My brother lives in the Bay Area, so it was with more than passing interest that I read Paul Krugman’s piece on how California is completely screwed, both economically and politically. California provides a good illustration of the schizophrenic nature of the American body politic. Everybody likes the public and social services that government provides, but nobody wants to pay for them. And so California has deficits that dwarf the actual budgets of many countries. Further complicating matters is the fact that California can’t issue a parking ticket without putting it to a statewide referendum. I’m all for participatory democracy, but we elect state representatives to make decisions about spending and taxes. The people of California need to do some intensive soul-searching about what kind of future they want for themselves and stop looking to former movie stars to solve their problems for them.
I thought California was an extremely rich state. This idea of mine sprouts from what I heard professor Hans Keirstead say, in an interview on stem cell research: he said that the state of California alone is paying a bigger sum to fund this resaerch and the clinical studies, than the whole country does.