Tredmond@sfbg.com

The San Francisco City Planning Department is revising its housing plan, and there's a lot of indignation on the west side of town. See, the Housing Element of the city's General Plan calls for a little bit of increased density in some of the neighborhoods that have fought density for years.Read more »

tredmond@sfbg.com

Calling for painful spending cuts, it turns out, is the easy part. Calling for relatively painless tax increases requires real political courage.

— The New York Times, March 13

The Times is hardly a crazy socialist rag; it's always been the voice of the establishment, more Democrat than Republican but never even close to radical. The Gray Lady certainly can't be accused of fomenting class warfare.Read more »

tredmond@sfbg.com

The numbers in the Twitter tax-break deal just keep getting bigger. And the politics keep getting stranger.

City Editor Steven T. Jones went through hundreds of pages of city records on the Twitter negotiations; the results of his investigation are in this issue.Read more »

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tredmond@sfbg.com

I've been trying to think of a good metaphor for the public-employee pension story, a way to explain what's going on without making it so complicated that it becomes a battle of political slogans. Here's what I've come up with.Read more »

tredmond@sfbg.com

"Taxes," Warren Hellman told me last week, "are the third rail of American politics." The billionaire financier was talking about my Feb. 16 column. I complained that Hellman and a group working on reforming San Francisco's pension system were asking city employees to take more cuts — but nobody ever seems to ask the rich to take cuts.Read more »

tredmond@sfbg.com

In a heartwarming Valentine's Day blog, Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, talks about an old cartoon that ran in the 1980s showing Democrats trying to develop a centrist economic policy that cut spending on social programs. "How is this different from Republicans?" one Democrat asks. The answer: "We care about the victims of our policies."Read more »

tredmond@sfbg.com

I had fun with the state budget the other day. The Sacramento Bee has a pretty good online simulation that lets you pick programs to cut and revenues to raise to see if you can get rid of a $26.4 billion deficit, and I gave it a shot. It took me exactly seven minutes to turn the red ink into a $2.1 billion surplus. Read more »

You want a really bleak picture of the politics of California today? Check out the recent comments of Dan Schnur, GOP political consultant and director of the Jesse Unrush Institute for Politics at the University of Southern California.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Schnur discussed the disconnect between image and reality in this state: "Cut $1 billion out of Medi-Cal and most voters won't notice," he said. "Take away some cell phones and make legislators sit on a picnic bench, and they pay attention." Read more »

tredmond@sfbg.com

This is how strange things are in the world:Read more »