Or at least it appears that a majority of Californians were already smoking some serious weed:
Californians object to increasing taxes in order to pare the state’s massive budget deficit, and instead favor closing the breach through spending cuts. But they oppose cuts—and even prefer more spending—on programs that make up 85% of the state’s general fund obligations, a new Los Angeles Times/USC Poll has found.
That paradox rests on Californians’ firm belief that the state’s deficit—estimated last week at nearly $25 billion over the next 18 months—can be squared through trimming waste and inefficiencies rather than cutting the programs they hold dear. Despite tens of billions that have been cut from the state budget in recent years, just a quarter of California voters believed that state services would have to be curtailed to close the deficit.
As is his wont, my friend and colleague Steve Bainbridge is not amused: “Can democracy work when people are idiots?,” he asks. “It’s no wonder Scientology is so big out here. Apparently Californians will believe anything, no matter how moronic.”
Very true. But there is a bigger problem here. The entire gravamen of Republican Party ideology since St. Ronald is that government is so shot through with “waste, fraud, and abuse” that we can cut it without any consequences. My UCLA colleague David Sears’ classic book on Proposition 13 carries with it an even more classic subtitle: “Something for Nothing in California.”
This may be true on Planet GOP, where tax cuts pay for themselves, where Saddam Hussein caused 9/11 and had weapons of mass destruction, where climate change is a hoax, where Barack Obama is a Marxist Muslim, where the federal government is taking over our Medicare, where progressives are derided for being too “reality-based,” where war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength. But it is not true on earth.
Republicans never meant it, of course: their hope was that they would “starve the beast” and attempt to redistribute income upward in order to turn the whole country into Mississippi, or maybe Venezuela. And now they find that the voters don’t want them to and they don’t know what to do. They have told the big lie for 30 years, but it’s hard now to say, “Oh, sorry folks: just kidding.”
As Steve is fond of saying, you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. It’s even worse if you are the dogs and fleas simultaneously.
Now you tell me.
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things are just warming up. It’s gonna’ get real crazy. I just hope (and pray? ) that Obama can rise to the affair. The Republicans are dirty fighters, with no holds barred, and I’m sick and tired of Obama’s naivity.
Get down and dirty OPbama! Now! For the next 6 years! Start now!
I’m so tired of his tactics. I wish Hillary were President.a
Well, with a Rep governor and Rep majorities in the legislature, we’ll see how this works out in Michigan. I suppose as long as school districts don’t have to get rid of their football teams or readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmatic, and the freeways and US highways don’t actually go back to gravel roads there won’t be any great outcry.
This problem doesn’t exist only in California. It’s a national problem. People widely believe that all the “out of control” government spending goes to welfare bums, illegal aliens and good old “waste, fraud and abuse”.
In fact, it goes mostly toward things they don’t want cut, like Medicare, Social Security and the military. Bainbridge is correct.
I lived in CA for a long time and got out just in time (2003). My sense wasn’t that everyone thought that there was so much waste that a kaboodlezillion could be cut and all would be chill, yo. My sense was that everyone thought the system was broken and if you ignored enough of it, something would happen and all would be fixed. But then again, I lived in Sacto and knew a bunch of state workers, so go figure.
A good read! Steve seems to like Poor Richard.