The UK’s Paul Harris from the Guardian asks two tough questions:
- Will California become American’s first failed state?
- What has gone so catastrophically wrong in California?
From its politics to its economy to its environment and way of life, California is like a patient on life support. At the start of summer the state government was so deeply in debt that it began to issue IOUs instead of wages. Its unemployment rate has soared to more than 12%, the highest figure in 70 years. Desperate to pay off a crippling budget deficit, California is slashing spending in education and healthcare, laying off vast numbers of workers and forcing others to take unpaid leave. In a state made up of sprawling suburbs the collapse of the housing bubble has impoverished millions and kicked tens of thousands of families out of their homes. Its political system is locked in paralysis and the two-term rule of former movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger is seen as a disaster – his approval ratings having sunk to levels that would make George W Bush blush. The crisis is so deep that Professor Kenneth Starr, who has written an acclaimed history of the state, recently declared: “California is on the verge of becoming the first failed state in America.”
To answer the first question — I don’t know. Or more accurately, I don’t know that it hasn’t already become our nation’s first failed state. How much further does it have to fail before we declare it so? Though I’m sure that California Democrats will try everything they can to get the Federal government to bail them out of their own failures.
Which leads us directly to the answer to question number 2. What went so wrong in California is the exact same thing going wrong in Detroit — failed Democrat policies and governance (yeah, I know Arnie is a Republican — but he’s a bigger RINO than Arlen Specter was.
And the shittiest part of California collapsing under it’s own decrepit and amoral weight is that these same failed policies are being thrust upon the rest of the nation by a corrupt and myopic Democrat party.
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State employees receiving IOU’s instead of paychecks?
I call that an epic fail, when you consider that in some instances the IOU’s weren’t accepted by the banks.
It has taken decades of failed jackass policies and profligate spending to reach this point, and because of the bizarre gerrymandering, the jackasses in office can’t be voted out.
Hey – you can take a cow to water, but you can’t make him drink. They have oil and won’t drill. They are starving their own people by refusing to provide water to their farmers because they’d rather save a 2 inch bait fish. They are giving the store away to illegal aliens. They are driving business out by taxing them to death.
I have no sympathy.
I guess that should have been “You can lead a horse to water..” Hey Robbie, have we lost the edit function?