EDITORIAL
I poked it with a stick. It didn’t move. I poked it again. Still nothing. I beat the snot out of it with that stick and it still didn’t budge. Satisfied, I grabbed it by it’s cold stiff tail and dropped it in the burlap sack, adding a couple of heavy rocks for good measure. I may have looked suspicious walking across the Golden Gate Bridge with it in hand, but hey, who cares? Can you think of a better place to dump such a nasty, festering sack of job killing legislative excrement?
What started out as a well-meaning but short sighted bill drafted by a freshman assemblyperson intended to give a broad swath of California auto and home borrowers a, “no questions asked”, two-and-a-half-year hall pass on paying their first and second biggest monthly expenses, has come to an end. AB 2501 was the little train that couldn’t. Coming as close as two votes from passing in Assembly, it died in the light of day, like all things dark and malevolent should.
AB 2501, monikered with the aesthetically pleasing title “The COVID-19: homeowner, tenant, and consumer relief Law of 2020”, wasn’t the first of its kind, in fact, it was almost a carbon copy of federal bills S. 3565 and HR 6379, both introduced in late March of this year. While neither of its predecessors had a chance of passage in the more balanced legislative federal environment, the oxygen rarified chambers of the Democratic party’s super-super majority in California provided these credit and job killing ideals their best chances of passage.
California, with a population of 40M, is the largest economy in the nation and also the fifth largest economy in the world. California is not unique in it’s political imbalance, nor in it’s perhaps over-zealous consumer biased views of lending. What happens in California, could happen elsewhere under similar conditions. While we dodged a bullet and the battle is won, the war may not be over.
I’ve always been a horror movie fan. Being an aficionado of the genre, I know that monsters have a tendency of rising from the grave. As such, we may see a sequel to this unoriginal premise and need to remain vigilant to future legislation of its sort. There is suspicion that we may see this bill rise from the grave with a new sponsor reintroducing it in the state senate in mid-July. If the event occurs, we will at least be more prepared than we were the first time and, the more the state’s economy opens up, the less attractive this bill may appear.
While we may need meet in battle against this foe again, let us, for now, enjoy our victory for a few and try to get back to normal. Or, the new normal, or whatever.
In closing, because there are too many people to thank, I’d like to just make this a great big shout out to everyone that helped defeat this “Job Killer.”
Thank you!
Kevin Armstrong
Publisher
CUCollector.com
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