There is little America can do for California. The saying goes this way: the first generation earns the money, the second generation manages to keep it, and the third generation spends it all. California is in the fourth generation now. The money's been spent, but the lifestyle goes on. This is happening where I live, Illinois.
All the wealth built up in a low/no-tax and low/no-regulation environment has been eaten up. The principle is gone, but America didn't do that. You and I didn't vote these policies. The Welfare State is the utopian dream of the rich and ignorant (not necessarily the same).
What can America do to reign in the policies implemented at the state and local level in California? What policy should we put in place? You're right that California is critical to America, but you have now generations of people trained not to work. They've never had to strive for anything, so they don't know how. Everything has been given to them. To run against that is to lose election after election.
Here's my proposed solution. Add ten states to the union. Take the top ten urban counties and make them their own states with the remainder of the existing counties remaining as their own state. In this way you could unburden the suburbs and countryside and allow them to thrive outside the undo influence of city liberals. What do you think?
Three generations from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves. - Andrew Carnegie
I think the idea stinks. The 10 new senators representing the new "city-states" would be automatically bluer than blue, big government gun-grabbing demoncrats. The states from which these "city-states" were carved would very likely thereby be more conservative, but not sufficiently so to guarantee that all senators elected from those states would be conservative. Your fanciful suggestion would likely swing the balance of the Senate substantially to the left.
Now, if the ten largest cities could be carved out of their states and composed into a single state, this proposal might have some merit. A sufficient number of the senators elected from the new sans-city states would probably be reliably conservative enought to more than counterbalance the two new automatically deep blue senators from the State of Megalopolis. Illinois, for example, might actually elect conservative senators if the entirety of the Chicago metropolitan area were carved away from the remainder of the state.