As I have mentioned before, California faces a large deficit because Gov. Gray Davis has been spending like a drunken sailor ever since he got into office - the per capita spending is up 31% in the last 3 years. But in the People's Republic, spending is never cut or even restrained. As Gray says, "The problem is not spending. The problem is lack of revenue."
So it's with little surprise that I see Andres Martiniez in the NY Times weigh in with The Disintegration of the Golden Era in the Golden State:
John Deasy, the superintendent of one of the state's most affluent school districts, clearly knew the figures, but he couldn't help but look for them on the sheet before him, as if to make sure this hadn't all been an unpleasant dream. The numbers are that dire. California's budget crisis will soon force Mr. Deasy to terminate more than 200 of the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District's 900 employees, including 102 teachers. There will be no more school nurses and no more elementary school music programs. High school classrooms will be crammed with up to 40 students.Ah, the old Washington Monument ploy! If we don't get more loot, we'll have to shut down the Washington Monument!
"It's disastrous. This district is going to know times it hasn't known before," Mr. Deasy said last Thursday, as he steeled himself to review the budget cuts at a public school board meeting. "This whole state is going to know times it hasn't known before."OK, I'll bite. How can we keep the tykes from suffering a dreadful fate?
In California, Mr. Goldberg says, "the voters will ultimately have to help us break the present stalemate."Yep, "it's all the ignorant citizens' fault" and there's not even the faintest echo of a clue phone ringing in the newsroom. But we did learn that Andres doesn't have a hint about the meaning of "investment capital".
That would be fitting, since Californians helped to get their state into this fix. Since the 1978 triumph of Proposition 13, which signaled the rise of a grass-roots antitax movement that helped send Ronald Reagan to the White House, populist initiatives have been an impediment to sound, long-term policy making in the state. By freezing local property taxes and imposing an onerous requirement that any other new tax be approved by a two-thirds' majority of lawmakers, Proposition 13 has starved California of needed investment capital.
