Well, it is dying from Applied Liberalism:
Under Arnold Schwarzenegger, the best governor the states next to California have ever had, people and businesses have been relocating to those states. For four years, more Americans have moved out of California than have moved in.
California’s business costs are more than 20 percent higher than the average state’s. 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 full budgets of all but 10 states.
Since 1990, the number of state employees has increased by more than a third. In Schwarzenegger’s less than six years as governor, per capita government spending, adjusted for inflation, has increased nearly 20 percent.
While the government shares a large amount of the blame for California’s woes, we must not let the people of California off the hook. As one small example, 63.5% of the people of California in November of 2008 essentially voted to kill California’s poultry industry, as well as greatly decreasing the pig and cattle industries. This was done via Proposition 2, Standards for Confining Farm Animals – a measure which, among other things, prohibits chickens from being kept as chickens are kept in our egg-producing farms. The chickens – egg-layers destined for the soup pot, in the by and by – must be allowed to stretch their legs…thus vastly increasing the cost of production to the point that such businesses will either die, or move to other States. Prevention of cruelty to animals has been conflated with Chicken Run and so the people of California voted for a nonsense, “animal rights” bill.
On and on it goes – Californians have doomed themselves at the behest of the liberal elite who sucker then, again and again, into backing suicidal ballot initiatives which, curiously enough, never seem to adversely affect the ability of the liberal elite to remain rich and powerful (you know, you can get a ban on smoking in California but you can’t seem to force the rich liberals to provide public access to the public beaches in Malibu). The fact that the liberals in California government are just quicker about destroying the goose which lays California’s golden eggs doesn’t change the fact that Californians have got the government they deserve…and they’ve gotten it good and hard.
It is to be hoped that, finally, the people of California will recover from their liberal stupor and that California conservatives will finally get their act together and provide a credible alternative to more of the same liberalism. Of course, it could be too late – the people with sense in California seem to have been moving out of late (as George Will points out, for the past four years more Americans have moved out of CA than moved in), so there simply might not be enough Californians with the wit to draw the proper conclusions. Meanwhile, it is our conservative job nationally to highlight what liberalism has done to California, and make people understand that it is just what Obama and his Democrats want to do to the rest of the United States – make us into a nation of double-digit unemployment but laws to protect the rights of chickens while the State pays for abortions…
Will we be able to do it? Will we, that is, be able to educate the people faster than Obama can destroy America? Time will provide the answer…
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