Many years ago my car broke down in the Middle of the San Joaquin desert, err, I mean Valley. I had to have the car towed to a really lonely town, Avenal, one of the bleakest places I have ever visited. I thought I had landed in some dreary film noir. But I ran into three sets of people from my hometown of Jonesboro, Arkansas.
That was the story of California told in what amounted to the demographic version of an archeological artifact: California was once a Mecca for meek, a Beverley for Hillbillies from all other places. Now the meek are abandoning ship and returning whence they came as fast as possible. The state economy works about as well as my dreadful Dodge Omni, and the state government has seized up the way the Omni's transmission did on that highway to Hell. Governor Arnode is paying the state's bills with $3.3 billion in IOU's, and there seems to be no prospect of a break in the budget impasse. The state is $26 billion dollars in the red.
This hasn't happened over night. Manufacturing jobs have been leaving Hollywood land for real places like Arizona for years. Joel Kotkin, at Forbes, has a list of the parties responsible for California's disaster. In order: Governor Schwarzenegger, the public sector, the environmental lobby, the business community, and the people of California.
To flesh out a few of these, the Governor failed to lay out a program of reform when one was needed, and simply switched strategies and personalities with every defeat just like the actor he is. To be fair, he had little power to institute any real reform. But that doesn't let him off the hook. The enormously bloated public employee sector doesn't give a rat's ass what happens to the rest of the state as long as their benefits aren't cut. The environmental lobby has made doing business if California ridiculously expensive. The business sector has laid low, and the voters want all the benefits they can get without paying for any of them. The result has been that spending increased 31% from 2003 to 2007, while the population increased only 5%.
That public spending is the thing. Most of the blame has been laid at the feet of Prop. 13, which limited property tax increases back in the 1970s. Kotkin points out Prop. 13 kept a lot of people in their houses at a time when property taxes were soaring along with state revenues. I think it was a bad idea and greatly contributed to the dysfunction that afflicts the state. But it had no effect on California's current crisis. If Sacramento had had more revenue to spend, it would simply have spent more revenue. Having one of the highest tax rates in the country isn't helping now, it is driving out people and industries.
All of this would be merely curious to people west of Blythe, were it not for the fact that the President of the United States seems bent on turning America into a large scale model of California. As the economy stalls, and unemployment climbs like Kudzu in Arkansas, the President is spending trillions, and planning on spending tens of trillions more, that we don't have and have no prospect of producing. Meanwhile he wants to put a California-like environmental policy into effect, and wants a trillion dollar health care plan enacted. What no one seems to be asking (no Democrats, at least) is whether there is any realistic prospect that future economic growth can cover this kind of spending. California here we come.
Blaming Prop 13 is a cop out done by tax crazy and spend crazy libs from the day Prop 13 was passed. I worked to help get it passed.
People forget...and the lib big spenders forget intentionally...that Prop 13 protected property owners who were not on the real estate ride-to-riches wagon. IF you stayed in your house, they...the tax hungry lib spenders...could not raise your property taxes just to satisfy their avarice.
BUT, if you were in the 'buy and sell and buy up and sell up' real estate ponzi game, then the property taxes were reassessed to baseline at 1% of the selling price.
The result: long term real residents weren't forced out of their homes. The players in real estate paid the toll for their shell games.
For a few years before Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann got the ball rolling on Prop 13, it was a regular occurrence to read or watch the reports of retirees who had been in their homes for 20, or 30 or more years, being forced out of their homes because the property taxes had been raised to the point that the yearly tax bill exceeded the original buying price of the home.
I knew people who had family members who were victims of the property tax rate explosion.
The eco weenie brown shirts have pretty much succeeded in denuding the state of small manufacturing and light industrial businesses.
The libs have done their best to keep the borders open for illegal immigration. When the legal citizens of California decided to stop being ripped off for the social costs of the influx of illegals, and passed Prop 187, the libs cried "RACISTS!!!!" and declared Prop 187 unconstitutional.
IF Prop 187 had been implemented, California would not be $26 billion in the hole. The deficit would be less than half that.
Do I totally blame the libs in office? Not totally. I also blame the bozos who kept...and keep on...electing the tax and spend freaks just so that 'they' could and can get their own little small pile of 'goodies'.
I got out of there 26 years ago. It was one of the best decisions I ever made.
Posted by: Thomas Fritz | Saturday, July 25, 2009 at 01:38 AM