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View Full Version : VDH: Who's To Blame for California?




AuH20
03-15-2012, 09:19 AM
Mirror needed. :D

http://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2012/03/15/whos_to_blame_for_california


Campus administrators likewise want more state money for universities. But, unlike the beleaguered faculty, their numbers by some calculations have increased 221 percent between 1975 and 2008. At CSU, there may be one administrator for every full-time faculty member. Why, then, were not the students calling for their administrators to return to the classroom, and thereby provide additional classes at reduced cost?


Are the students instead angry at the state's public employees, who on average make more and are better pensioned than their counterparts in other states? Or do protestors connect the state's escalating costs that divert money from universities with California's massive number of illegal aliens -- whether in terms of the soaring costs of social services, billions of dollars sent as remittances to Mexico, or the incarceration costs of 30,000 Mexican nationals in the state prison system?


Just 1 percent of California taxpayers are already providing 45 percent of the state's income tax revenue. And such income taxes now fund half the budget.

But unfortunately, in recent years the number of upper-income earners in California has radically shrunk -- by a third between 2007 and 2009 alone. Apparently, wealthy Californians are either fleeing to nearby no-income-tax states or have become less well-off after years of economic downturn, higher taxes, and overregulation of business. Meanwhile, the number of California's Medicaid recipients grew at 70 percent of the general population increase over the last two decades.


Yet protesting students would probably believe all those solutions were either unfair or unnecessary. The result is that we are left with mostly liberal students angry at mostly liberal policies of a mostly liberally governed state.

The once-utopian visions of 1970s California -- unionized public employees, more state lands off limits, more regulations, higher taxes on the wealthy, vastly expanded social services, de facto open borders -- have at last mostly come true, but apparently not in the fashion anticipated by most Californians of those long-ago times.

In cash-strapped Greece, when similar things happened, protestors blamed the Germans. But without Germans, whom can Californians blame but themselves?

Keith and stuff
03-15-2012, 10:48 AM
The failed policies of CA are mostly caused by the people of CA. They generally dislike freedom and continuously vote to increase statism. Otherwise, they wouldn't have near the highest property taxes, sales taxes and government fees in the US. Otherwise, in election after election, they wouldn't approve new bonds. If the people of CA would to continuously make their state worse and worse, let them. The people that care about freedom will continue to move to states like NV, ID, TX and NH.

http://mercatus.org/freedom-in-the-50-states/CA

The best way to reform the government universities in CA is to reduce state funding of them. Eventually the government universities will not be able to increase tuition anymore and will be forced to layoff the 1000s of unnecessary administrators. Less government spending will help the state as a whole, at the same time.