These crooks undid in no time at all the reforms that Pete Wilson fought for and achieved in several areas. An example is worker's compensation - Wilson led a three-year battle to scale that back to reasonable levels and succeeded. The democrat crooks have removed all those restraints and it's back worse than ever. No significant business in its right mind will relocate to or expand in California.
The article seems to imply that Texas and Florida rely on sales taxes unlike California. However, California does have a sales tax of 7.25% plus county add-ons in most locations - one of the highest rates around.
While I'm correcting impressions, let me also correct an error in the article. It says that the Federal deficit of $150-200B is 1 percent of the budget - that of course should be 10%. But California's deficit is 35% of its budget, so still 3.5 times the federal shortfall, and California is not fighting a war on terror.
Lastly, I think we owe a lot of this problem to term limits. We have a bunch of novice, incompetent, economics-illiterate state legislators who in 6 years typically are gone to other government bodies or back to where they came from. They feel no long-term accountability to the state as a whole, just a need to feed bennies to the morons who elected them. Any other states that are contemplating term limits should pay attention to the California mess.