Victor Davis Hanson, whose columns can be read in the Register, paints a fascinatingly grim picture of California and the nation generally. He draws parallels to the 1981 post-apocalyptic movie “The Road Warrior.” With an important distinction:
“Our culprit out here was not the Bomb (and remember, Hiroshima looks a lot better today than does Detroit, despite the inverse in 1945). The condition is instead brought on by a perfect storm of events that have shred the veneer of sophisticated civilization.”
Hanson ticks off some of the obvious reasons: the destruction of the California rural middle class, manufacturing jobs, small family farms and new businesses disappeared due to globalization, high taxes and new regulations; a pyramidal society followed of a few absentee land barons and corporate grandees, and a mass of those on entitlements or working for government or employed at low-skilled service jobs. . . “Illegal immigration did its share. No society can successfully absorb some 6-7 million illegal aliens, in less than two decades, the vast majority without English, legality, or education from the poorer provinces of Mexico, the arrivals subsidized by state entitlements while sending billions in remittances back to Mexico — all in a politicized climate where dissent is demonized as racism. . .” and terrible governance “that the state worked like a lottery,” “high wages, good benefits, no accountability and rich pensions,” and don’t forget, “a coarsening of popular culture — a nationwide phenomenon, which he rightly notes was “intensified, as it always is, in California.”
Road Warrior
“Add all that up,” Hanson says, “with a whiny, pampered, influential elite on the coast that was more worried about wind power, gay marriage ending plastic bags in the grocery stores — and, well, you get the present-day Road Warrior culture of California.”
We recommend Hanson’s column if your quota of bad news hasn’t been reached yet today.
So, what do we have to look forward to? More of the same, apparently.
Jon Fleicshman points out that despite the state’s horrid budgetary woes, billions of dollars of indebtedness have been OKed for “an incredibly unpopular high speed rail boondoggle,” while nearly a thousand legislative staff members get raises even as state employees take furloughs and the Parks Agency squirrels away $50 million , “totally off the grid.”
Bad enough? Apparently not.
Even Road Warrior California insists on more: a legislative effort to spend tens of millions of dollars to subsidize building of a new stadium for the San Francisco 49ers.
Therefore, the Powers that Be conclude that in November Californians must raise taxes, substantially, even in light of this spendthrift compulsion, waste, gluttony and irresponsibility.
How did California get this way? By doing what it insists on doing more of.
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How did California get this way? Ready for more of the same? is a post from: Orange Punch
