San Francisco Chronicle

The Statement: McCain said Obama will increase government spending by over $860 billion.

The Distortion: The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget called McCain's claim "a misleading figure taken out of context." By 2013, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates Obama's policies would add $286 billion to that year's deficit, while McCain's policies would add $211 billion. LINK

The California Constitution is now more than five times as long as the U.S. Constitution. After a century of amendments and initiatives, it runs more than 150 pages.

California's government is so dysfunctional that the Bay Area Council, a business-backed public policy group, and other good-government types want to call a convention to draw up a new constitution. Good luck! Reforming such a monster is likely to spark resistance from Californians who worry they might lose some of the document's many, many protections, such as tax regulations for… more

"The cost of doing nothing just got higher if more and more people are losing their jobs," said Len Nichols, health economist with the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan policy group in Washington, D.C., that supports covering all Americans. "People really want security, and part of economic security is having your health care." LINK

Learning English is an essential skill for immigrants and their children, both for their personal success and for the good of the nation, said Tomás Jiménez, an Irvine Fellow at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy think tank.

"To borrow a non-English phrase, English is the lingua franca of the United States," said Jiménez, who also teaches sociology at Stanford University. "There are folks on the right who want people to speak only English, and there are folks on the left who think it's unimportant.… more

..."I had such a frustrating meeting the other day on the Hill, where one staffer said, 'We don't have a problem until Wall Street tells us we have a problem,' " said Maya MacGuineas, head of fiscal policy at the nonpartisan New America Foundation. "By the time the financial markets tell us we've gone too far, it will be too late to fix this in any rational way. We are the toad in boiling water, where it's getting hotter and hotter and nobody's really noticing..."… more

...Len Nichols is the director of the Health Policy Program for the New America Foundation, which aims to expand health care coverage to all Americans. He said San Francisco's efforts are so revolutionary that the city shouldn't be knocked for taking longer to enroll everyone... LINK

Once a land of savers, America is now the home of the thriftless. Americans' personal saving rate, in steady decline over the last quarter of century, finally plunged into negative territory this year. No surprise there. In modern America the struggle between debt and saving is a rigged contest. It's never been easier to borrow -- credit cards, subprime home mortgages, home equity loans, payday loans. But when it comes to saving, about half of American workers, including more than… more

"People value the idea of a period beyond their work life," said Yale University political scientist Jacob Hacker, who has studied U.S. pension and health care policies. "Retirement was the victory of the affluent society over the need to be a cog in the machine your whole working life..." LINK

A bill in the state Assembly would require the California Public Employees' Retirement System, the mammoth pension fund for government workers, to offer individual retirement accounts for private-sector employees. The goal of the bill, AB2940, is to increase retirement savings among the vast number of people who have no plan at work and don't have the will or skill to open an IRA on their own.

Although several other states have considered letting their public-sector pension funds run private-sector accounts, no state… more

California has a massive dropout problem: An estimated 25 percent of students fail to complete high school, ultimately costing the state billions in lost income tax revenue, crime costs and public assistance.

Last month, a study from UC Santa Barbara suggested that the dropout problem might be more concentrated than previously thought: It found that just 20 percent of schools account for 80 percent of dropouts, and that many of them are "alternative" schools that are meant to help students who… more