California Blues By Victor Davis Hanson
The Bear on Jan 21 2008 at 9:22 am | Filed under: Uncategorized
Our poor state is $14 billion plus now in the red, and the Governator has promised no new taxes, wise inasmuch as our sales and income taxes are already among the highest in the country. The University of California system is panicking and sending out emails to us alums, to march en masse on Sacramento for redress!
But lost in the furor is any self-reflection, such as why would UC Davis recently pay John Edwards, multimillionaire trial lawyer, $50,000 plus to give a brief lecture on poverty? Such questions are never answered, much less raised, since the problem is always framed as a matter of a shortage of income, never a surfeit of unnecessary expenditure.
We in California, given the past budget implosions, know the script to follow. We expect that police, fire, prisons, parks, etc. will be threatened with cut-backs and closure, while the state-funded “Center for this” and the “Department of that” will remain untouched, since cutting the essential while protecting the politically-correct superfluous is the only way to scare the voter and achieve higher taxes.
At some point we Californians should ask ourselves how we inherited a state with near perfect weather, the world’s richest agriculture, plentiful timber, minerals, and oil, two great ports at Los Angeles and Oakland, a natural tourist industry from Carmel to Yosemite, industries such as Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and aerospace — and serially managed to turn all of that into the nation’s largest penal system, periodic near bankruptcy, and sky-high taxes.
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
Source: The Corner Blog
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And Texas right behind them, putting an amendment to the state constitution, no less, with little or no fanfare (except, I’m sure, to those places where it was supported heavily, such as the Cancer Research industry) to spend three billion dollars on cancer research. By the time I’d heard about it, it was because it had been voted in.