“I have been reading since THE SEVENTIES!!!! about this state or that state being on the brink of bankruptcy...”
You have a point. The difference [”it’s different this time!”] with CA is that until maybe 5-8 years ago, CA was literally a nation in and of itself, and a very well-endowed one, with industry of every description, agriculture, high-tech for days, even reasonable oil production, and of course non-out-of-control real estate frenzy. CA in effect had giant, giant sources of revenue that it could suck up to pay for whatever petri-dish sized experiments it came up with in between bong hits.
Now, it’s not goofy panic any more. It’s incontrovertible math. We have entrenched gov’t employees of every description earning 2-3x what they’d earn in the private sector (if anyone was foolish enough to hire their useless asses in the first place) writing feel-good regulation after regulation, in endless, faceless bureaucracies accountable to nobody, creating higher and higher hurdles to business and biz expansion; and we have waves and waves of illegals entitled to welfare largesse of every description. If you believe (as I do) that there has to be productive businesses to create jobs for a functioning economy, CA has effectively declared war on same, on multiple fronts. Prop 13, our prop tax limitation, is clearly on the table. AB32, the most draconian global-warming emissions control regime imaginable may by itself make truck delivery and certainly *any* hard-goods industry literally impossible; this prop 25 which gives legislature unlimited largesse to raise taxes ad lib, upon 50% legislative approval...the collective impact of these things will take what is now the 48th least-friendly business climate in the US and blast it all the way off the gameboard.
In short: It’s not random panic any more. It’s hard math.
In short, it’s hard to imagine that the holes that have been blasted into the bucket are not massively larger than the ever-diminishing flow of water pouring into the bucket. The economy in general is in a secular contraction, and business is on notice that it is a target of opportunity. We have quite literally reached that Ben Franklin point where the voters have decided that they can vote to tax themselves without limit to pay a gaggle of economic Dr.
Mengele’s to perform anaesthetic-free experiments upon them.
Very well said. I’m waiting to see how it all unfolds.