California, we are continually reminded, is a cutting edge state. Not so much an early adopter as an innovator. Things happen here, and spread across the country. Social trends particularly; music, movies, television, yes. But also science and technology. We are blessed with enormous natural resources, hundreds of miles of coastline, magnificent weather and world-class universities to generate an educated workforce.
So I ask myself – as the Hobbit works to be paid by an IOU for work this month, as I dodge potholes on the streets and freeways, as I ponder the tax consequences of daily life in income, real estate and sales – how can we be broke?
VDH wonders the same thing, and has some answers of his own.
As goes California…
Which introduces yet another problem: they bring the same type of infestation with them when they move. Witness Washington State, Oregon, Idaho, Colorado….
The only problem is when the left wins big for the rest of us like they have in California we will not have anyplace to go.
There are producers and there are parasites. When the parasites living off the producers get too many the host dies, taking with it, the source of nourishment for the parasite.
Maybe the idea of Texas seceding isn’t such a bad idea after all…..
I lived in Cupertino for a couple of years, but having obtained the full ration of Californutty policy, I returned to Texas. I made that decision to leave when I found out I owed California income taxes on income (a bonus) I had earned 9 months prior to moving there, a situation that would not have occurred in Texas.
I saw it illustrated when a friend had to replace a tree in front of his house (city owned on that strip of property between the sidewalk and street), the tree damaged and killed by a city services truck. He had to pay to have the tree removed (permit+removal+cleanup), plant a new, city approved, similar sized tree (20′) (permit+cost of tree+city approved installation company), install a city approved deep watering system (permit+materials+installation, performed at planting), and replace two sections of sidewalk damaged by the former tree and not helped by the installation of the new tree (permit+ material removal/disposal), (construction permit+new sidewalk section installation). All of course, inspected at each stage and signed off by a city inspector (who would arrive between 10 and 2, weather permitting. Which he had to be there to get the signed completion paper. Which required time off work.
In my own backyard, I had a neighbor across the fence complain when my young boys climbed a very large tree (my side of the fence) because they could see into his back yard.
The single 30 gal trash container, that oh, BTW, would not be emptied if the garbage man perceived it to be more than 50lbs. Could NOT contain a long litany of perceived hazardous items (conceded, most made sense), would be fined if found to contain items that MUST be recycled (very short recycle list), and the lid could NOT be ajar because of “excess” refuse. All broken rules of course came with associated fines.
Really, all the above were just irritants like flies, I learned to swat those I could and live with those things I could do nothing about. I left for the simple reason it was too blamed expensive to live there on the salary I was being paid.
The apologists put the blame squarely on “prop 13″ that limited increases in property taxes on existing owned property to a value fixed at a point in time. That is why the house I rented (from a 70+ yo woman…her retirement income. She lived in a double wide someplace else) There was a tax notice left in a drawer I saw…she paid $18,000 for the house new in 1965. Her taxes were less than $1000. She sold the house in 1997 (a couple of years after I left) for about $900,000. I can’t imagine what the new tax rate would have been on that.
Having set up all those strawmen just to say, I believe Californians have done it to themselves, by acclimation (or silence on the part of the rest). Now I understand that California wants ME, as a federal taxpayer, to help bail them out of a mess they created. THAT, I object to.
Precisely daveg…
People are kidding themselves if they think this is just a California problem.
Witness South Carolina: increased taxes, out of control spending, unenforced illegal workers, 9.5% unemployment….I can’t count the times government has failed us.
I feel sorry for people counting on their unemployment and social security checks.
The chicken has come home to roost!
Lex — you are still waffling on the Texas thing? Knucklehead #1 moved back last year, and brought her Valley raised BF with her. Just couldn’t see why she had to participate in the insanity. He loves living in Tarrant County.
Flight Lead, Yankee that she is, asked me once why I dislike NY so much. She sees no diff between Texans and NYers. Both blowhards, both convinced their place is without flaw. I pointed out one big diff — NYer says “Boy is this place screwed up. You should do it like we do it in NY.” Texan says “Boy this place is screwed up. I can’t wait to get back to Texas.” And that is why, no matter how many carpetbaggers move there, Texas will stay Texas. Too many bumperstickers saying “We don’t care how you did it up North.”
Favorite Texas bumper sticker:
“Get the US out of Texas”
I’m fifth Generation Californian, and you may notice I don’t live there anymore. It’s a real shame, because in my very predjudiced opinion California is the greatest state in the union, except for a lot of the people and the politicians. My Dad still lived up in Gold Country and it could be a separate state easy.
Unfortunately, a lot of them are moving to the other Western States and bringing their bad ideas with them. We call it “Californication,” Like in “Don’t Californicate Idaho.” Not sure where to move next. I like it here, but were getting more traffic, pollution and idiots all the time.
“If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” I’m native Californian and California is MY state, and I’m staying put to do what I can to reclaim it with my voice and my vote. Good riddance to those who leave. Texans know the feeling. It’s called “Alamo”.
Mike, the problem has been going on for almost as long as I’ve been alive. My father got orders to Adair AFS, near Corvallis, in Oregon when we were in germany the first time. Got there in 1961. SOCAl morons were already starting to leave the nest they fouled and it was noticeable in 1966 when my father got orders to Ramstein AFb, in Germany. Oregonians hated the Californians coming north and bringing their mess with them.
If you want to go down with the ship, feel free and more power to you. California, along with the rest of the left coast, and New England will lead the country into third world status. The idiots in Sacramento simply won’t llisten to reason, and reality is something that others are inflicted with. Reality has a very bad habit of smacking such people up side the head with a 4×4. The rest of you are going to get it right along with them.
If you can, you’d better leave while you can. No one that is able, and has the intelligence, to leave will stay in La La land. Better beat the rush because California is going to get unpleasant to live in after this year, and maybe by the end of the year.
jweb
As a fellow palmetto-ite, I can only assume that “the chicken has come home to roost” ain’t talkin ’bout the Gameockadoodlers. As local business owner I recently attended a Chamber of Commerce breakfast with the local mayors of the 3 largest cities here. When I asked the mayor of ____ why I paid $11,000 in property taxes for my house in his county yet received no city water, no city sewer, no city trash service, no fire service and no police protection, and oh, had no kids in his schools, and how could I lure skilled employees to his fair city and state and tell them truthfully it was a fair deal? I also said I wouldn’t mind supporting his schools if the graduates could read and write , but that the last 4 workers I hired were all ex-military from other states!!! The mayor was literally incensed to the point of tongue-tied. I told them they were strangling the golden goose, and that where small business could thrive, it wouldn’t survive at all, and we’d go elsewhere with our little hi-tech company. So this problem isn’t limited to the fruit baskets out West. It is a liberal mind-set of entitlement at NO COST – to them!
Remember the end line to Lex’s post…as goes California. I seem to remember reading this morning that Texas’ university system is financially troubled and tuition increases have become the norm. Started here that way, why on earth we hired the guy who screwed UT to screw UC, I’ll never know. But if a university is a microcosm of the bigger world, I can tell you why UC is in trouble despite its big budget on paper.
The short of it is, the university has adopted, like so many others, a corporate model of management. Instead of promoting people from within the university community into leadership positions, they have turned to a class of professional administrators–people who have no sense of what the culture of the place is and who hope from university to university–draining pensions and other resources of the places they leave with hefty serverance packages (lots of our top folks have written in their contracts that they are to be invested in our retirement whether they stay five years or not–unlike the rest of us). These ‘professionals’ all need their own staffs–and of course, their staff members must be more qualified than those working at lower levels of administration, and must have new job titles and salary levels. These are new positions that exist only to serve the administrators. Sometimes you get people with no university experience getting titles like
Bloat at the top.
Meanwhile, the $$$ must come from somewhere. State allocations have been dropping, so the sources of income available are: tuition, charitable donations, overhead on grants and contracts. Tuition comes from the students.
Charitable donations require nurturing donors, which means more staff at the upper level are necessary–where’s that budget come from–well, those of us at the bottom, working in departments, have to make cuts–we lose staff who help counsel students, we lose teaching associates, we lose work-study positions (those financial aid jobs that students paying higher tuition need).
The cut in instructors (and freezing faculty lines–the number of faculty in UC has been radically reduced in the last decade) means fewer classes being offered, more students per class. Students are getting less for more.
So what about grants and contracts? Well, streamlining staff means that those who apply for grants and contracts have to do more and more footwork themselves–takes a lot of time. So the university offers incentives, like taking those folks who are successful grantwriters out of the classroom so they have more time to pursue grants that generate the overhead that pays for the bloated administration. By the way, a lot of those grants and contracts are from the Feds…
SO, the pursuit of overhead takes more people out of the classroom, further impacting class size and course offerings, making the student experience more and more miserable and creating a two-tiered faculty system split between those who can generate grant money and don’t teach, and those in disciplines that don’t get Federal money, and who cover the bulk of the university’s work.
In nature, an entire ant colony supports one queen…we’ve created structures where too few workers are supporting a bloated oligarchy of queens. The system cannot be supported. What has happened at UC has happened in much of corporate America…too much weight at the top drawing too many resources, decreasing numbers of workers responsible for carrying the weight.
It’s not limited to California, nor university systems, but its easy to trace out the feedback pattern quickly in our system. Its a situation that marks our current society in all places–the demand for illegal labor is a symptom, not a cause…the need to provide cheap support for illegal labor from public rather than private funds is one of the effects of administrative bloat–its the drive for cheap labor to push more funds to the top that ensures that illegals have employment when they get here. The reluctance of corporations to innovate new technologies (or research the development of drugs with small profit margins) is a symptom of the desire to push money to the top…and now we see US automotive industries imploding–too busy skimming money off at the top to put money into development–
We are the richest nation in the world in terms of raw human intelligence and potential. Instead of developing that–that which would allow more efficient use of other resources and ultimately generate profit–we skim money from schools, pay teachers in IOUs and take faculty who should be working with students on research out of the classrooms.
Don’t blame the people who think its stupid to cut down all the trees that took 500 years to grow–look at the folks who are too greedy to fund research into ways to balance responsible use and conservation. I don’t believe in end days–the earth has kept on going–so the notion that we should just strip this place clean in the name of profit makes me ill.
Laurie:
While I often find myself on the opposite side of the argument on just about any position you espouse I am in complete agreement here.
Whether government, business, or, it seems, academia we have become society where the “top” is dominated by an inbred class that in intent on “keeping it in the family” instead of promoting a true meritocracy.
Look at the defense offered in paying bonuses to those same managers who presided over the biggest meltdown in history on Wall Street. The argument, “we need to do this to keep the top talent” rings so hollow because, if they are indeed the top talent then I would suggest we might do better to start over with a new gene pool. We see the results of more of the same in Washington and I fear the outcome. Your tales of academia ring true as I have read of the lavish severances and guaranteed compensation packages given those who, have demonstrated time and gain their only real talent is in wrecking institutions.
The question I struggle with is, and I’m not being totally flippant in asking, is how, short of armed insurrection, do we get rid of the bastards?
Oh no! OldT6Flyer! We agree! I’m a crazy enough optimist to think that can happen more than we allow ourselves to think.
I struggle with the same question…revolutions are so messy, but sometimes necessary. I keep hoping to ignite a revolution of the mind, but those often need to be backed up with the sword too, don’t they? As you say, how to get the bastards…
No profound answers, still, glad to be on the same side for a change
OldT6Flyer brings up a point that has incensed me for years.
America is well on the way to becoming a hereditary oligarchy. A very, very high proportion of the ruling elites are members of old elite families, and msot are the products of a handful of colleges whose primary selling points are high-proof snobbery and their alumni list.
And it’s no longer concealed. The Dems are openly speaking of Biden’s son inheriting Daddy’s Senate seat…and I won’t start in on the litany of Kennedys. But remember, these are the high-visibility examples. Dig deeper, and you will find plenty more, both in political life and in business.
We need a revolution. The real question is whether we can get away with an electoral revolution, such as happened in 1994, or need to break out the blueprints for the guilliotine.
Mike:
I’m not sure I believe the revolution ala 1994 would work. It took less than a decade for the Republican majority to adopt most if not all the bad habits it had taken the previous Democratic majority almost 40 to master.
The differences between the two parties as far as Capital Hill are so miniscule as to almost defy discernment. Oh the interests that are recipients of the favors change but the overall thrust of taking more money than they should, to spend on more things that they shouldn’t, all the while doing everything possible to block, delay, obfuscate, and oppose any efforts to change the system that serves them so well, is well entrenched in our so-called two-party “system”.
They are sugessting a commission, ala the BRAC commission, to come up with reforms to entitlements as everyone is on board that we just can’t afford the future the current trajectory will take us. Then up or down vote, no debate, etc. Seems they need political cover, etc. to make “tough choices”.
Let me see – are they saying collectively that they have been elected to only therefore make easy choices?
Let us ask ourselves what the Congress is openly saying: “We cannot make the choice necessary to manage our affairs in a manner we believe will insure the continuation of our Government.”
Without looking it up I am pretty sure that position is hard to square with whatever oath they took on being sworn into office. I am certain is does not square with the one the current and former officers of the US Military took when they were so sworn.
Again, without being flippant nor advocating violent revolution, how do we rid ourselves of this clear and present danger to our liberties?
You want to talk political families? Let’s talk about the state I’ve lived in for the last 30 years; Illinois.
Gov. Blagojevich is the son-in-law of a Chicago Alderman/Democratic Party high-level functionary, and if that had not been so he’d never have gotten the nomination.
Daley II at least had to run for election on his own – Daley I had been dead for a few years and there had been intervening mayors – but he’s stuffed his brothers deep into the power structure. His son, however, may redeem the family. After dropping out of West Point he ended up finishing his education with a University of Chicago MBA. With his name that’s a ticket for a life of high income and preference. But he chucked it out and enlisted – not angled for and received a commission, enlisted – in the Army and ended up overseas in Iraq. Probably a fobbit, but hey.
My previous congressman, William O. Lipinski (D-IL), had a secure seat and had held it for years. In 2000, after a primary that had no real opposition for him in his party and that nominated no real opposition for him in the Republican party, he resigned. This meant that the Democratic candidate would be chosen not by the voters but by the state’s Democratic Party Committee. After an exhaustive search of all the suitable Democrats in the area they chose – Daniel Lipinski, his son. A professor of Political Science. At the University of Tennessee, where he of course was living at the time. And he’s been my congressman ever since.
Cook County has 5.3 million people, larger than many states. It touts itself as the 19th largest governmental body in the U.S. I think they measure that by how many people it represents, because if it was by how many people were part of it’s bureaucracy then it would probably be larger. It’s run by a 17-member board with a Board President. They have a $3 billion budget. The Board President is a powerful position.
John Stroger had been President for many years. A couple of weeks before the 2008 primary he had a stroke. As was his right, the doctors refused to release any information about his condition. Pres. Stoger himself did not speak to any media – all his statements were written and released through spokespeople. He refused to say whether he’d have any problems doing his job. That is, until after he won the primary. Then, all of a sudden, he had to resign. After due consideration by the Cook County Democratic Committee they chose as his successor: his son, Todd Stroger, who up to this point had been a mid-level County functionary (i.e., his dad got him a job with the county at a salary he’d never have gotten paid by private industry). Todd promised that he’d be different than his father – he’d cut waste, he’d cut workers while maintaining services, he’d hold the line on taxes. Then he got elected. 1700 new workers were signed up, including many of his friends and relatives. Taxes were raised, so that Cook County residents now pay the highest sales tax in the country. No particular efforts to cut waste, etc. have been seen.
I just don’t understand why people vote for these guys. One explanation is that the reform candidate lose in the primaries because people don’t take them seriously and don’t realize that this is where you can get rid of the party hacks. The other explanation that I’ve come to accept is that government has become so big that the people in it who thus are invested in the status quo are a huge voting bloc and carry the day in the primaries.
The only problem I have with Laurie is her “end days” quip. Biblical prophecy tells of the conditions that will exist in the end time scenario. It does not give a date of any sort. The Bible gives no cover for “rape and run.”
Alas, the conditions it tells us will exist we can look around and see most of it already. Sinful man is too predictable.
Mike47, I’m with you. When do we start building our Alamo? I’m 3rd Gen California, and it makes me sick to see this great state going to the green-tree-hugging-tight-sphinctered-ball-whackin’-everykidgetsatrophy-ObamaLovin-twinkletoed-sociopathCommie-bastids.
Lex, please give Mike47 my email if he so chooses to lead the fight here in our Golden State. I’ll follow him down this path, help him in any way I can.
Pardon the irony of this statement, but, Viva California! Tome su política y la hoja malísimas rápidamente.
hey, I am certainly on the same side when it comes to education. I’ve got a bona fide birth certificate to prove that my son was born in California (I would certainly be willing to testify to his birth!). The very idea that he should have to pay “out of state” tuition to the same institution that will allow illegal aliens in-state tuition (A 63% DIFFERENTIAL) makes me sick.
In fact, when he was first thinking of UC Santa Barbara, because of their language school, I told him that I would pay out of state tuition over my dead body…
For the first 12 years that this child was alive we paid CA income tax.. The very idea that he is now being descriminated against in favor of those that don’t even belong in this country makes me sick and very angry…
But, people like me are expected to find “different solutions” to their problems… In other words, we are not privy to the state’s funding mechanism even though the state constitution claims we are..
We are expected to spend our own money (saved up from not going on ski trips and the ilk) to educate our children in a reasonable way THROUHT PRIVATE FUNDING.. By reasonable way, I mean the bare essentials of history, civics, etc. Then, when it comes to “State Colleges/Univesities we are expected to find other solutions… as “ethnic/race/religion” perogatives have been mandated and put in place.
As Pat Candell once said “I wish you all to be reincarnated as jewish lesbians”: (or something like that)…
#11 Laurie – “Bloat at the top.”
I have suspected – and I am sure some here can tell me for sure – that our military services suffer from the same affliction – top-heaviness.
My guess is that although the total number of service members has declined in recent decades, the ratio of flag officers per serviceperson has indeed increased. I do understand that some technology reduces the need for manpower. Nevertheless, it seems to me not only are there far more new senior commands now, but there are also mid-level commands formerly manned with more junior officers, now being manned with higher pay-grades.
Am I wrong or right in my observation?
BT
Laurie’s discussion of specific California University problems are not unique to the state or most universities across the land. Moreover, both the public and private sector are so afflicted.
In the vernacular, we have bean counters in control, now more than ever. In their ever-dispassionate methods, they have made it a mission to abandon anything that is not easily quantifiable (like integrity) or does not contribute to the bottom line, or will not extend their position and power.
Those old intangibles like teamwork, loyalty, pride, dedication, etc. are no longer valued.
It’s called commoditization (not to be confused with the closely related, “commodification”).
Today in our “free market system” nothing differentiates an employee, other than cost. … Not his skill, experience, talent, dedication, loyalty, or nationality. All that matters is today cost, be it illegal labor, or outsourced to India labor cost. Workers – be they production or service workers, tinkers, tailors or whatever – regardless of what great intangibles they may offer the workplace and their community as taxpayers, youth coaches, volunteers, church members, etc, are nevertheless in today’s world considered nothing more than mere commodities — and easily replaced, exploited, or substituted with foreign workers.
Conversely, there is a segment of our society who have profited greatly on this commodization of our working citizens.
This is evident in those who, despite our current financial crisis and government bailout money, nevertheless feel entitled to multiple million-dollar bonuses, funded by taxpayers, despite their own failed management.
Rewarding failure is unacceptable to me. Yet there is a large segment of our citizens who care little about anything other than their entitlement. To wit: Which is more offensive, and expensive: – The welfare mothers who game the system, or the billionaires whose companies fail but they still receive bonuses funded by taxpayers?
Bottom line: It’s not just California. VDH and those who love to bash the left coast may have fun with this, but they sadly miss the point. There is a cancer that is growing, and will unregulated, will paralyze our nation.
Lex,
There’s always Texas…