Excerpt

For 2005, California spent $9.38 out of every $100 that each individual earned. That is the biggest chunk out of its citizens’ earnings in the state’s history. Californians pay the fourth heaviest taxes per gallon of gasoline in the country, and yet California ranks dead last in per capita spending on its roads. Californians back every classroom with nearly $300,000, but only a fraction of these funds actually reach the classroom. Californians pay among the highest sales and income tax rates in the country and yet California’s credit rating is the lowest in the nation.

Since the California Constitution requires a balanced budget, revenue must equal spending. To compensate for the spending increases, the state has raised taxes, raised user fees and issued bonds--- loans taken by the state. But the higher taxes and fees are driving out the state’s middle and upper middle class (its tax base). And the interest rate paid on bonds is creating deeper debt that the children and grandchildren of its citizens will have to pay.

During the period from 1950 to 1990, the spending increases had little impact as businesses and people moved into the state thus providing increased tax revenue. The shortages were masked further in the 1990’s by the “dot com” boom that provided artificially high revenue and growth for most of the decade.

But behind the high tech growth were serious systemic problems that the legislature and the governors chose to ignore: illegal immigration, declining test scores in the public schools, crumbling infrastructure, welfare benefits to almost anyone regardless of need (including illegal aliens), unaffordable increases in guaranteed future pension benefits for public employees, and the loss of the middle class and management level employees (the tax base) to other states.

As expected, the state’s legislature, controlled almost exclusively by liberal democrats, has proffered only one solution, a one size fits all: higher taxes on the “wealthy” redistributed to the “poor” through programs they create and then leave to a complicated and confusing bureaucracy to administer.
Education has not only suffered from a shift in resources to teaching non-English speakers, it also has suffered from a state bureaucratic system out of touch with local schools and local school districts who in turn give more respect to administrators (the bureaucracy) and the California Teachers’ Association (the union) than to students and parents. Test scores are abysmal and hardly improving even though teachers complain that they are “teaching to the test” and not teaching a broad-based curriculum, whatever that means.
Yet, in addition to the legislature and CTA’s opposition to vouchers, any proposed changes such as merit pay for good teachers, increases from two to five years for tenure, teacher testing, and student testing are systematically opposed.

Illegal immigration costs California nearly $10 billion per year. These costs include healthcare and welfare, public education, and tuition breaks to the California university system. Meanwhile, police in most cities are prohibited from arresting or detaining illegals--- the result of pressure from liberal politicians and interest groups and their labeling as racists anyone who dares arrest and repatriate an illegal.

With regard to welfare, it is a morass of ineffective bureaucratic agencies with an organizational chart even Einstein could not explain. Necessity has been replaced with need. No longer does one have to be the victim of circumstances beyond his or her control. Instead, benefits are paid simply because the applicant shows a need regardless of their skills or ability to obtain meaningful employment and regardless of whether he or she is responsible for his or her predicament.

On infrastructure, little has been spent—mostly because the money is being spent on education and welfare. As a result, California’s highways are crumbling. Freeways and major roads are congested to the point that traffic is changing where people live, where they work, and how they interact. Airports are overcrowded and ports have no space to unload the daily cargo being delivered.

Californians are unimpressed and losing patience. According to the 2000 census, during the 1990’s, for the first time more Californians moved out of the state than citizens of other states moved into California. The people are leaving. And not just any people. It is the managerial upper middle class. You know, the ones who are considered the “rich.” These citizens pay the taxes that fund the morass. They are being replaced by less educated native-born Californians and by illegal aliens whose contribution to the coffers, if any, is far less than the benefits they receive.

So the obvious question is: How did it come to this? The answer is disconnect---an inability to equate the philosophy underlying the 1960’s “Great Society” era with fiscal ruin.

Lyndon Johnson was responsible for the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights act. But he was also responsible for creating the “Great Society.” Johnson believed that the wealth of the country was so substantial that the federal government could assist all Americans in need through the redistribution of tax revenue. But the welfare programs he initiated had failed by the following decade. Nonetheless, many of the policies and their goals trickled down to the states, especially to California.

Even as it became clear that the redistribution of wealth was (and is) failing miserably, state leaders were unable to acknowledge it. This inability is not so much of an unwillingness; rather it was and remains an inability to do so because any acknowledgement of failure would be tantamount to an acknowledgement that the underlying philosophy of the “Great Society,” the redistribution of income from rich to poor by government, is fatally flawed.

So the emperor has no clothes. But California politicians, who continue to support each other’s failed philosophy and the policies and programs thereon, are powerless to evaluate honestly the condition of the state or propose the drastic changes in direction necessary to repair it. And those few who dare to speak out are demonized as cruel or unsympathetic or greedy or even racist.