A Failed State

George Will often writes interesting columns and this one is a good illustration. It is about the death throes of the state of California and how it got there.townhall.com/columnists/GeorgeWill/2010/01/10/golden_no_longer

California is facing a $41 billion budget shortfall over the next 18 months. www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1870299,00.html We have never had a state fail, even in the Great Depression, but California may become a first:

"Kevin Starr, author of an eight-volume -- so far -- history of the (formerly) Golden State, says California is "on the verge" of becoming something without an American precedent -- "a failed state." William Voegeli, writing in the Claremont Review of Books, tartly says that "Rome wasn't sacked in a day, and California didn't become Argentina overnight."

He goes on to say that:

"It took years for liberalism's redistributive itch to create an income tax so steeply progressive that it prompts the flight from the state of wealth-creators: "Between 1990 and 2007," Voegeli writes, "some 3.4 million more Americans moved from California to one of the other 49 states than moved to California from another state."

"Voegeli says that if California's spending had grown no faster than population growth and inflation from 1992 to 2006, it would have been $65 billion less in 2006, and per capita government outlays then would have equaled not those of Somalia or Mississippi but of Oregon, which is hardly "a hellish paradigm of Social Darwinism."

Why this last quote is interesting is because Oregon is going the California route, although not as far down the road. I wrote in my 1/3/10 post that since 2001, Oregon government spending is up 64.2% while population growth was only up 10.8% in the same period. This is exactly what started California's problems. As Margaret Thatcher acidly observed, "The problem with socialism is that at some point you run out of other people's money." California has reached that point and Oregon is walking the same path. It's time to change it.