printFor a long time, “moderate” Republicans considered California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger a member of the “saner” Republican guard. Arnold drove his state to insolvency, and insolvency, you see, can shore up a moderate’s credentials.
Schwarzenegger has pumped up his state’s bloated bureaucracy and ballooning parasitical class. Now, in a referendum, California voters have rejected milquetoast measures that would allow The Terminator to continue to hobble along with his $21 billion deficit.
The Republican governor made sure he was out of town during the vote. “He was not the public face of the effort,” reports the New York Times. But rather, Arnold “let teachers and firefighters do his talking for him in advertisements, and indeed was not even in the state the day of the vote.”
“Representative democracy,” wrote Ludwig von Mises in Bureaucracy, “cannot subsist if a great part of the voters are on the government pay roll. If the members of parliament no longer consider themselves mandatories of the taxpayers but deputies of those receiving salaries, wages, subsidies, doles, and other benefits from the treasury, democracy is done for.”
One of the causes of inflation and debt is the public sector—with its capacity to hire while the public sector must fire—and award its members with inflated wages and benefits, the kind we can only dream of.
Update (May 20): Arnold gave it a bash; he tried to peddle a “package of budget-balancing measures that he promised would temporarily fix the state’s financial crisis.”
MSNBC: “Schwarzenegger said the state’s residents have had to sell off motorcycles, second cars and hold garage sales to make ends meet in recent months. Now, they’re telling state officials that the government has to shrink, too.
“Don’t come to us for extra help. That was the message.”
Me: Moocher-in-chief, however, knows how to try and prolong the party, with some leverage against the moochers he governs:
“Still, Schwarzenegger said the budget cuts to come may be more painful than California voters realize. While they may not want to pay more for services, they can’t say specifically which services they would pare, he said.
He said cuts will certainly come in education, health care and in prisons by transferring undocumented immigrants to federal facilities and transferring more non-violent offenders to local jails. He plans to meet with state lawmakers in the afternoon to discuss the state’s options.”
I don’t know that you’re actually doing it, but I think it’s a bit unfair to only blame The Governator for the mess California is in. This has been building up for some time.
He did try to make some reforms in an earlier election, but got slapped down. After that, he seemed to just want to go along to get along.
And no, I didn’t vote for him. I voted Libertarian.
California is a microcosm (macrocosm?) of the disaster of a nanny state out of control. [In combination with mass immigration] It starts when the society gets very wealthy and then decides to redistribute its wealth on the basis of ‘need’. Eventually, like California, the most productive members of society flee and the neediest move in to absorb government benefits. Then the system goes bankrupt and prints money.
California has nothing on my dystopian hometown of Washington, D.C.
D.C.’s population is currently around 600,000. A few years ago the municipal payroll was approximately 50,000.
In other words, 1 out of every 10 persons was employed directly by the D.C. government!
Was the money well spent?
Nope. The city still suffered, and still suffers, from impossibly high levels of violent crime, crumbling infrastructure and lousy schools.
Of course Congress had to step in and correct things. Look for the current administration to do the same with California.
BTW, these very same parasites want statehood for D.C.
I have four words, “comprehensive annual financial report.”
Interesting that when companies fail, it is those lousy capitalist CEO’s and their bonuses that are to blame. When whole states go to ruin, who is forced to resign? When Comrade O bails out California, will he fire Arnold? Will he give 53% of the state to the unions? See, politicians rarely pay for their failures. Even when they are voted out, they are supported in retirement by the same people who voted them out. It’s a good system, ain’t it?
I wonder if Arnold, Bass, Steinberg, Cogdill and Villines (aka The Big 5) are listening to the taxpayers of Ca. after the defeat of props 1A-E. With the Gann spending caps in place in the 80’s we went from 7th in per-capita spending to 16th, launching our states economic growth for the decade to 121% ,14% over the national average, sadly the Gann spending limits where essentially overturned in 1990 by referendums supported by the public employees. If the Gann spending limits where still in place (which limited yearly budget increases to population plus inflation growth) we would have a 15 billion dollar surplus in the Ca. budget right now. But without those constraints on our politicians they have spent this state into near bankruptcy. Whats next? Arnold standing out on the street corner with a tin cup asking passers by, “brother can you spare a dime”?