As California Goes (Broke), So Goes the Nation…
Digg 
Stumble Upon 
Newsvine 
Slashdot 
Mixx 
Diigo 
Delicious 
Reddit 
Facebook
PALM SPRINGS, Calif. — In just a few weeks time, California hits the wall.
And Americans should take a good, long look at the fiscal and social wreck of the Golden Land, because California is at a place to which all of America is heading.
In May, when five fund-raising proposals were put on the ballot, Gov. Schwarzenegger pleaded with the overtaxed Californians not to make their state “the poster child for dysfunction.”
As The Economist writes, “On May 18th, they did exactly that.”
Arnold went to the White House for U.S. loan guarantees for new state bonds. But with the president’s approval rating wilting because of a belief he is spending too much, the Obama-ites slammed the door.
In Sacramento, a Republican blocking force is resisting any new tax revenue. And with the state under a constitutional mandate to balance its budget, yet facing a $24 billion deficit this July, a chainsaw is about to be taken to state government.
Some 38,000 of 168,000 state prisoners may be released. As Barack Obama is pushing universal health insurance, California will cut Medi-Cal for the poor. Education will be slashed, resulting in a shortened school year, thousands of laid-off teachers, school closings and an end to summer programs in a system that has plummeted from the nation’s best to one of its worst, as measured by dropout rates and academic achievement.
The 10 campuses of the University of California face cuts that may result in 50,000 fewer students and 5,000 fewer teachers.
What makes her fiscal crisis relevant to us all is not only that California is our most populous state, with one in eight Americans living there, but California has a gross domestic product larger than Canada’s.
Moreover, the demography of California today is the demography of America tomorrow, just as the social and fiscal policies of California in the last decade mirror those of the U.S. government today.
One-third of all U.S. wage-earners today have been amnestied from paying U.S. income taxes, as the top 1 percent haul fully 40 percent of that huge load. So, too, in California, the well-to-do and the wealthy are hammered, which is why many have quietly closed their businesses, packed and gone back over the mountains whence their fathers came.
Under George W. Bush and Obama, the U.S. government has undertaken huge new responsibilities: No Child Left Behind, Medicare prescription drug benefits, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the takeovers of banks and auto companies, bailouts without end and national health insurance.
California, too, spent lavishly in the fat years and issued bonds when state revenues did not cover the costs, bringing its once-sterling credit rating down to the nation’s lowest. So, too, U.S. Treasury bonds, T-bills and the American dollar are now increasingly suspect.
Demographically, California is where America will be in 2040.
White folks, who are leaving California as they did in the millions in the 1990s, are below half the population. Hispanics, their numbers surging due to legal and illegal immigration, are well over a third of the population. The African-American share of California’s population is also falling, as the Asian share is rising, again from immigration.
Los Angeles, which is what most large American cities will look like, is the most diverse city on earth. Has diversity been a strength?
In the prisons and jails, and among the scores of thousands in street gangs and the underclass, a black-brown civil war is underway.
In October 2006, the Financial Times reported the findings of the famed author of “Bowling Alone” on what diversity has wrought:
“A bleak picture of the corrosive effects of ethnic diversity has been revealed in research by Harvard University’s Robert Putnam, one of the world’s most influential political scientists. His research shows that the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone — from their next-door neighbor to the mayor.”
“In the presence of diversity, we hunker down,” said Putnam. “We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it’s not just that we don’t trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don’t trust people who do look like us.”
“Professor Putnam,” said the Financial Times, “found trust was lowest in Los Angeles, ‘the most diverse human habitation in human history.’”
Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan carried California nine times. But the state is now a fiefdom of liberalism. John McCain’s share of the vote was smaller than Barry Goldwater’s. California today believes in Big Government, open borders, diversity, multiculturalism and the politics of compassion. But what liberalism has wrought in California, its native-born are fleeing.
Still, where California is at, America is headed.
Californians who are running away from the communities and towns in which they were raised have Arizona, Idaho, Colorado, Utah and Nevada to head to. But when all of America arrives at where California is at today, where do the Americans run to?
COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
Filed under: Economics, Immigration, Politics
Last time a check Texas was doing Fine without Spendaforrnia.
I was born in California, the product of poor Okies fleeing the dustbowl. California was first populated by native Americans, then by the explorers who came by way of the sea, next by the “winners” of the US movement west (assuming that the others either died, or settled for Oklahoma, Winnemucca, or Salt Lake City). By the Mexican and Italian farmers, food crops and grapes. A port city, a portal to a nation, it grew with chinese workers, and “big city culture and entertainment and sophistication”. Coming out of the work ethic of World War II (and ship-building money), into the 50’s of the America that was determined to engineer a new and brighter future, and it attracted the best and brightest, from the entertainment world, as well as the scientists who populated Silicon Valley, people from all races and cultures.
Reagan recognized that big business employed and fed the population, and that healthy society tolerated the harsh undercurrent of the radical anti-government hippie movement, the liberal and screaming college protesters, and the anti-business tree-huggers. Healthy society could tolerate, and support, increasing regulation, increasing entitlement spending, and increasing promotion of liberal Big Government whose job was to school and take care of children, students, “mexican tourists”, and bums.
California had a firm determination to harshly regulate big business, to firmly fix into law entitlement spending-unions-benefits for all, and they simply went broke and unemployed, having run off (and exported) all that science and industry.
My Dad, who started his career in the power industry, worked for COPCO (Cal-Oregon Power). He would tell about the inordinate regulation, and make dire predictions about California’s future. I grew up in Oregon. Military in the 60’s.
Reagan was an example of that prosperous era of California, espousing a pretty and attractive, and big-city-sophisticated “50’s” America, that was clean and safe, and entertaining, yet preserved an underlying morality. An America that championed it’s big business, as a place to finance schools, scientific research, and provide jobs for all.
Like it did with McCain, the big media had foisted Reagan onto the Republican party, promoting him as the only acceptable alternative in an increasingly Democrat-leaning population. They thought Regan would be liberal and ineffectual. When they later tried to turn on him, the public revolted, and the media was reduced to referring to Reagan in “double entendres”, and Reagan became known as the “teflon man”. That is, as he aged, he still looked good, and also, no matter how much “crap” they flung at him (whenever he made some “screwup”), it did not seem to stick (though they promoted the idea that it wasn’t the media flinging the crap, but rather the democrats).
Somewhere in the 60’s, there was this most wonderful science fiction story, about a family that was going to the beach for the day. In an era of huge American cars this story predicted a road having nothing but tiny cars, like “baby buicks and caddlettes”. The parents chided the rambunctious kids, “INVERT! INVERT!”. Telling the kids to pull their arms in, talk quietly, and fit themselves into their tiny car. There were two ways to get to the beach. By way of the paid highway, and by means of the “free tunnel”. but there was a catch. The free tunnel had steel doors, and randomly (from time to time), the doors would close, and all people within would be gassed, and people and cars fed to the recycling system, then doors would open again. The story ends with the family agreeing that the trip had been exciting, and maybe next weekend they would again visit the beach by way of the free tunnel.
We laughed at Carter, listening to this rich-boy tell us all to INVERT! INVERT! Learning to watch the new misery index, as the desireability of Carter and the US plummetted monthly.
We watch rich-folks, thinking they are royalty, again learning to tell the US to INVERT! Now we watch in horror as the media, and seemingly most of Washington DC begins to head towards the California/European model, like something from a hollywood zombie movie.
Will the pendulum again swing to the right (to keep our financial/morality/scientific/military healthy)? Will the conservatives have anything ready, by then, to offer except more career-crooks?
Or will the pendulum get stuck to the left (emphasizing our Empathy/Caring/Nobility/Liberal-Arts, in the European image, with the California-style financial disaster)? Will we become addicted to the nanny-state, and the immorality permeating Pelosi’s home territory? Will we get stuck in the Free Tunnel?
I am one of those white educated professionals who left California in the 1990’s. I made the right decision.
Expats with Education and skill-sets (belonging to other nations) are repatriating (coming home and leaving the USA).
America is losing the “brains” who once flocked there, leaving only the huddled masses of the illegal alien, uneducatable, and co-dependants.
Buchanan said the same thing, but he used less clear vocabulary.
Those who can flee the USA are leaving or have left. Expats fill other nations now, and I am one of them.
The nation that most impresses me at this time is Burma, and second, Indonesia, third Cambodia, and fourth Vietnam. I have been in all of these countries multiple times over he past 2 years, and I am impressed. I am now living 30 minutes from the Burma border in the mountains. I love life here, and am so glad that the Burmese military didn’t allow the Americans and others into their country. I have many Burmese friends, and they are so kind, generous, and godly. A great revival is happening in Burma, and it’s the Holy Spirit, not the narcissistic missionaries of the western world.
Yes, the USA is going down, losing all who can leave and still survive elsewhere.
When the American economy collapses, if we are forced to repatriate, what will America do then with the repatriating American elderly? We won’t have any money, and we are totally accustomed to the good life by living in Asia where we don’t have to cook, drive a car, worry about medical bills, or fear harassment when we travel widely and at little expense.
Yes, as America collapses, the priviledged American Expats who have been living overseas whilst the American-based Americans suffer will return home, with a totally different concept of life then what the American media has fed the newly awakened American residents.
And the military, if they don’t get kept on the battle-fields fighting for politicians, when they get back to the streets of American, not-landscaped, will they fight for the America they remember, or the America they find themselves enduring?
Just a few of my thoughts as an old man.
The solution to the illegal immigration problem – stepped up pressure by an informed electorate.
Everything you need to know about immigration and what to do about it .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBw1nUlf38I
(Roy Beck and NumbersUSA are the “gumball” heroes)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7WJeqxuOfQ
The American people have no one to blame but themselves. They voted for President Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, Bush Jr., and Obama. They were all poor choices for America, along with all the other bad choices for the Senate and the House for those years.
So enjoy your unemployment, tent cities, and million of new legal and illegal immigrants that are coming to America.
So long as the American people continue to elect Presidents based on slogans rather than sustance, they deserve the government they are getting. The American people never learn because they do not take the time to study history or read what is really going on in the real world. Do the American people studying the voting records of the candidates they are voting for? The answer is 95% do not.
Have a nice day.
Britain can print money and California can’t
[...] Wonder what the future looks like? The American Conservative
GO WHINE ELSEWHERE CALIFORNIA. U DESERVE THIS FATE.
There is nowhere else to run. I am a CA native. I ran to Texas several years ago. Only an ignoramous could not see this train wreck. Trouble is, now there is no where else to run. With Obama and his super majority, we are all going to pay. Take a bite of the S**t sandwich and love it. We’re just screwed.
Well, what can you say. You have a state that is a state. Funny how extremists on both sides think the problem is simple, be it too many illegal aliens or not taxing the wealthy heavily enough.
I think, and i think most outside obersvers would agree, that a state the size of california doesnt get brought to its knees with one problem.
Yes, you have to many illegal immigrants, but the wages demanded are so high its no wonder they turn to illegals (100k+ a year prison guards anyone!) and you have the most innefectual government around. Arnie hasnt a clue, like most republicans, the democrats think you can ramp up everyones taxes and it will fix the probelm and it wont, the republicans think you must slash services and it will be ok, but that will only hinder tommorows growth.
Then on top of that you are now losing people! Less tax dollars coming in, more cuts, higher taxes to bridge the gap……..
Good luck. Thank god im in europre is all I can say