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Fortyfi Handle and the Morning Crew on Aday Wednesday.
Hey, I want to invite you to join me this Saturday.
Night at the Walt Disney Concert Hall where I amc the LA Lawyers, Philharmonic and Legal Voices. These are lawyers, judges, pair of legals who are world class musicians who wanted to make a living in the legal profession and not starve as musicians. And it is this Saturday at the Disney Concert Hall.
I am am seeing it, which I do every year.
I'm in a tuxedo. I make an ass out of myself as you can imagine, and it is just terrific music. For example, selections from Phantom of the Opera and then a couple of classical pieces like Carmina Burana. Anyway, please join me. You can get tickets, and tickets are inexpensive. They go from twenty dollars on and this is a benefit.
So go to LA lawyersphil dot org. That's LA Lawyers phil as.
In Philharmonic La lawyersphil dot org and love to have you join me. All right, let's start with what happens here in California.
Money wise.
Gavin Newsom, who is going to run for president, is an interesting guy.
He is a devout liberal, but at the same.
Time he's turning out to be a physical fiscal conservative in a bunch of ways. So the Democrats and Newsom announce a new budget three hundred and twenty one billion dollar budget deal. Budget has to be in place by July first, that's the law. We have to have a balanced budget by July one and in the constant that's the constitution. So how do you make it happen with a deficit of twelve billion dollars?
Well, you play games, is what you do.
You borrow money, you move money around, you do accounting, You put programs together and then take them away. Democrats in this state, there is a philosophy. Look up Will Rogers if you don't know who Will Rogers is. By the way, it's worth it. He Owes a great commentator, by the way, out of KFI is when he did his commentating, and he was a man that was beloved
by virtually everybody in this country. He was a radio commentator and he also had a column, etc. And when he died on his tombstone it was written, I never met a man I didn't like. Very famous, every Democrat who has ever served in the Assembly or the Senate on their tombstone will be I never met a tax or a social program I didn't like because our state legislature, which the Dems have a super majority, is basically nuts.
What happens is programs are placed.
Into law, put into law, and start, and when there's money, there are new programs that are put into place, or existing programs are expanded, like for example, medical care for undocumented immigrants that we now have including dental.
I mean, just it's crazy. No other state does that.
So they've come to an agreement that is the legislature newsome and we're going to have a budget, and one of the principal aspects of the budget is housing reform. Interestingly enough, everybody's on the same side of housing reform, yet you've got the Dems in the state that will not, for example, limit environmental controls, what stops development.
Regulations.
And by the way, I have built before I grew up in the construction business, I've known a whole lot of people. I've built a house and remodeled a bunch of houses, and the requirements are completely crazy. Department building in safety. Getting permits is nuts.
Why.
One of the reasons is environmental protection. Let me give you an example. The California Coastal Commission, which runs several miles inland from the coast, controls all that property and you have to if you're building, you have to comply. And they are crazy, okay, they have to say no to everything.
It takes weeks and weeks.
Then you have local for example in Calabasas, if someone is building in the West Valley, they have their own regulations, and then you have the County of Los Angeles, which has its regulations.
Then you have the state of California.
Which has its regulations, and some of them contradict each other, some of them because, for example, it's not a contradiction if you've got a state minimum requirement some environmental issue where you have to limit your building, and county is more strict, the county controls, and if the city is stricter yet, then the city one controls. Effectively, you can't build. It is impossible to build. It is just they make it so difficult. And one of them is the environmental control.
So we get lip service from the Democratic legislature. Lots and lots of lip service. But in the end, oh my god, you can't screw around with the environment. You can't screw around with the protections. I mean, we've got to protect our land, especially the land under your house. So the California Constitution demands a balanced budget by July one, So there's only a week to go, and the scramble still is going on.
Maybe a deal is in.
Place, the governor being conservative relative to the Democratic legislature, the Senate and the Assembly, Republicans having virtually no say because it's a super majority among the republic among the.
Democrats.
So, as I explained earlier in the last segment, we are looking at a twelve billion dollar budget deficit, and we're looking at a California legislature that doesn't.
Want to get anything up.
It just is willing to, I don't know, kick the can down the road.
How do you make a budget work?
Well, you borrow money, an issue a bond, No, that's off the table as something else.
You move money around, You do what you can.
And this deal that is cutting into place relies mainly unborrowed money and going into state reserves and shifting funding around. So it becomes an accounting issue, and the budget continues the practice of state programs and it spares the state programs because that's what the Democratic legislature wants.
And what it does is.
It stops us from immediate pain. This budget is going to work and long term budget will just keep on keeping ongoing. Republican Leader James Gallagher of the Assembly says, we're in this situation because of overspending.
It's that simple.
We've made long term commitments that the Democrats have wanted and now, just like everybody warned, the money's not there and they don't want to cut back on the programs. The day expanded. And here's what happens when there is a surplus. And some years there is a surplus when the economy is good and California is their revenues. California's revenues is based on income tax, and the wealthy pay the income tax like eighty percent.
People in the top twenty percent pay well.
When the economy goes south, you know, you don't make as much money. Now, rich people don't make as much money as they did the year before.
When the economy is good, which means the revenues to the state dropped.
Dramatically, and what Democratic legislators do when there's money.
Oh boy, let's start a program.
Let's expand a program, much like expanding medical to include all illegal immigrants, including dental, and the state legislature or is still going for it. Newsoma says, we can. We have to stop that. I mean, we're done with that.
We now have to restrict. Now, the governor still wants to provide seven hundred and fifty million dollars to expand the film and television tax credit, which so, how can you expand How can you spend money on that and cut these programs Because when you spend money on the film and television tax credit, it's money coming in. It provides income to the state. It provides jobs. Believe me,
medical does not provide jobs. It's expenditure. And the issue is medical should be there, but do you also offer it for illegal migrants? And the big change is medical cost overruns, major problems, higher than expected price tags for expansion that the healthcare system put into place.
Newsom's budget budget trims a lot.
Of that for people who are undocumented, and of course the liberal Democratic legislature.
Saying, oh no, not at all.
Well, he wants to include freezing new enrollment as of January first, requiring all adults, including illegal migrants, to pay one hundred dollars a month for premiums, eliminating long term care benefits long term care you don't have long term care, but illegal migrants do, and cutting full dental coverage. So here's what the lawmakers ultimately agreed on, which is kicking in. Undocumented immigrant adults ages nineteen to fifty nine are to pay thirty dollars monthly premiums beginning in.
July of twenty twenty seven. Thirty bucks a month. That's what they're going to pay now.
The argument is that there are migrant families that are so poor that thirty dollars actually mean something. But at at the same time, I mean, how much does the state pay? Well, California is the great state to come here. I don't know how many homeless people are in upstate New York. In Buffalo, for example, in the middle of winter, when it's forty degrees below zero, I'm assuming there are plenty of shelter beds. But I can guarantee you New York, well,
New York State isn't a bad place. It's not California in terms of benefits, but it's better than Alabama, Mississippi.
Those are not good places to be homeless.
So expanding housing by cutting down environmental controls, which we love, and bringing down social programs because when there's money, the legislature goes crazy. And the problem is those become permanent programs and when there is no money, they're still in place. Welcome to California, all right now, talking about Iron's nuclear program, you know where it all started. The United States started
their program. Now a little of handle history here. There was a speech the President Dwight Eisenhower delivered nineteen fifty three in which he talked about Adams for Peace and he warned of the dangers of a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union.
That's it, nothing more, nothing less.
And at that time the nuclear bomb was only held by the United States, Russia, which we were enemies, and then France and.
Great Britain, who were allies, of course.
And what ended up happening was that the United States actually sent Tehran sent Iran a full nuclear reactor, and it's in Tehran's northern suburbs. It's a small nuclear reactor. It's used for only peaceful purposes. It was not the target of the Israeli or the US campaign. And it's a research reactor and its real significance is really symbolic.
It doesn't do much.
It was shipped to Iran by the US in the nineteen sixties part of the Atoms for Peace program that Dwight Eisenhower established, sharing nuclear technology with our allies, which Iran was at that time, and that was to modernize their economies that's in quotes, and have them move closer to Washington in a world divided by the Cold War. Now, the reactor does not contribute to the enrichment program of Iran. The processing of uranium it runs on nuclear fuel far
far too weak to power a bomb. Now. A couple of statistics here. In order for a bomb to be successfully manufactured, uranium has to be purified to ninety percent. And you do that with centrifuges, centrifuge centrifuges, and that uran has thirty thousand of these. Because it's incremental, it's tiny little processes to make it.
A little purer, a little purer, a little puer.
Right now, Iran has brought it up to about sixty percent and it's a pretty short run to ninety percent. Get how much a peaceful nuclear reactor uses in terms of uranium with the processing, how much purity. It's two to three percent.
That's it.
So what ended up happening is when that nuclear reactor was shipped to Iran, it quickly became an object of national pride, first of all as an engine of economic growth. See, we're going to grow with nuclear power, because that was the end all be all in those days. And then later on and this is where it went south for the US, and that was as the potential source of
ultimate military power read the atomic bomb. Robert Einhorn, who was a former Arms Control official who worked on US negotiations with Iran, said, we gave.
Iran its starter kick. He delivered.
Eisenhower delivered that speech in December of nineteen fifty three, and he actually warned of the dangers of a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union and vowed to leave the world to lead the world out of this dark chamber of horrors in the night.
And here's what he explained.
The world should better understand the destructive technology and understanding how dangerous nuclear arms are. Because you're looking at the destruction of the Earth. I mean we have at one point we had thirty thousand nukes. Russia had twenty five thousand nukes. Can you imagine where one good sized nuke blows up a city. So Eisenhower said that the secrets of nuclear power, low grade uranium to power power to power plants produce electricity.
That should be shared.
It's not enough just to take this weapon out of the hands of soldiers. Because as soon as the atomic bomb was developed in the United States and it was set off in Hiroshima in Nagasaki under the civilians actually created it. Immediately the civilians were fired and it went under military control. And what he's saying is what Eisenhower said, it has to be put in the hands of people who know how to strip the military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace. We have to use
nuclear power for peace. Therefore, we sent a reactor to Iran that started all of this. Now it was back in the fifties, actually was in the sixties when it happened, and this had to do with Eisenhower. President Eisenhower with the program Adams for Peace, Adams being atoms and a
different world. Because the Cold War, we were in the middle of the Cold War, and we wanted the Western world not to have weapons, but to be self sustaining and take our technology and create a better economy and join the modern world with nuclear power, not nuclear weapons. And so Eisenhower explained, the world should better understrand the understand the destructive technology, but the secrets should be shared
and put to constructive use. And boy, you think he was a little pie in the sky, And why did he do it well? To gain influence over important pieces of the Cold War Chess Boar, which incidentally included Israel, Pakistan and Iran given nuclear information and training and equipment, all for peaceful purposes, right, science, medicine, energy. So that reactor that was actually given to Iran in sixty seven very different from the reactors today, that's for sure. And
at that time we gave it to the Shaw. The Shaw was a very westward leaning monarch, is what he was put into place in a nineteen fifty three coups backed by the CIA, and Iran to this day is a little bit upset about how their government, their elected government was tossed out because it wasn't pro west enough and the Shaw, Pavlavi modernized the nation world power with
American backing. And he was a liberal secularism, western education, repressed political opposition which turned the United States against him, or really cared no women's veil modern art. Actually, Andy Warhol once painted his portrait literacy infrastructure, and he budgeted billions of dollars for the Iranian nuclear program. And what he did is switch the premise of this is for peaceful purposes into all of a sudden it was a program where Iran was going to become a nuclear force onto itself.
And that is what changed everything.
And of course nineteen seventy nine the revolution took place in Iran. At first, they really didn't care about the nukes. The Humani at that point was just not ignoring it. He was establishing the country and changing into a religious theocracy.
And then quickly realized.
You know what, this is good, especially after the eight year war with a Rock in the eighties, and so they went into nuclear power and ever since, well you know what it is now.
So what's the takeaway here? As you look at Iran.
Processing uranium and making it as quickly as it can into did bomb grade material. It was all started by the US.
We didn't know.
Different time, different place, KFI AM sixty.
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