By Jim Campbell, Citizen Journalist
Once upon a time, California’s rising standards of living, outstanding public schools and universities once attracted millions seeking upward economic mobility. California was the 8th largest economy in the entire world.
But then something went radically wrong.
Voters opted for the likes of Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, and Nancy Pelosi among others to bring the great state down.
When on thin ice, don’t dance!
Unless new dramatic changes occur starting with the election of Elizabeth Emken, to the U.S. Senate in November; coupled with wins by many fiscally conservative republicans challenging democrat members of the state’s legislature, look for the great state to continue its spiral downward at an ever-increasing pace. Already they have mortgaged the future of the children living in the state.
California has long been the harbinger of national trends, as the saying went, “ So goes California so goes the country.
Liberal/progressive policies are failed policies. Evidenced the implosion of the EU.
It’s time for the voters to wake from their slumber of the late sixties, they must go to the polls with a decision. Do they want opportunity for growth, prosperity, and new companies moving back to California, with new jobs? Their choice is simple they must reject the failed policies of the tax and spend liberal politicians like Dianne Feinstein and her liberal cohort in the CA assembly and vote them out of office.
California legislatures and governors built a welfare state on high tax rates, liberal entitlement benefits, and excessive regulation. The results, though predictable, are nonetheless striking. From the mid-1980’s to 2005, California’s population grew by 10 million, while Medicaid recipients soared by seven million; tax filers paying income taxes rose by just 150,000; and the prison population swelled by 115,000.
In 2012 CA is drowning in $16 Billion of red ink. The only solution provided by the current batch of inepto-cons running the state is to raise taxes, having not a clue that the road so well-traveled lead CA into it’s current fiscal crisis.
California’s economy, which used to outperform the rest of the country, now substantially underperforms. The unemployment rate, at 10.9%, is higher than every other state except Nevada and Rhode Island. With 12% of America’s population, California has one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients.
Partly due to generous union wages and benefits, inflexible work rules and lobbying for more spending, many state programs and institutions spend too much and achieve too little. For example, annual spending on each California prison inmate is equal to an entire middle-income family’s after-tax income. Many of California’s K-12 public schools rank poorly on standardized tests. The unfunded pension and retiree health-care liabilities of workers in the state-run Calpers system, which includes teachers and university personnel, totals around $250 billion.
Meanwhile, the state lurches from fiscal tragedy to fiscal farce, running deficits in good times as well as bad. The general fund’s spending exceeded its tax revenues in nine of the last 10 years (the only exceptions being 2005 at the height of the housing bubble), abetted by creative accounting and temporary IOUs.
Elizabeth Emken US Senate CA 2012 