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Friday, May 15, 2009

The Mandated Detroitification of California

[via Calitics]
For our failed governor, a budget deficit always means one thing: cuts. A man cut from the Milton Friedman cloth, Arnold Schwarzenegger is determined to destroy the government he was elected in 2003 to save…. Budget cuts make no rational sense in a severe economic crisis such as this. When state budgets contracted between 1930 and 1932, it helped a recession become a Great Depression…. Tax increases on the wealthy are preferable to budget cuts…. [California's] budget deficit is NOT a problem of "overspending" but of a revenue drop… [a] phenomenon Arnold is going to exacerbate.... [M]ass layoffs will merely exacerbate the retail decline… and worsen a second foreclosure wave already predicted to be severe. If someone can explain to me how laid off teachers and bureaucrats are going to pay mortgages and spend at local businesses, I'm all ears…. [Schwarzenegger will] cut public services to the bone, destroy mass transit, worsen the quality of education, and gut our health care services. How exactly is that going to produce economic growth?! California under Arnold Schwarzenegger is a place where economic logic, basic math, and future planning go to die… With closed libraries, crappy schools, unaffordable college, and mass unemployment, few business[es] in their right mind would want to relocate here. As other states plan for the 21st century by moving toward green transportation and new investments in education, California is locking itself into a late 20th century model that has already failed. Arnold is not just presiding over, but actively mandating a downward spiral, a Detroitification of the once-Golden State.

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