California Schemin’…
The longer I am away from California, the clearer my eyes
get when examining anything about the state. There is a sort of Stockholm
Syndrome that conservative residents of the Golden State get which prevents
them — and me when I lived there — from realizing how completely miserable
things have gotten.
The things that make California great — the physical
beauty and the weather, for example — are still there. The politics have been
so horribly dysfunctional for so long though that the state at times seems
irredeemable.
I lived in California during the most politically active
years of my life and worked as hard as I could to keep the state from slipping
into progressive oblivion. Obviously, I didn’t have much success. Instead, I
watched the state fall into the hands of a series of exponentially worse
leftist ideologues who were hell-bent on turning it into
Cuba-on-the-Pacific.
The progressives have been running the state into the
ground financially for years, and now they want to use the present crisis as an
opportunity to get some federal bailout money to cover for their past financial
sins.
OK, it’s not just California. Jeff
wrote yesterday about the Democrat-led western states that have formed
a “Pact” to go hat-in-hand to the federal government:
On
Monday, the states that formed the West Coast Coronavirus Pact went begging to
the federal government for a massive $1 trillion bailout of their bloated state
budgets. The states of Washington, Oregon, California, and later, Nevada and
Colorado joined in a pact of questionable
legality last month to coordinate their responses to the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) pandemic and the gradual reopening of their economies.
Now, the pact members have sent the bill for their failed state budgets to the
federal government.
While it’s true that all of these states have been
mismanaged to some degree, I am focusing on California because it’s the largest
and the most arrogant of the bunch.
The state has been careening towards a pension crisis
that people have been writing
and warning about for years:
As
far back as 2005, the then-treasurer of Orange County described California
public-sector pensions as a “ticking time bomb.” In 2011, California’s Little
Hoover Commission advised the governor and state Legislature that California
pension plans were dangerously underfunded as the result of overly generous
benefit promises, wishful thinking and an unwillingness to plan prudently. It
warned that, “Unless aggressive reforms are implemented now, the problem will
get far worse, forcing counties and cities to severely reduce services and lay
off employees to meet pension obligations.”
Now California Governor Gavin Newsom wants to pretend
that the above-described scenario is a coronavirus crisis problem that needs
immediate attention:
-----
NEW: Without federal
support, states will be forced to make impossible decisions.
Today—CA, OR, WA, NV, CO, and our legislative leaders have joined together to ask the federal government for $1 trillion to protect our schools, public health, and public safety services.
Today—CA, OR, WA, NV, CO, and our legislative leaders have joined together to ask the federal government for $1 trillion to protect our schools, public health, and public safety services.
---
The present situation may have accelerated things a bit,
but California has been heading in that direction for a very long time now.
Whenever a conservative complains about the hostile
business climate in California, liberals there are fond of smugly reminding
them that the state’s economy would be the fifth largest in the world were it a
sovereign country.
Maybe California’s progressive ruling class should learn
to budget and spend all of that money more efficiently, no? Just a thought.
There is something particularly infuriating about
governors who are arbitrarily keeping their states’ businesses shut down longer
than they need to be — looking at you, Kate Brown — begging for money from the
federal government. Perhaps they should look at firing up their tax bases
again.
California shouldn’t get to sneak in underneath the cover
of a pandemic crisis to cover up decades of financial malfeasance on the part
of its governors and legislators. If the bailout does happen, there should be
stipulations that none of the money can be spent on illegal aliens in any way
whatsoever.
Gavin Newsom has spent the majority of his time as
governor publicly railing against President Trump. I’m looking forward to the
inevitable bailout shaming.
