[Editor’s note: Louis Warren, our colleague and friend, returns to write about why you should care that California has decided to self immolate.]
[Editor’s note II: This post has been updated to reflect author’s changes.]
While the scolding and the tut-tutting goes viral — “California, such a shame those weird, flaky people can’t live within their means” — it’s time for some serious reflection about how the nation’s richest, most populous state got where it is. California, home to one in eight Americans, has a GDP bigger than Canada’s. And it’s in the middle of an on-going fiscal calamity which threatens to rip our legislature apart (again). This week, the governor went to the White House to beg for federal backing of state bonds, a move which threatens to make California’s predicament a national drama.
So, whatever the solutions to California’s problems, rest assured those problems are coming soon to a theater near you, because unlike any other place, the Golden State is where the future is now. In a sense, California is the un-Las Vegas. What happens here does not stay here, it goes global. The growth of independent political voters? Auto emission regulations? The tax revolt and modern conservatism? We saw them all first in LA and San Francisco. Watts erupted in flames before any other American ghetto in the 1960s. Harvey Milk led the charge for gay rights on our televisions first. The tech boom was here first. And so was the bust.
So what explains California’s budget crisis, and what can we learn from it? In truth, the reason California has been unable to balance its budget has little to do with being an outlier, and more to do with some small, structural peculiarities that simply don’t suit a modern American state. Our politicians are about as partisan as Americans in general (read “very”). Our state tax rate is marginally higher than most others (but it is not the highest), and the level of our spending on public education and other services is also somewhat higher. So what gives?
The root of our problem is our state constitution, which requires a two-thirds majority to raise taxes or pass a budget. In some ways, this is peculiar. No other state requires two-thirds majorities to perform those two vital functions (although Rhode Island and Arkansas both require 66% to raise taxes, their budgets pass on simple majority votes). In other words, to pass a budget every year in California requires the same level of amity and consensus other states require for a constitutional amendment.
Where did the supermajority originate? Although many blame Proposition 13 (passed in 1978), California’s constitution has in fact been tilted this way for a very long time. The state first passed a constitutional amendment requiring two-thirds majorities to approve budgets back in 1933. The rule kicked in only when budgets increased by 5% or more over a previous year. But since most budgets did increase by at least that much (California was growing by leaps and bounds), it kicked in a lot.
Even then, budgets passed with little trouble. California Republicans fought to restrain expenditures, then voted to raise taxes to cover what the budget required. Democrats fought for public education (including the nation’s most extensive system of higher education). In the 1950s and ‘60s, California took on more debt than any state in history to fund massive public works, including highways, university campuses, and the state aqueduct system (which together did much to create the wonders of LA and San Diego as we know them).
All this spending was funded by taxes and bonds, which voters approved at the ballot box. This despite the fact that in 1962, voters and legislators united to “streamline” the budget process and require two-thirds majorities for ALL state budgets. Still, Republicans and Democrats typically hammered out deals, with Republicans voting for taxes only after exacting concessions from Democrats.
So it went for another decade or so, when the rise of movement conservatism changed the terms of debate. Republicans never liked taxes, but they saw them as an unfortunate necessity. By the 1970s, conservatives increasingly sounded like the leader of California’s tax rebellion, Howard Jarvis, who condemned all taxes as “felony grand theft.” With passage of his Proposition 13, voters mandated that all tax increases required two-thirds majorities, just like state budgets.
Still, for many years, leading Republicans could contain their most conservative brethren and hammer out deals in the old-fashioned way. As late as 1991, a Republican governor (Pete Wilson) championed a tax increase and budget cuts to close a deficit. In 1994 he won re-election.
But already the tide was turning. As Wilson discovered during his abortive presidential campaign in 1995, the “No New Taxes Pledge” had become a litmus test which he had failed. This hostility to all taxes is now conservatism’s defining feature. It is also, historically speaking, quite new. More than anything else, this is what killed the consensus that drove California’s 66% majorities.
The proof is in the pudding. The state has had the same supermajority requirements for budgets for the last 47 years. But only for about the last two decades has the budget become a source of continual drama, with legislators deadlocking 18 years out of the last 22. There has been chronic division in the last ten. We are a long way from the consensus that built the Golden State.
But it’s worth observing that we’re not beyond consensus. Today, California’s state assembly is less than 40% Republican, a situation that is not likely to change much in favor of Republicans (for reasons I’ll discuss in a later post). They are stalwarts for tax cuts, but over 60% of the state’s voters have opted for higher taxes and more public services. In any other state, this wouldn’t even be an argument. But in California, it’s a crisis because of the supermajority amendment to the constitution. The state is not “dysfunctional.” It’s not “flaky.” But the constitution no longer suits political realities, and it seems bound for some kind of change. The Bay Area Council, a group of prominent San Francisco business leaders, has proposed a state constitutional convention to require only a simple majority for new budgets and taxes. Their idea appears to be gaining ground.
This all might seem a peculiar California story, but to any observant American it is a sign of the times, a symptom of the country’s divisions. The U.S. Congress has no supermajority requirement, but California’s travail is echoed in the Senate, where rules require 60 votes to end a filibuster. Democrats now control 59 seats, Republicans have 40. The empty seat is Minnesota’s, where Democrat Al Franken appears to have eked out a victory over Republican Norm Coleman in the 2008 election. That was six months ago. Since then, Republican operatives have poured money into legal appeals, tying up the business of the country, stalling health care reform, threatening a filibuster of the president’s Supreme Court nominee and many other big initiatives, to buy their flagging party some time. From the Pacific to Minnesota to the nation’s capital, California blazes a path into the future — like it or not.
52 comments
May 21, 2009 at 6:49 pm
bitchphd
Yay CA budget blogging!
I’m a Prop-13 blamer, but I don’t blame it for the 2/3rds rule. I blame it for setting property taxes in stone, thereby ensuring that property taxes actually go *up* on anyone who is buying a new house, because all those people who stay in their houses get their taxes held down. As a result, everyone thinks that property taxes are way high when really they’re artificially high for some and artificially low for others.
Plus I blame Prop 13 and white flight for ruining the CA school system.
May 21, 2009 at 6:56 pm
Levi Stahl
Thanks, Louis. I knew the outlines of this story, but it’s good to see it all laid out clearly like this.
Anyway, California may be hamstrung by its constitution, but I’d still take that over my native Illinois, where we’re hamstrung by thoroughgoing corruption.
May 21, 2009 at 7:03 pm
kid bitzer
hey, c’mon now. illinois corruption has brought us some great stuff, too.
no, more seriously, i think the ca/il contrast really may suggest that corruption is the lesser of the two evils. (or at least corruption in the quantities and degrees common in il). i mean: do you really think il is less functional, as a whole, than ca?
May 21, 2009 at 7:08 pm
soup biscuit
B, both the 2/3 rule and the proposition system are pretty loony. CA is reaping what it has sown there, but I don’t see an actual fix without at least adjusting both.
May 21, 2009 at 7:12 pm
Levi Stahl
I suppose Illinois isn’t less functional than California, but it’s plenty maddening: from our governors in jail to our absurdly regressive income tax to the state’s ridiculous amount of power over the budget of the CTA (the importance of which state government almost entirely fails to understand), Illinois offers plenty to grumble about.
May 21, 2009 at 7:14 pm
kid bitzer
maybe the situation in il would improve if we adopted a 2/3 rule for convictions.
May 21, 2009 at 7:18 pm
bitchphd
Oh, god knows that the proposition system needs to go. I certainly wasn’t arguing otherwise.
May 21, 2009 at 7:25 pm
soup biscuit
On second thought, it’s worth noting that the combination of the two is particularly fraught. The whole is loonier than it’s parts, as it were.
May 21, 2009 at 7:40 pm
andrew
i think the ca/il contrast really may suggest that corruption is the lesser of the two evils.
I keep coming back to the good government/representative government distinction. Probably because I read a bunch of Lincoln Steffens* recently.
*But not the socialist parts. I keep not finishing his autobiography.
May 21, 2009 at 10:18 pm
The Brucolac
Per Louis’s narrative (and my observations), the 2/3 requirement alone isn’t the problem. The equation seems to be
(2/3 majority) + (Republican intransigence on taxes) + (just enough alienation and complacency in the electorate [even the 60% of the population represented by Democrats] to stop repeated attempts at fixing the previous two) = problem.
I guess my question is whether the Jarvisite culture– which is sufficiently widespread and weird to prevent the state from even reforming property tax assessments on commercial property– is unique to, or at least uniquely entrenched in, California.
Also, on a yea-to-year level, budgeting is made much more difficult the ability to appropriate by initiative, which is not universal even among states with strong initiative systems (eg Alaska, which bars appropriation by initiative).
May 21, 2009 at 10:24 pm
Zac in Davis
Personally, I think the initiative system is interesting, and the article has convinced me that it’s not the supermajority that’s the problem; it’s the political climate.
Nonetheless, I say we could always change budget and tax-raising to a simple majority, and someday in the future, if a supermajority starts making sense again, we’ll just go back to that! Not so hard – Prop 8 is, no doubt, only the latest example of California’s ability to go back and forth on an issue.
May 21, 2009 at 10:46 pm
David in San Jose
It’s good to know that massive illegal immigration plays no role with CA budget crisis. I was worried that it might.
May 21, 2009 at 11:12 pm
Cryptic Ned
Glad to reassure you, David.
May 21, 2009 at 11:23 pm
Michael Turner
i think the ca/il contrast really may suggest that corruption is the lesser of the two evils
When you include in the concept of “corruption” the idea of corruption of the electorate, it’s not even really two different evils.
Sordid fact about me: I once made a little (much-needed) money collecting signatures to get intiatives on the ballot in California. Take it from me: It’s a fairly loathsome process.
However, it did not make me more of an elitist. There was something in the process of meeting so many people (however briefly) who were so ready to speak up about and formally register their political opinions openly that made me want more of them think a little better, and made me believe it might be possible. In that way, it made me an even bigger fan of the general idea of deliberative approaches to approximating an informed referendum. How to get there from here? Uh . . . well . . . sign my petition!
May 21, 2009 at 11:44 pm
Zac in Davis
After reading this post, I tried to go and explain to my mother (my family’s from Delaware, and our biggest local paper is a glorified AP news feed, to give you context) how California works with this stuff. All she kept saying was “why do you bother electing legislators?”
I tried to suggest, in the spirit of what Michael Turner is saying above me (I think), that this made California a hybrid of American republicanism (small “r” is deliberate) and a more directly democratic system of governance. She simply repeated, “But why do you bother electing legislators?” I sighed, wondering how I had never realized how much of a federalist my mom could be. Admittedly, when Prop 8 passed, I grumbled about the “goddamn dirty masses” too, but only long enough for my more democratic friends to smack me and remind me I’m only upset because my side lost that one.
The creepy side of that conversation was her insistence that voting every two or four years was just fine. I countered with a line from the book, “What Does China Think?” (Leonard, 2008) – it’s a sentiment about governance in China that goes, essentially, “In the West, you go into a restaurant and you choose the man to cook for you, but only he designs the menu. In China, we do not get to choose the cook, but we do decide what’s on the menu.” To this, she responded, “California does both!”, but not in the “hey, what a neat approach!” tone I had hoped for.
It’s hard to be an elitist or anti-populist, I think, when you know you can go out and get a grassroots thing going to successfully push the issue you care about.
May 21, 2009 at 11:49 pm
Zac in Davis
Er, that should read “voting only every two to four years…”
May 22, 2009 at 4:01 am
rosmar
The initiative/referendum/recall system was intended to be democratic (small d), but has also been enormously influenced by money (just to get something on the ballot is expensive, in such a large state, and of course advertising is expensive, too).
May 22, 2009 at 6:26 am
human
Ban television! That’ll take care of that.
May 22, 2009 at 6:29 am
Michael Turner
Seconding rosmar: when I was soliciting petition signatures in the mid-90s, the high end of the commission scale was $2 per signature. Rates were seldom lower than 75 cents.
The math is chilling. Wikipedia:
Which is to say, about 10% of voters. About 8 million voted in California 2006, so at $2/sig that’s maybe upwards of . . . $1.6M? And that’s just to pay the petition-circulators, it doesn’t cover legal fees in drafting the referendum language, or recurring overhead expenses. $3M wouldn’t be ridiculous.
Now, a truly grassroots, popular movement needn’t cost nearly this much to get an issue on the ballot, because you get truly committed volunteers. But those sorts of movements tend to gore someone’s ox, provoking astroturf reactions, which can hire expensive political consultants, buy radio spots, the works. They can afford it. They just pass the costs on to the consumer. Think of it as hidden sales taxation — to pay thieves who robbed you of effective representation.
Among the objections to deliberative polling: “Wouldn’t it be very expensive, time-consuming, wasteful and prone to misrepresenting the will of the people?” Oh sure — until you compare it to the status quo in, say, California.
May 22, 2009 at 9:43 am
Dr VanderPal
The super majority requirement of Congress (2/3rds vote) does exist for overturning Presidential vetos.
May 22, 2009 at 9:55 am
Bitchphd
I’m not really down with a blame-the-voters approach. We really can’t expect people with lives to lead, kids to feed, and jobs to do to know all the details of budgets or legislation. It’s understandable that people are fed up and blame the legislature.
If the legislators would act responsibly they could change the rules while functioning within the system. Someone is benefitting from the ongoing gridlock. I’m just not sure who.
May 22, 2009 at 9:57 am
Zac in Davis
I think it’s pretty obvious who would benefit from basically having every single tax bill shut down by the Republicans – wealthy business owners, CA’s super-rich, etc. You know, the GOP’s usual beneficiaries ^_^
May 22, 2009 at 10:12 am
kid bitzer
plus, illegal immgrints.
they’re behind all this stuff, pulling the strings, working the levers of power.
May 22, 2009 at 11:49 am
Erik Lund
You know, just because California has a bigger GDP than Canada doesn’t mean it’s somehow more important. But if it does, we can be illegal immigrants, too. Climbing the rankings by undermining California, one waiting job at a time…
May 22, 2009 at 12:21 pm
Not Prince Hamlet
The whole is loonier than it’s parts, as it were.
Also true of law firms and universities.
May 22, 2009 at 12:31 pm
Mr Punch
The trouble with “direct democracy” isn’t, in fact, that it’s unduly influenced by money — it’s that it tends to produce superficially attractive, poorly drafted measures that cannot (especially in California) be repaired by corrective legislation.
As a sometime CA resident, and a Democrat, I have to say that my party is part of the problem. Why can’t the California Democratic Party produce good leadership? How can it be that there has never been a plausible Democratic presidential contender from California? [Brown not plausible, McAdoo not from Calfornia]. When the major historical figure is Jess Unruh ….
May 22, 2009 at 3:33 pm
bitchphd
Re. emigrating to Canada: the problem is that Canada sucks, and California is lovely.
May 22, 2009 at 3:55 pm
kid bitzer
you’re such a bigot, b.
next you’re going to be saying, “america, love it or leave it!”
canada is a big country, and parts of it are nicer than parts of california. maybe you just got stuck in a less nice part of canada?
May 22, 2009 at 4:18 pm
ari
b was in eastern canada, kb, which is where we keep all of the malcontents and losers.
May 22, 2009 at 4:47 pm
Ahistoricality
The super majority requirement of Congress (originally 2/3rds vote; now 3/5ths) does exist for overturning Presidential vetos.
Fixed.
May 22, 2009 at 5:58 pm
Joshua Buhs
My two cents, for what it’s worth: I think that the general thrust of blaming Proposition 13 and the two-thirds rule are right, the structural problems created by Prop 13 are more profound than just capping property taxes, and certainly more of a problem than intransigent Republicans. (a href=”http://www.staysacramento.org/Newsclips/SacBee_Dan%20Walters_Cityhoodcampaignasympton_March132007.pdf”>Dan Walters is good on this.
May 22, 2009 at 6:30 pm
bitchphd
BC is lovely, but only because it’s a lot like Washington state and the Oregon coastline.
May 22, 2009 at 7:11 pm
kid bitzer
in other words, wa and or are lovely because they resemble part of canada. only you’re too chauvinistic to put it that way.
i’m really surprised at you, b. i’m really shocked. i didn’t know you were such an america-firster nativist. no wonder you’re always linking to pat buchanan’s screeds.
May 22, 2009 at 7:21 pm
bitchphd
It’s really bizarre. I never realized how American I was until I lived in Canada for three years. The earnestness and egalitarianism drove me batty. (And I will admit that Vancouver is really more beautiful even than Seattle, but don’t tell anyone.)
May 22, 2009 at 8:10 pm
nick
another mystery: Canadians are earnest, yet 99% of all white American humor is written or performed by Canadians…..I suppose this is structurally necessary, though: Americans have abso-fucking-lootly no sense of humor about themselves….
May 22, 2009 at 8:14 pm
andrew
I am looking forward to moving to Vancouver.
May 22, 2009 at 8:24 pm
andrew
Also, the veto override threshhold is still two-thirds. 63% voted for override of first S-CHIP veto and it lost.
May 23, 2009 at 5:20 am
Ben Alpers
Interesting post and discussion. A couple points:
1) I’m pretty sure that over a dozen states now require supermajority votes of their legislatures to raise taxes, including my own state of Oklahoma. It’s more than just Rhode Island and Arkansas. Indeed, in Oklahoma we have 3/4 majority required for tax increases. Many if not most of the supermajority states adopted these rules during the 1990s (which fits Louis Warren’s chronology of Republican intransigence on taxes).
2) As Bruce Schulman points out in his book on the Seventies, the early California anti-property tax rebels (in the Sixties and very early Seventies) were progressive populists, not conservatives. They sought to shift the tax burden to the wealthy and corporations. Only in the 1970s did the tax revolt become entirely about cutting taxes, and California was of course a leader in this.
3) Having lived through the fun of Prop 13 growing up in California, one of the most disconcerting aspects of its politics was then Gov. Jerry Brown’s willingness to embrace Howard Jarvis and (after some waffling, if memory serves) support Prop 13. Again the California pattern has been exported: the Democratic Party across the country has failed to make the case for the need for taxation for decades. And the closest it came to doing so was when, under Clinton, Democrats tried to rebrand themselves as the real fiscal conservatives.
4) The Republican Party now seems locked into a policy of legislative monkey wrenching. It’s an interesting contrast with the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Gingrich at least pretended to be offering a well developed alternative set of policies. Now it’s all about standing athwart history and yelling stop. Supermajority requirements make this a lot easier.
May 23, 2009 at 6:49 am
drip
Things are the way they are because enough people want them that way. The synopsis of the California referendum/tax revolt/supermajority was terrific. Can you now weave into it the fourth (or maybe fifth) factor of the recall? The present governor owes his job to the recall of a perfectly fine governor who was undone by a manufactured electricity crisis by some of George Bush’s Texas cronies. The fact that it took Gray Davis completely out of the presidential race was the added bonus. Arnie hasn’t been a bad governor, but he is too weak to have much influence. Weirdly, it’s as though he wasn’t even elected. When Californians are sick of what’s going on they’ll fix it or emigrate to some place that will take them in. Probably not Canada. Too many foreigners. Probably Delaware where they only vote every couple of years.
May 23, 2009 at 8:03 am
Ben Alpers
Does anyone other than drip think that Gray Davis was a perfectly fine governor? I wasn’t living in California at the time, but family members who were (and were, incidentally, died-in-the-wool liberal Democrats) tended to think of him as an ineffective hack and shakedown artist, most of whose major appointments were purchased with campaign funds. They didn’t vote for the recall, of course, but they had nothing good to say about Gov. Davis and weren’t particularly sorry to see him go.
May 23, 2009 at 8:04 am
Ben Alpers
Correction: that’s campaign donations not campaign funds
May 23, 2009 at 8:10 am
Robert Halford
In the meantime, of course, our governor is trying to balance the budget on the backs of the poor. No more family welfare. No more health insurance for low-income kids. Dramatic cuts in other social services.
In part, this is because the social services segment of the budget is one of the few areas that the legislature can quickly cut; funds for schools, transportation, and the environment are locked up by referendum. But it’s also because the poor have no lobby.
The bottom line is that California is about to reduce its social services to sub-Mississippi levels, at exactly the moment when people need those services most. It’s hard to overemphasize how bleak the outlook is, even if most people haven’t started feeling it yet.
May 23, 2009 at 8:31 am
soup biscuit
b was in eastern canada, kb, which is where we keep all of the malcontents and losers.
B was in central canada. Or I’m misremembering.
BC is lovely, but only because it’s a lot like Washington state and the Oregon coastline.
It’s more that Washington and Oregon aspire to be like BC. But they’re all pretty (at least in large parts)
Vancouver is the most beautiful city on the continent, but it’s damned wet, too.
May 23, 2009 at 8:50 am
drip
“Perfectly fine “wasn’t meant as an endorsement, neither was “hasn’t been a bad governor”, but at one point Davis was incredibly popular. The energy crisis was only one of his problems, but the recall of Davis and the threat it makes to the present and future governors fits into the situation in which the State finds itself today. The recall, together with ballot initiative, make for a pretty short horizon. Of course, that is apparently what Californians want because they have kept it this way for a long time.
May 23, 2009 at 9:29 am
Charlieford
That was really good.
May 23, 2009 at 10:49 am
grackle
Grey Davis was an extremely competent bureaucrat whose biggest failing was the transparency of his opportunism; he was seen as wholly owned by the Prison guards union and was widely perceived as insincere and unsympathetic. Nonetheless, he had made adroit and timely decisions in regard to the electricity crisis but took the fall anyway, because of the perception that he was, to put it delicately, a weasel. At the time of the recall, Arnie looked to be a straight shooter, even if he was ignorant about the causes that led to his being the effect. Davis seemed to inhabit Willie Brown-trustworthiness-space, without the charisma.
May 23, 2009 at 9:37 pm
Michael Turner
Yes, drip, Davis was “incredibly popular”, for a while. However, at that same moment, Californians were living in an even more incredible economic fantasyland.
Being home to Silicon Valley, California was a disproportionate “beneficiary” of the dot-com bubble — NASDAQ hit its peak just about a month after the Feb 2000 sfgate story you cite, and Davis took office in 1998, when that bubble was already out of control. As one of Krugman’s Zoned Zones, California was also definitely one of the earliest “beneficiaries” of our more recent housing bubble.
From that same SFgate story:
Davis was, at times, widely popular, but never wildly so, except perhaps regionally (SF Bay Area). If Californian voters had had any real affection for him, more of them would have been willing to see him as a victim of forces largely beyond his control. Note that Schwarzenegger’s ratings have only recently fallen to Davis-recall levels, even though Californians have a lot more to be pissed off about now than they ever did in late 2003.
May 24, 2009 at 12:20 am
Bitchphd
The situation isn’t “what Californians want”–or they wouldn’t be so pissed. The situation is the result of a lot of little pieces that Californians want, many of which are inconsistent or contradictory, adding up into a huge fucking mess.
May 24, 2009 at 4:17 am
drip
So what is to be done? As Michael Turner implies, anybody can govern in boon times. Will Californians put their direct democracy to work, reform themselves with a groundswell of sensible referenda, and show the rest of america that voters and states still matter? Or will they move in the opposite direction, surrender their principles of referendum, limits on government taxation and recall and look to the federal government for a way out? Or will they return to fantasyland, recall a governor, secede, or pass some other insane, shortsighted patch of a proposition and declare themselves fixed. That was what I saw in the post. The tax cutters, the direct initiatives and the recalls are just shortsighted, self-defeating band aids. I agree with Louis Warren’s conclusion: From the Pacific to Minnesota to the nation’s capital, California blazes a path into the future — like it or not. There isn’t much to like right now.
May 24, 2009 at 8:00 am
Michael Turner
What do Californians want? b is right, you’ve got a bunch of different Californians wanting a bunch of conflicting things, and that doesn’t help at all.
Let me speak as a middle-aged second-generation Californian (as if that mattered), transplanted to Tokyo about 15 years ago. I want the qualities of the California I remember growing up in. But it’s not so much about nostalgia for that California (except perhaps in the sense of Paul Krugman’s nostalgia for the “fairly equal society” of his youth, before the New Deal was undone.) True Californians are neophiles. I would be happy to see these desiderata (re-)achieved in different (better) ways.
That California was so safe you didn’t lock your doors. It had an excellent k-12 educational system, not just good colleges. And it was easy to get around.
I don’t blame people for wanting those qualities, not at all. Just for how they pursued them when it stopped being so easy. When these qualities began to evaporate, people tried to find them again in the self-perpetuating evaporation of suburban sprawl. Rather than concertedly enfranchise racial minorities and combat poverty’s root causes, we got White Flight. Instead of mass transport, we got even more freeways. Prop 13, don’t get me started. Maybe the school systems were already lurching downward by then, but Prop 13 sure didn’t help.
Safety, education, mobility — Japan offers all three of these qualities. As a 73-year-old friend of mine here (another transplant from the U.S.) likes to say: “Why would I want to leave Japan? It’s the last civilized country on Earth!”
But it’s not my culture. Or perhaps, cultures? In this, I’m irretrievably Californian. Even Tokyo’s glittering and sophisticated urban core seems dismally homogeneous to me in terms of ethnic variety. Japan generally is a cultural tail-light chaser of the West, often obliviously stripping out what I consider to be the real heart of any vibrant new trend, before parading the colorful husk. Japan is not a bellwether of a brighter future, which is what California used to symbolize to the nation. Japan just happens to do some things right. Like energy efficiency. Cops on bicycles. Trains that, um, run on time. (Sorry for saying that like it’s a good thing, but BART now makes me cringe every time I go back for a visit.)
drip may be right that there isn’t much to like right now. But as I can see even from brief visits to California, there’s still much to love. And I can only hope that’s enough to turn things around.
May 24, 2009 at 8:16 am
mr earl
Here in Arkansas the super majority (75% of the legislature, but a majority of a popular vote) requirement for tax increases is of earlier vintage than others mentioned above. Amendment 19 to the state constitution was adopted by an 80% vote of the people in 1934. As interpreted by the state’s highest appellate court, the amendment applies only to taxes then in effect, such as income and beer. The sales (gross receipts) tax was not in effect in 1934. Not surprisingly, therefore, it accounts for the largest portion of Arkansas public funds nowadays.
Re social services at sub-Mississippi levels, social services at sub-Arkansas levels are Mississippi. Only Mississippi.
May 24, 2009 at 8:55 am
drip
Let me be clear, as BHO might say. There is not much to like about California politics these days, but there is plenty love about California. I look forward to the next phase.