Anyway, I can't go all the way with "irreparable," at Jennifer Rubin's essay, at Commentary, "California, There It Went." It's a great piece. And, yeah, sadly, I'm convinced that neither Jerry Brown nor Meg Whitman will be any better than Arnold Schwarzenegger, and that California will continue to be driven by unaffordable ballot-driven governance (initiatives) that makes that state ungovernable and prone to collapse. But Californians are fighters. The tax revolt started here in 1978. A new burst of good-government reform, focusing first on the crisis in state budgeting, will become a reality in due time. It has to. Things simply can't continue as they are. And that's what makes Rubin's piece a must read:
California today bears little resemblance to the land of opportunity whose promise of a better life in a perfect climate once lured so many. Schools, even in expensive residential areas, are substandard and getting worse. Public parks are unseemly and unsightly. Libraries are understaffed and understocked. Commutes have extended from 30 to 60 to 90 minutes or longer.
Because the 21st-century economy is global and portable, residents and businesses have other options. Employers and educated people can uproot themselves, and they have been, fleeing the congestion, the traffic, the crumbling infrastructure, and the deficient schools. Between 1990 and 2000, 2 million more left the state than arrived from other states.
The U.S. Census Bureau report noted that a number of states have benefited from California’s woes: “199,000 of the 466,000 people who moved to Nevada during this time came from California.... Between 1995 and 2000, 644,000 people moved to Colorado from other states, led by 111,000 migrants from California.”
California’s unemployment rate at present hovers a few points above the national average, in part due to a state judiciary hostile to business and the proliferation of pro-plaintiff litigation rules that have made the state a toxic environment for employers. In recent years, Northrop Grumman, Fluor Corporation, Hilton Hotels, Computer Sciences Corporation, and defense contractor SAIC all moved their headquarters out of the state.
The optimism of the 1960s has been replaced by cynicism and resignation: Did you hear that gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown gets multiple pensions totaling $78,000 a year? Did you read about the little city of Bell’s council members who pay themselves nearly 100 grand a year and paid the city administrator $1.5 mil a year? Gallows humor, appropriate for a dying state, is de rigueur among the state’s political class.
My own family has come full circle. My husband (whose family moved from Indiana to Northern California a year before mine moved from South Jersey) and I joined the out-migration in 2005, moving East with our two sons. It was our turn to amaze West Coast friends and family by leaving home. But unlike the trek four decades earlier, there was little confusion about the reasons for our departure. Instead, people seemed wistful, curious about whether they would learn from us that there might be a better life elsewhere, with workable schools, functioning state and local governments, and more modest taxes.
And in the years since our exodus, we have become acquainted, once again, as we had been in our youth, with normal public schools, pleasant neighborhood parks, well-stocked libraries, and state and local governments that live within their means, more or less.
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