those new funds wisely, balance the state budget and not keep coming back to hard working Californians looking for more,” said Nguyen.
State Senator Mimi Walters called Nguyen the ideal candidate for the 34th district. “Janet knows what it takes to run and win tough campaigns because she has done it time and time again. She is a tenacious campaigner and a dedicated public servant,” said Walters.
The 34th district contains the heart of Orange County and all of the area known as Little Saigon. Over 90% of the registered voters in the district live in Orange County, with the remainder in Long Beach.
Janet Nguyen was elected to the Orange County Board of Supervisors in February, 2007.
In doing so, she became the first Asian-American and the first Vietnamese-American to serve on the Board of Supervisors, and the youngest Supervisor ever to be elected in Orange County. In 2008, Nguyen was honored by Latino OC 100 for her contributions to the Latino community. Janet previously served on the Garden Grove City Council and as Vice President of Government and Public Affairs for the Long Beach Area Chamber of Commerce. Janet, her husband and children live in Garden Grove.
During her tenure as a County Supervisor, the County has maintained a balanced budget every year while also being able to set aside money into the reserve. The County of Orange restructured its Retirement Medical and Pensions Programs, resulting in savings of $992 million to the County’s unfunded liability.
As part of an effort to reclaim local neighborhoods from the control of gangs, Janet joined the Orange County District Attorney’s Office and local law enforcement agencies to obtain a permanent gang injunction against local criminal street gangs.
http://www.janetforsupervisor.com/
Jeremy Yamaguchi, 23, is said to be California's youngest mayor. He governs in Placentia. He is joined by fellow Mayor Ling Ling Chang, of Diamond Bar. Both are Republicans. Credit Dave Colby
The President’s proposal to raise the minimum wage is as politically clever as it is economically meaningless. The proposal is pointless in practical terms since it can’t become law and wouldn’t help the economy if it did. It is only significant because of what it says about President Obama.
The President is clearly learning how to use Republican dysfunction to his advantage. This gambit invites Republicans to put their most serious weaknesses on display. So far we are giving him what he hoped for and more.
Any Republican response ought to begin by acknowledging the merits of the minimum wage. While it’s true that a wage floor eliminates some jobs, that’s what it is meant to accomplish. In extreme circumstances, people can find themselves without negotiating leverage in the wage market. A wage floor, along with the rest of the social safety net, legislates out of existence certain jobs which are inherently exploitative.
Along the way it incentivizes technological development, supporting careers in fields like computers and robotics which might not exist if the poorest in society could be starved into submission. Eliminating the wage floor entirely would do more than make the poor poorer. It would pull some of the momentum out of higher-paid industries, sucking wages downward for everyone.
While a minimum wage serves a purpose, it needs to be handled with care. An increase in the minimum wage moves the range of available careers higher up the value scale. However, if we shift it too far then lower-skill workers begin to suffer, seeing the opportunities to launch careers fade.
For example, if the minimum wage were hiked to $20/hour, then the window of available careers will no longer include, as an example, the McDonalds restaurant. McDonalds might still provide drive-through service, but they could not afford to pay humans to do the work. Such a high minimum wage might make fast-food automation economically viable eliminating millions of entry-level jobs.
Perhaps your Big Mac would be cooked and served by a mostly-automated restaurant. Your meal would cost a bit more and you might be less likely to get ‘screwed at the drive-through,’ but such a high wage floor could eliminate the entire concept of student employment and make unskilled work almost entirely redundant.
It makes sense to hike the minimum wage significantly if the mass availability of desperate workers is causing technology investment to lag. However, that is the opposite of what we are experiencing. Rapidly accelerating technical advances have created a long-term paradigm shift away from manual labor.
This has spawned twin problems, a frustrating talent drought in knowledge careers (unemployment for IT professionals is around 3%) and vast structural unemployment in less skilled jobs. Raising the minimum wage by a meaningful margin would exacerbate both problems at the same time.
The modest increase Obama is proposing is probably too small to have any effect at all beyond its political value. According the Labor Department, in 2011 about 2% of American workers earned at or below the minimum wage. Most of them were under 25 and white. A tiny minority (3%) of hourly workers over 25 earn at or below the minimum wage. The wage floor does little more than d
etermine how many summer jobs the economy will support. That’s why there is little difference in the unemployment rates between states with a higher minimum wage and those that stick with the Federal rate. Our economy has developed to the point that the minimum wage is largely irrelevant.
The wage floor has no relationship to the most serious problem affecting low earners – our systemic failure to prepare workers to meet the exploding demand for technical fields. It takes years to prepare workers for knowledge careers. Those jobs are going unfilled and businesses are doing their best to adapt to the labor drought. All told, Obama’s proposal would probably eliminate a few thousand student jobs while doing nothing about our core problems. Democrats are once again using the working poor as a backdrop for campaign photos.
And Republicans can’t do anything about it.
This would be the perfect moment for Republicans to unveil a rational, realistic program to address the collapse in upward mobility among the working poor and minorities. We can’t do that because we don’t have one. We cannot develop sensible responses to real world issues while locked in an ideological fantasyland in which every problem is solved by cutting taxes, deporting Mexicans or humiliating pregnant teenagers. Jack Kemp is gone and no one has yet emerged with the courage or insight to continue his legacy.
So, the gambit will probably succeed. President Obama and the Democrats are positioned to score a few more political points while struggling Americans languish. For Republicans, it’s yet another opportunity missed.
About the Author: Chris Ladd is a Texan who is now living in the Chicago area. He is the founder of Building a Better GOP and has served for several years as a Republican Precinct Committeeman in DuPage County, IL, and was active in state and local Republican campaigns in Texas for many years. (Email: chrladd AT gmail DOT com)
From
BetNews:
J.C. "Buddy" Watts Sr., father of former
Republican congressman J.C. Watts, in 1999 said, "A Black man voting for the Republicans makes about as
much sense as a chicken voting for Col. Sanders." Back then, his son was the
only African-American Republican in Congress and there's still just one. It is
in part why Watts is taking steps to diversify his party by starting an
organization called Insight.
Set to launch on Feb. 27, Insight will
recruit students of color to serve in Republican offices, host professional
development and policy forums and provide networking opportunities, Politico reports. The policy forums will kick off in March
and focus on issues that affect ethnic minorities.
Watts, who runs a
consulting firm, said he was inspired to create Insight in part by his time as a
youth pastor. He hopes the group will help young people of color build the kinds
of networks that build careers.
Read more: http://www.bet.com/news/politics/2013/02/19/j-c-watts-launches-group-to-groom-minority-republicans.html
Still overlooked in the immigration discussion are Asian Americans, who are the fastest growing demographic group in the country—and one of the most diverse. The bulk of Asian American immigrants (83 percent) come from China, the Philippines, India, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan.
At present, they’re 5.8 percent of the total population, nearly half of whom live in the West, with a large concentration on the Pacific coast. Seventy-four percent of Asian American adults were born outside of the United States, and in 2009—according to the Pew Research Center—Asian American immigration outpaced Hispanic immigration for the first time in recent history:
Read more: http://prospect.org/article/gops-big-asian-american-problem
