It cannot sustain itself – and while no one knows how it will all shake out, the plain fact of the matter is that California has followed the liberal social and economic model and it is now a basket case which can only be rescued by a conservative revolution:
…we will have the highest sales taxes (ca. 9%) in the nation, the highest state income taxes (10+%), and probably the lowest thresholds to get into those top brackets — and yet only about 380,000 Californians pay 40% of the aggregate income tax revenue.
In exchange, our schools, roads, airports, hospitals, and police are, to use a euphemism, not competitive. The CSU campuses make up the largest university system in the world, with the largest unionized faculty, and yet nearly 50% of entering freshman must take mandatory remedial math and English courses. We don’t utilize our ample energy, mineral, and timber resources, but instead depend on other states who do. Such an odd mix — we have sermons on our own greenness, but stealthy dependence on other less liberal producers to satisfy our insatiable appetites. (Thank god for moose-hunting Sarah Palin’s Alaska and an assortment of Middle East authoritarians).
We have an enormously expensive, but incompetent government at all levels. It has a horrendously expensive bicameral Legislature, hundreds of boards and bureaus that serve as $100,000+ sinecures for political insiders and term-limited ex-politicians. Those with advanced degrees fly to our low- or no-income tax neighboring states, coupled with an influx of tens of thousands without high school diplomas. We have a political discourse that is polarized, self-censored, and completely framed by race, class, and gender agendas — reflecting the curricula of our high-schools, colleges, and universities. The electorate is as volatile as it is unhinged.
And I know that the immediate desire of liberals who read this is to point out that Schwarzenegger is a Republican, and thus Republicans must be responsible for California’s deepening crisis. To be sure, Republicans in California haven’t often been very helpful, but the plain fact of the matter is that in most matters, liberals have gotten their way in California. And this runs right from the State down to the lowest, local level – outside a few pockets of conservatism, liberalism rules the roost from San Francisco to San Diego and all points in between.
While I still love to go to San Diego and the Los Angeles area, it is really rather sad as you drive through California these days and see a State deteriorating right in front of your eyes. Kids aren’t being taught how to read, but I’ve seen gangster graffiti scrawled on walls in Barstow and other out of the way places in California. To descend from the Cajon Pass into the Los Angeles area is to take a step-by-step trip into increasing societal decay. Dirty streets, dirty walls, an indescribable smell, a flashy rich elite which just makes the spreading blight stand out in sharper relief – this is the area my grandfather lived in and my father was born, and neither of them would recognize it today. The life has just gone out of the State.
When will it end? As soon as the conservative forces in California work out a plan and find leaders who are willing to put it all on the line. Meanwhile, liberals will continue to tax and spend and allow things to run down more and more because, quite simply, liberals don’t know anything else to do.
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