Wednesday, November 17, 2010

California Sinks, as Texas Rises

Financially speaking, that is:

California Suggests Suicide; Texas Asks: Can I Lend You a Knife?
In the future, historians may likely mark the 2010 midterm elections as the end of the California era and the beginning of the Texas one. In one stunning stroke, amid a national conservative tide, California voters essentially ratified a political and regulatory regime that has left much of the state unemployed and many others looking for the exits.

California has drifted far away from the place that John Gunther described in 1946 as “the most spectacular and most diversified American state … so ripe, golden.” Instead of a role model, California has become a cautionary tale of mismanagement of what by all rights should be the country’s most prosperous big state. Its poverty rate is at least two points above the national average; its unemployment rate nearly three points above the national average. On Friday Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was forced yet again to call an emergency session in order to deal with the state’s enormous budget problems.

This state of crisis is likely to become the norm for the Golden State. In contrast to other hard-hit states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Nevada, which all opted for pro-business, fiscally responsible candidates, California voters decisively handed virtually total power to a motley coalition of Democratic-machine politicians, public employee unions, green activists and rent-seeking special interests.

In the new year, the once and again Gov. Jerry Brown, who has some conservative fiscal instincts, will be hard-pressed to convince Democratic legislators who get much of their funding from public-sector unions to trim spending. Perhaps more troubling, Brown’s own extremism on climate change policy–backed by rent-seeking Silicon Valley investors with big bets on renewable fuels–virtually assures a further tightening of a regulatory regime that will slow an economic recovery in every industry from manufacturing and agriculture to home-building.


Texas’ trajectory, however, looks quite the opposite.[...]

Read the whole thing and see how. Count the many, many ways. See how bad things have gotten in California. Even I was shocked.

Texas is the living contrast, showing that there IS a way out for California, if they will take it. If not... NO BAILOUTS. Let them go bankrupt, and
dissolve their government employee unions. Some people need to learn the hard way, that you can't spend money you don't have.
     

2 comments:

ZZMike said...

We've cooked our goose here in California. We've voted in Democrats from top to bottom.

The only silver lining to that farce is that if we have to go bankrupt, it'll be on their watch.

Our wants are simple. We want no new taxes. We want no cuts in any government programs. We want our cars to be totally non-polluting, and not use any of that nasty old gasoline. They have to run on electricity. We want no energy-producing power plants. Especially not hydroelectric - it hurts the salmon and the delta smelt.

Not really too much to ask, is it?

Chas said...

You forgot to include the Moon in that list. It's just as obtainable as the rest! ;-)

I sympathize Mike. Oregon isn't much better, and seems to be rushing to catch up with California.

The "greens" have succeeded in getting the Government here to dismantle three hydro-electric dams, at great expense to taxpayers. Now the power rates are going up, of course. And the greens don't want any more oil burning powerplants.

I can't wait for the "suicide" model of governance to fall out of fashion. But what's it gonna take?