Archive for January 10th, 2010

From Rhonda Bodfield, Arizona Daily Star. Tucson v Business

George Will weighs in on California liberalism. We’ve covered in this blog many many times. Arizona is faced with similar choices. Which way will be go?

It took years for liberalism’s redistributive itch to create an income tax so steeply progressive that it prompts the flight from the state of wealth-creators: “Between 1990 and 2007,” Voegeli writes, “some 3.4 million more Americans moved from California to one of the other 49 states than moved to California from another state.”

And the state’s income tax — liberalism codified — intensifies the effects of business cycles on the state’s revenue stream: During booms, the stream surges and stimulates government spending; during contractions, revenues dwindle but the new government spending continues. Voegeli says that if California’s spending had grown no faster than population growth and inflation from 1992 to 2006, it would have been $65 billion less in 2006, and per capita government outlays then would have equaled not those of Somalia or Mississippi but of Oregon, which is hardly “a hellish paradigm of Social Darwinism.”

It took years for liberalism’s mania for micromanaging life with entangling regulations to make California’s once creative economy resemble Gulliver immobilized by the Lilliputians’ many threads. The state, which between 1990 and 2007 lost 26 percent of its factory jobs and 35 percent of its high-tech manufacturing jobs, ranks behind only New York, another of liberalism’s laboratories, in the number of outward-bound moving vans.

It took years for compassionate liberalism to make California’s welfare menu contribute to the state becoming an importer of Mexico’s poverty. It took years for servile liberalism to turn the state into what Voegeli calls a “unionocracy,” run by and for unionized public employees, such as public safety employees who can retire at 50 and receive 90 percent of the final year’s pay for life.

Friend reports that when the seven-hour meeting ended, the protest moved to the UC president’s house. Two buses carried “some hundred Berkeley students and members of AFSCME.” Perfect.

The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees is one reason why California’s government employees — their numbers grew 24 percent between 1997 and 2007 — are the nation’s most highly compensated. And why California’s economy is being suffocated by the weight of government. And why the state’s budget has little left over for Berkeley.