CALIFORNIA HAS BEEN STRANGLED TO DEATH BY THE LEFT

What a sad and sordid tale! The accompanying article speaks to the reality of the late great Golden State, long under the control of far left ideologues. The record speaks for itself. Clearly and unambiguously!

As the article points out, Californians have been passing judgment on the health and future of America's largest state with their feet and moving vans over the past several years. A state that perpetually attracted an ever growing population has been and continues to hemorrhage families and businesses each and every day.

California is quite probably the most mismanaged state in history. The left long ago seized control of virtually all the public governing entities from the state to the local levels and everywhere in between. Cities, counties and the state itself find themselves fiscally upside down or very near to it. Most amazingly, all of that has occurred or is occurring in spite of the highest state income tax and the highest gasoline tax in the nation along with close to the highest sales tax rate in America. Not to mention the ever more onerous "fee" structure for everything government controls, or to tell it like it is, taxes on everything in sight that are barely camouflaged as said "fees".

Thus residents head for the exits in ever increasing numbers. Most large corporations moved their headquarters out of state some time ago in response to the obvious trend. Over time, California has become increasingly unfriendly to business big and small via unprecedented tax and regulatory regimes. The left has yet to understand that in their desire to bleed corporations and companies dry of their profits in order to fund doctrine driven giveaways, they have driven those cash cows away and lost the requisite revenue. Pinheads.

Taxpaying families leave for more affordable environs as well. As welfare roles increase and the government schools continue to decline, parents seek out places to live that give their kids a better living environment and a more promising future. People cannot afford to be taxed into poverty on the one hand only to have their children dumbed down by the government schools on the other. The left has been in full control of the California public schools for decades and in that process, the schools have gone from the penthouse to the outhouse. The Golden State used to have the top K-12 system in the country. Now those same schools rank 49th out of 50. Nice.

As the producers, employers and taxpayers stream out of the state, the future grows ever dimmer. Government is the only consistent growth sector and government produces nothing. Bureaucracy continues to explode, regulations skyrocket, taxes increase and the end result is an ever shrinking productive population base.

What continues on the increase is the population of illegals as well as a growth in welfare recipients. The ongoing increase in government welfare spending and taxes to support same coupled with the ongoing decrease in the tax paying base is a formula for disaster. California is well down that road and is showing exactly zero signs of changing direction.

The State legislature is in full collapse. They are pushing forward a special election later this month in an attempt to get voters to empty their bank accounts and send all their money to the state treasury via a series of phony and manipulative ballot propositions. It isn't going to work, leaving the state in the same mess it was in just a few short months ago. The political class has no answers, only the path of doctrinal politics to follow. Like sheep going over a ledge, they continue to do the same things over repeatedly, expecting different results every time. All the while, the ship of state continues to slowly sink.

The anti-military left has even managed to drive out our Armed Services from many a location, particularly in and around the San Francisco Bay Area. The consistent message to the American military is 'you are not welcome here in the people's republic of the left coast'. So the Pentagon has taken it's massive budget and decided to spend it elsewhere, where the locals are far more appreciative. In other words, more revenue and employment opportunities gone to other states. Proving once again that leftists cannot understand the relationship between actions and outcomes.

The coup de grace is the fact that other state governments openly advertise in California in an effort to attract business and families to their more enticing confines. In lots of instances, it is working. Another result of far left doctrine in action.

In sum, the future of what once was and is no longer the world's six largest economy appears to be made up of, for the most part, the oh-so-promising combination of public employees and welfare recipients. Some businesses will stay to serve that audience but most free market taxpayers and employers will continue to exit the stage. In a way, the outcome will be ironic. No two constituencies deserve each other more than public employees and the people they oversee.

The unionized bureaucrats and public service crowd will be the ones who will pay the lion's share of the taxes which in turn will go to support the people who pay no taxes.

How fitting an end to what once was considered paradise on earth.


Californians Must Take Their State Back
By GEORGE F. WILL

California's increasingly severe and largely self-inflicted economic crisis will deepen on May 19 if, as is probable and desirable, voters reject most of the ballot measures that were drafted as part of a "solution" to the state's budget deficit. They would make matters worse.
National economic revival is being impeded because one-eighth of the nation's population lives in a state that is driving itself into permanent stagnation.
California's perennial boast —that it's the incubator of America's future—now has an increasingly dark urgency.
Under Arnold Schwarzenegger, the best governor the states contiguous to California have ever had, people and businesses have been relocating in those states.
For four straight years, more Americans have moved out of California than have moved in. California's business costs are more than 20% higher than the average state's. In the last decade, net out-migration of Americans has been 1.4 million.
California is exporting talent while importing Mexico's poverty. The latter is not California's fault; the former is.
If, since 1990, state spending increases had been held to the inflation rate plus population growth, the state would have a $15 billion surplus instead of a $42 billion budget deficit, which is larger than the budgets of all but 10 states. Since 1990, the number of state employees has increased over a third. In Schwarzenegger's six years as governor, per capita government spending, adjusted for inflation, has increased nearly 20%.
Liberal orthodoxy has made the state dependent on a volatile source of revenues — high income tax rates on the wealthy. In 2006, the top 1% of earners paid 48% of the income taxes. California's income and sales taxes are among the nation's highest, its business conditions among the worst, as measured by 16 variables directly influenced by the Legislature. Unemployment, the nation's fourth highest, is 11.2%.
Required by law to balance the budget, the Legislature has "solved" the problem by, among other things, increasing income, sales, gas and vehicle taxes. This, although one rationale for the federal government's gargantuan "stimulus" was to spare states the need to raise taxes that, in California, will more than vitiate the stimulus.
Proposition 1A would create a complicated — hence probably porous — spending cap, and a rainy day fund. Realists, however, do not trust the Legislature to obey the law, which may be why some public employees unions cynically support 1A. Another May 19 proposition, opaquely titled the "Lottery Modernization Act," would authorize borrowing $5 billion from future hypothetical lottery receipts. The title is a measure of the political class' meretriciousness.
If voters pass 1A's hypothetical restraint on government spending, their reward will be two extra years (another $16 billion) of actual income, sales and vehicle tax increases.
The increases were supposed to be for just two years. Voters are being warned that if they reject the propositions, there might have to be $14 billion in spending cuts. (Note the $15 billion number four paragraphs above.) Even teachers might be laid off. California teachers — the nation's highest paid, with salaries 25% above the U.S. average — are emblematic of the grip government employee unions have on the state, where 57% of government workers are unionized (the national average is 37%).
Flinching from serious budget cutting, and from confronting public employee unions, some Californians focus on process questions. They devise candidate-selection rules designed to diminish the role of parties, thereby supposedly making more likely the election of "moderates" amenable to even more tax increases.
But what actually ails California is centrist evasions. The state's crisis has been caused by "moderation," understood as splitting the difference between extreme liberalism and hyperliberalism, a "reasonableness" that merely moderates the speed at which the expanding public sector suffocates the private sector.
California has become liberalism's laboratory, in which the case for fiscal conservatism is being confirmed. The state is a slow learner and hence will remain a drag on the nation's economy. But it will be a net benefit to the nation if the federal government and other state governments profit from California's negative example, which Californians can make more vividly instructive by voting down the propositions on May 19.
Remember the story of the mule that paid attention only after being walloped by a two-by-four? The Democratic-controlled state Legislature is like that.
Fortunately, it has handed voters some two-by-fours — the initiatives. Rejections of them should get Sacramento's attention.

© 2008 Washington Post Writers Group

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