May
21
The most painful post I may ever write
May 21, 2009 | 1 Comment
It absolutely pains me to agree with Bill Maher, but he is absolutely on the money here.
You see, our state is designed to be ungovernable because we govern by ballot initiative, and we only write two kinds of them: “Spend money on things I like” and “Don’t raise my taxes.” More money for teachers and firefighters? Check “yes”! High-speed rail? “Cooool!” Drug treatment for former child actors? “Sure, why not?” But don’t even think of taxing me for any of it.
That’s not an answer! Newt Gingrich had it right when he said, “People don’t elect presidents who tell them to sacrifice. They elect presidents who solve problems for them so they don’t have to sacrifice.”
Right, like Obama should solve global warming by working a little harder in his secret White House lab and coming up with a car that runs on seawater and emits gold doubloons. Someone who magically gives you everything and asks nothing in return? Bernie Madoff tried that plan; it didn’t work.
This is why our founders wanted a representative democracy, because they knew that if you give the average guy the chance, he’ll vote for a fantasy world with no taxes and free beer.
California used to be like the rest of the country, following the instructions in the Constitution and everything. But then we chucked that, and now our state is governed not by elected representatives but by special-interest people standing in front of the supermarket with clipboards asking, “Would you like to sign a petition to cut your taxes?” And then that becomes law. Proposition 14C: Two weeks paid leave for hangovers and universal teeth whitening, paid for by Central Valley cow gas. “Vote ‘yes’ on gain, ‘no’ on pain.”
California is a mess because it has abdicated representative government. It is the Jefferson-Rousseau model at work in America, and it is an abysmal failure. I probably could have saved 240 pages of text and four and a half years of my life if my dissertation had simply said, “See California.”
And it doesn’t pain me nearly as much, but George Will is also absolutely correct.
Now California’s mostly Democratic political class will petition Washington for a bailout to nourish the public sector that is suffocating the state’s dwindling — and departing — private sector. The Obama administration, which rewarded the United Auto Workers by giving it considerable control over two companies it helped reduce to commercial rubble, will serve the interests of California’s unionized public employees and others largely responsible for reducing the state to mendicancy.
These factions will flourish if the state becomes a federal poodle on a short leash held by the president. He might make aid conditional on the state doing things that California Democrats and their union allies would love to be “compelled” to do: eliminate the requirements of two-thirds majorities of both houses of the Legislature to raise taxes and pass budgets, and repeal Proposition 13, which voters passed in 1978 to limit property taxes. These changes would enable the Legislature (job approval: 14 percent) to siphon away an ever-larger share of taxpayers’ wealth and transfer it to public employees. Such as prison guards, whose potent union is one reason California’s cost-per-inmate (about $49,000) is twice the national average.
California’s voters are complicit in their state’s collapse. They elect and re-elect the legislators off whom public employees unions batten. Also, voters have promiscuously used their state’s plebiscitary devices to control and fatten the budget. Last November, as the dark fiscal clouds lowered, they authorized $9.95 billion more in debt as a down payment on a perhaps $75 billion high-speed rail project linking San Francisco and Los Angeles — a delight California cannot afford.
In a surreal attempt to terrify voters into supporting the propositions, Schwarzenegger (job approval: 33 percent) threatened to do something sensible: sell such state assets as San Quentin prison, which sits on prime ocean-view real estate. But Californians should now pay a real price, in realism about ways and means, for Schwarzenegger’s wasted years. His governance-by-attention-deficit-disorder has involved flitting from one trendy irrelevance (e.g., stem cell research) to another (e.g., cooling the planet) while the state has sagged. Fittingly, he was in Washington as his shambolic legacy was being defined by Tuesday’s defeat.
He was at the White House, applauding the Obama administration’s imposition of severe fuel efficiency standards on a dependent automobile industry that at least has a proven aptitude for its new task of building cars Americans will not like. Standing far from Tuesday’s repudiation, in the shadow of the president who may soon effectively be California’s governor, Schwarzenegger was the administration’s dependency agenda writ small.
As California goes, so goes the Nation. Lord, have mercy on us if that’s still true.
Comments
1 Comment so far
I refuse to consider the possibility that Maher could be right on anything. Even if it sounds like he is taking the correct side of an issue it is purely to make a joke about stuff. In this particular case he is is generalizing about both sides of the argument. While I’m an opinionated fiscal conservative, I also believe government has a legitimate (albeit limited) role which requires adequate funding. What Maher misses in his generalization is it is possible for people to have differences of opinions about what government should do or fund without being against all taxation. What most of us are against is the excessive spending which will lead to unmanageable debt.