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Democrat control of the governorship and legislature is exactly what caused this mess. There was a nearly $10B surplus when Davis came in. Now we are looking at a $36B deficit, plus $10-12B deficits for the next 3 fiscal years!

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.

You make several good points and for the record, I'm surprised that there is a conservative left in San Francisco!!! :-) ... I was born and raised on the peninsula.

I agree that the liberals in four short years undid any of the successes of 16 years of Republican control, but Pete Wilson wasn't any great leader. He increased the size of government (just not at the same rate as Davis and the DEmocrats!)

Workers compensation is a good example, though we didn't get everything we wanted or needed in 1993 when the reform package went through. It was still a hell of a lot better than what we had. Now, we are going to create another crisis just two or three years down the road ... and after Davis, the electorate will vote in Republicans to fix the problems of the Democrats, and when we get them partly fixed, get rid of us so they can have their pet projects like protect-a-rodent and cut-a-tree, go-to-prison.

I'm with you on term limits. I voted NO in 1990 and still think they are a bad idea, but the electorate loves them. They can wake up every 6-8 years and vote, then sleep while the idiots they elect push their pet projects.

I think term limits are good in a limited sense in that we got rid of some of the real bad power mongers (like Willie Brown), but the few goods don't outweigh all the bads ... like the liberals who think that the money is there for them to dole out to their special interests, and who have never run a business and don't understand economics, and are basically ideological socialists who think everyone is undertaxed and don't understand why people don't want to live in 20-floor apartments with no yards in the middle of a city.