Have I mentioned how much I hate the Wall Street Journal lately? I mean, it's down right the most awful shit that can ever be printed. I say that with as much pride given how stupid my blog is. But that should show you that even my level of poor grammar and spelling errors is far better than the Wall Street Journal's dribble.
California: The Lindsay Lohan of States
Sacramento is headed for trouble again, and it shouldn't expect a bailout.
By ALLYSIA FINLEY
Listen up, California. The other 48 states—your cousin New York excluded—are sick of your bratty arrogance. You're the Lindsay Lohan of states: a prima donna who once showed some talent but is now too wasted to do anything with it.
After enjoying ephemeral highs and spending binges, you suffer crashes that culminate in brief, unsuccessful stints in rehab. This cycle repeats itself every five to 10 years, as the rest of the country looks on with a mixture of horror and amusement. We'd feel sorry for you if you didn't constantly flip us the bird.
Instead, we're making bets on how long it will be before your next meltdown. Oh, wait—you're already melting down.
Opinion Journal's Allysia Finley argues that California is suffering from spending addiction like starlet Lindsay Lohan.
You've racked up nearly $70 billion in general obligation debt, and that doesn't include your $500 billion unfunded pension liability. Your own analysts predict you'll face a hole of at least $80 billion over the next four years.
Your government's run by a brothel of environmentalists, lawyers, public-sector unions and legislative bums. When they're not taxing or spending, they're creating regulations and commissions like the Board of Barbering and Cosmetology and the California Blueberry Commission. Many businesses would leave if it weren't for your sunny climate.
Which may explain why you're so obsessed with climate change. If your climate changes, no one, including your Hollywood friends, would tolerate you anymore. So you've created a law to tax carbon emissions—no matter that it will kill jobs.
It's not as if you don't recognize that you've got problems. Roughly three-quarters of you say you're headed in the wrong direction, according to a recent survey by the Public Policy Institute of California. You're even more depressed than Illinois and New York, and you've got sunshine 10 months of the year!
You appropriately give your government low marks—28% approval for outgoing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, 16% for the legislature—yet you continue to re-elect the politicians who got you into this mess. Not a single incumbent state legislator lost re-election this year, including one Democrat who died a month ago (no joke). What's scarier is that you've just given almost all of the keys to statewide offices to Democrats.
Jerry Brown will be your new (old) governor. This is the man who acted as a gateway drug to your spending addiction three decades ago when he gave public-sector employees collective bargaining rights. Helping enforce your wacky laws will be Lt. Gov-elect Gavin Newsom, the San Francisco mayor who flouted state law by allowing same-sex marriage. On the plus side, he has nice hair and loves you just the way you are. This is what he had to say after winning his race:
"We're nothing but a mirror of our consistent thoughts. You tend to manifest what you focus on. If you look around for what's wrong, you'll find it. But as all we know up here in San Francisco, when you focus on what's right, you see it all around you. . . . There is absolutely nothing wrong with California that can't be fixed by what's right with California. . . . If you're from another state, you'd love to have the problems of California."
You've also just re-elected Barbara Boxer (that's Senator Barbara Boxer) to a fourth term. She boasted on election night that it's her "eleventh straight election victory, and what a sweet one it is . . . [since] everything was thrown at us, including the kitchen sink, and the stove and the oven and everything, millions of dollars of negative ads from known and unknown opponents, millions and millions of dollars."
We've tried to help you, California. Some spent millions on campaigns to entice you to change your reckless behavior. And you told them to kick rocks.
So here's our final warning: When you inevitably crash and burn, don't count on us to bail you out.
Ms. Finley, a lapsed Californian who still wears Birkenstocks, is an assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com.
It's crazy that even though he has a pretty vast Network studio located in Los Angeles, Murdoch sure loves to hate California. Once he bought the paper they just gave up on anything resembling journalism and focused on the whole class struggle journalism for capitalist.
This article instills strange and totally unjustified California Pride. Yeah, we may have a tax system that will never lead to a balanced budget and forget even paying for the shit we're proposing every election, but still, this is my state and I'm damn proud of it. Even if California did it to itself through shitty proposition system.
Who do we have to blame for all this? Well, for starters, how about everyone who voted in 1978. Prop 13 was and still is total shit. The idea that we put so many barriers between us and collecting state revenue while allowing more ways to create corporate tax loopholes is beyond reasoning. We're just really stupid for buying into it. It's not even politicians who are doing anything. It's proof enough that democracy doesn't work.
How else do you justify voting for limit on taxes and wonder why we can't fix our potholes and why your kid's tuition is so high? We can't really blame California government. They got little to do with their choices. But at the same time, don't call us Lindsey Lohan!
It really doesn't help that the federal government neglects urban development and focuses on rural policy on corporate handouts. Though I'm sure California voters would still find a way to fuck things up if we had some sort of helpful federal support in place.
No matter how beautiful the landscape that California has in its national parks and forests, it's not going to last. Especially given the fact that the proposition that would have secured non-discretionary funds for the state park system failed. Which will probably just lead to more loss in park access.
Prop 24 would have closed corporate tax loopholes, but California voted against it. I would call California voters retarded, but I am a Californian and I also have volunteered time working with disabled people and retarded people actually have better judgment than the state's prevailing opinion on most political issues.
In short, if Prop 19 was the main reason why you were sad this election process, you're pretty much not worthy of voting.
But hey at least we didn't elect a criminal for governor like Florida. To no one's surprise, criminal Florida Governor-elect Rick Scott may have already broken both tax and labor laws before ever stepping foot in office. It turns out that his campaign is trying to pay its workers in American Express Gift Cards, rather than through actual paychecks.
If you weren't familiar with it, Florida elected a Governor who's medical firm blatantly broke the law by overcharging the government by billions of dollars for Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements. So is it really much of a surprise when he's breaking the law again?
Mark Don Givens told Florida's WTSP News that he was expecting a paycheck after he made phone calls and knocked on doors for the Scott campaign, which made jobs a top issue in the election. Givens said he and other workers were upset after they were told by the campaign that they could not offer them a paycheck and given American Express gift cards instead.
"This would violate both tax laws and labor laws," Melanie Sloan, the Executive Director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) told TPMmuckraker in an email. "It looks like the newly elected AG will be investigating the newly elected governor.
Though the only thing separating failing states like Florida and California from working ones like all the other 48 states is simply a couple of years.
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