It's easy – justifiably so – to beat up on Stockton for spending itself into a fiscal hole so deep that bankruptcy may be its only course. City officials borrowed and spent heavily on a baseball park, a sports arena, a marina and other facilities in hopes of resurrecting a woebegone downtown, and simultaneously boosted their employees' salaries and fringe benefits. At the time, Stockton was seeing a surge of sales and property taxes from a housing boom and the city's politicians and administrators wagered, in effect, that it would go on forever. When the bubble burst, it was left...