Will California be the next Detroit? Sure seems possible. Excerpt:
California has a $16 billion deficit that no one seems to notice. Brown’s budget “assumes” that California voters will pass massive tax increases on themselves. If they do not, the 2013 deficit becomes a mind-numbing $20 billion. The budget, mandated to balance by the Calfornia Constitution, has been billions in the red for 10 straight years. How could Californians re-elect the same politicians year after year that produce budgets with multi-billion dollar deficits?
To protect the endangered Delta Smelt, a fish known better as bait, water has been diverted from the Central Valley to the Pacific Ocean. Orchards in the Central Valley have been allowed to wither and die, resulting in unemployment in the Central Valley as high as 40 percent. Imagine Californians living in what was the breadbasket of American now living on food stamps. California voters rejected Republican Carly Fiorina for U.S. Senator in 2010. She ran Hewlett Packard. Instead, they re-elected Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer ,who vowed to protect the Delta Smelt at the expense of the Central Valley.
California has 519 state agencies, like the state Blueberry Commission, that pay each of their commissioners more than $100,000 per year. State politicians, when asked to make cuts, fire teachers and fire fighters to inflict maximum pain on its citizens, while leaving these patronage commissions intact. State politicians have elevator operators in the state capital to push the buttons for them. Their solution for the overcrowding of the state’s prisons is to release inmates or transfer them to local facilities in already bankrupt cities. Yet, they are re-elected by California voters in numbers consistently higher than the old Soviet Politburo.
California’s public education system, once the envy of the world, now ranks 49th in the nation. Its business climate, according to 650 CEOs measured by Chief Executive Magazine, ranked dead last. Apple will take 3,600 new jobs to Austin, Tex. at its $280,000,000 new facility. Texas ranked first in the same survey.
Californey seems to be prone to a unique lunacy. the once-and-former Golden State has plenty to offer; beautiful scenery, gorgeous weather, generally just a salubrious place to live. But the tendency of California voters to keep putting the same lunatics back in charge of the asylum is troubling.
And the residents of that asylum will be calling on the Imperial government for help when the inevitable crash occurs.
The correct response from the Imperial City, of course, would be “you assholes made your bed – now go lie in it.” But that probably won’t happen; whoever sits in the Imperial Mansion when that day comes will probably continue to enable the asylum’s behavior by making some nebulous claim as to how the entire nation’s economy depends on propping California up, and funnel billions of taxpayer dollars to the Left Coast.
And things will just keep going on the same old way. California’s not too big to fail. The rest of the country should let it. There’s an object lesson in there for the other forty-nine states.
