{"id":488774,"date":"2026-10-08T03:48:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-08T03:48:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/488774\/"},"modified":"2026-10-08T03:48:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-08T03:48:08","slug":"reform-californias-bizarre-endorsement-of-proposition-38-orange-county-register","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/488774\/","title":{"rendered":"Reform California\u2019s bizarre endorsement of Proposition 38 \u2013 Orange County Register"},"content":{"rendered":"

With ballots out and too many things on everyone\u2019s ballot, many voters will be relying on voting guides put out by newspapers, political parties, pundits, friends, and so on to use as cheat sheets. (Obviously, you should be consulting the one put together by our editorial board<\/a>, since we surveyed and interviewed hundreds of candidates and ballot measure supporters and opponents.)<\/p>\n

In right-wing circles, one of the more popular voter guides is from Reform California, the group run by San Diego Assemblyman Carl DeMaio. None of the endorsements from Reform California are ever really surprising \u2014 it\u2019s usually \u201cWhoever is a Republican and\/or most aligned with Carl DeMaio.\u201d<\/p>\n

Likewise, on state ballot measures, the DeMaio list looks a lot like the one from the Southern California News Group editorial board. Opposition to Proposition 3 and 40, because they\u2019re taxes, support for Propositions 41 and 42 because they\u2019ll block the wealth tax, opposition to two big bond measures (Propositions 1 and 37).<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the bizarre exception: Proposition 38, an $8.4 billion bond measure which the left-leaning San Francisco Chronicle described as \u201cone of the most noxious deposits on California\u2019s political dung heap in years.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis one is not a taxpayer-backed bond, it is a public-private partnership,\u201d DeMaio explained<\/a> to his followers.<\/p>\n

The problem for that assertion is that it is indeed a taxpayer-backed bond.<\/p>\n

As the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst\u2019s Office notes, \u201cThe state General Fund cost to repay the bond would be $500 million to $600 million annually for about 20 years. The annual cost would be about one-quarter of 1 percent (0.25 percent) of the state\u2019s total General Fund budget. Since the state has to pay interest on the money it borrows, the total cost of the bond would be about 10 percent more (after adjusting for inflation) than if the state paid up-front with money it already has.\u201d<\/p>\n

DeMaio counters that his group backs Prop. 38 \u201cmainly because we see the bond as different from typical government borrowing,\u201d because of a provision requiring \u201c10 percent of all proceeds from the immunotherapies developed as a result of this act go to the state to offset the costs of this act.\u201d<\/p>\n

Where have we heard this before? Oh, right, the 2004 stem cell bond<\/a> under Proposition 71, which likewise vowed to use the proceeds of the breakthrough treatments it would come up with to help pay the $3 billion bond. How did that go?<\/p>\n

In 2020, the stem cell research backers came back to top off that 2004 investment with a new $5.5 billion ballot measure. At the time, the LAO noted<\/a> that, far from the windfall of revenue supporters expected, \u201cthese inventions have provided a total of approximately $350,000 to the state.\u201d No, I\u2019m not missing any zeroes. $350,000.\u00a0 Two years later, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine received $15.6 million in royalties. Still a drop in the bucket for a combined $8.5 billion in bonds, plus interest.<\/p>\n

Prop. 38 asks voters to make that same bad bet \u2014 and in an even shadier way.<\/p>\n

While the measure calls for half the money to be handed out to researchers across the state, the other half would go toward a research institute that isn\u2019t named but narrowly defined<\/a> by the language of Prop. 38 itself down to square footage so the only place it could be is the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy. Which, surprise, happens to be backed by Proposition 38\u2019s chief backer, billionaire Gary K. Michelson.<\/p>\n

To make matters worse, as the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board notes<\/a>, the \u201cCalifornia Institute for Immunology & Immunotherapy literally has no track record of developing, funding or bringing medical research to market. It isn\u2019t even fully built.\u201d<\/p>\n

If that\u2019s Carl DeMaio\u2019s idea of a public-private partnership, then, yikes. It sounds either like a half-baked cynical money grab or boondoggle in the making.<\/p>\n

As Robert Kaplan, a senior scholar at the Stanford University School of Medicine and a distinguished research professor at UCLA, warned<\/a> in these pages recently, the promise of repayment based on potential breakthroughs is one voters should be skeptical about given the nature of the bond and the nature of biomedical research.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat warning is not pessimism,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIt reflects how biomedical research works. Drug development is long and failure-prone. An often-cited National Institutes of Health estimate found that only 1 of every 10,000 promising compounds from early-stage research becomes a new drug; at least 90% of drugs entering preclinical studies fail. Immunotherapy has produced remarkable advances, but it is not exempt from these odds.\u201d<\/p>\n

Finally, DeMaio has uncritically parroted the promise by proponents that \u201cevery drug or treatment developed with the funding must be sold in California at 20% below the national average price.\u201d Kaplan, in the official argument<\/a> against the measure, points out the obvious hole in that claim: \u201cWhile this may sound attractive, it could incentivize companies to prioritize selling these products in other states where the prices are not controlled.\u201d<\/p>\n

Taken together, it\u2019s truly bizarre that a conservative group would lend its support to such a flawed, dishonest and expensive measure. For conservative voters wanting to do the right thing and oppose wasteful spending, always read the fine print of any measure or any voter guide.<\/p>\n

Sal Rodriguez can be reached at salrodriguez@scng.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With ballots out and too many things on everyone\u2019s ballot, many voters will be relying on voting guides…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":488775,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,975,2082],"class_list":["post-488774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-opinion","tag-opinion-columnists"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=488774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488774\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/488775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=488774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=488774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=488774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}