Here is VDH's thumbnail sketch of the State of California:
I think the wretched state of California, now looking at a fiscal
disaster of roughly a $20-30 billion annual shortfall, should be a
wake-up call for the Obama administration. Whatever California is doing
— please don't follow suit!
With proposed increases, we will
have the highest sales taxes (ca. 9%) in the nation, the highest state
income taxes (10+%), and probably the lowest thresholds to get into
those top brackets — and yet only about 380,000 Californians pay 40% of
the aggregate income tax revenue.
In exchange, our schools,
roads, airports, hospitals, and police are, to use a euphemism, not
competitive. The CSU campuses make up the largest university system in
the world, with the largest unionized faculty, and yet nearly 50% of
entering freshman must take mandatory remedial math and English
courses. We don't utilize our ample energy, mineral, and timber
resources, but
instead depend on other states who do. Such an odd mix —
we have sermons on our own greenness, but stealthy dependence on other
less liberal producers to satisfy our insatiable appetites. (Thank god
for moose-hunting Sarah Palin's Alaska and an assortment of Middle East
authoritarians).
We have an enormously expensive, but
incompetent government at all levels. It has a horrendously expensive
bicameral Legislature, hundreds of boards and bureaus that serve as
$100,000+ sinecures for political insiders and term-limited
ex-politicians. Those with advanced degrees fly to our low- or
no-income tax neighboring states, coupled with an influx of tens of
thousands without high school diplomas. We have a political discourse
that is polarized, self-censored, and completely framed by race, class,
and gender agendas — reflecting the curricula of our high-schools,
colleges, and universities. The electorate is as volatile as it is
unhinged. One day it will vote billions of dollars in new bonds for
massive new projects, the next it will vote to fund massive prison
complexes for "3-strikes and you're out" prisoners, and on yet another
it will vote to pass liberal feel-good nostrums that nullifiy what came
before.
In short, the state is the left-wing version of Lehman Brothers.