The GOP may not win the WH, or the Senate ( though I think we will) but the House will stay GOP..and become ever more conservative, for the rest of the decade. California MUST go bankrupt....there is no way to resolve the debt crisis without tossing out the civil service labor and pension contracts..as has already happened in a few smaller cities..the state can’t get out from under otherwise. And with a conservative GOP controlling the House, California can forget about ANY bailout..which is all that the Dems in Sacramento can now hope for..
You sound hopeful, on various fronts.
I will stipulate to the fact that CA will not be able to cure itself, even if it goes “France” and raises taxes to 75% on upper-earners.
I’m not so hopeful that whatever mix we get vis a vis Congress, that some national security concern will not educe a bailout for CA. The US has become the character in Blazing Saddles who holds a gun to its own head and threatens to kill the guy as if the victim is a third person. The US (and most state) debt situation is so serious, it could well take a GDP reduction of 5-10-20% (the actual number is around 40% if you do the math) and here we are, crying tears of abject destruction in a fetal position over cuts that total maybe 1%, at best. To solve this debt issue, GDP is going to have to contract more than it ever has by a massive degree, and it will produce the most vicious depression ever conceived. Whatever political party invokes this or is in power when this occurs will be out of power thereafter, permanently.
Maybe, in the long term, this is the highest and best use of the GOP-e. But the pain that is to be inflicted during this readjustment is something no American will ever willingly ratify.