California, here I come, right back where I started from

I'm in California this week, and realized how much I missed this place. I love California, it represents all that America should be. California is a state that truly takes in the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to be free. We believe that immigration, foreign and domestic, is the engine to our economic renewal. There's an aura about us, and I have to say, it's all true. It also doesn't hurt that the weather is awesome. Haven't you heard, that's why happy cows come from California.

Being so cool and trendy, we tend to start fads that then spread to the rest of the country. Computers, Hollywood, tolerance, the OC, California culturally dominates this country. People often forget about the biggest fad of the past fifty years, and how it actually began in California. The modern conservative movement started in Southern California, near Brea and Yorba Linda among the early 60s robber barons--ahem--excuse me, job creators. Nixon, Reagan, Goldwater, they all can trace their ascension national politics from the white washed communities of Orange County. The New Right started in the suburbs of LA and found its voice during the 1964 California Republican Primary. Before Bill Clinton, California was reliably the Texas of the West in presidential elections.

Today's interpretation that California is a bastion of liberalism is somewhat misguided. We have a state legislature that requires a two thirds majority to raise taxes, and a public with a strong hyper-libertarian streak. A study of California government is a study in civic disfunction. The status of the Republican party as being more or less party in exile allows them to take out extreme positions on any budgetary matter. This uber minority has absolutely no responsibility in governing, they stake their claim, and refuse to compromise even though almost 66% of the chamber is in agreement. They own less than 40% of the seats in both houses and as such tend to come off as cantankerous old fools yelling nonsense proposals from the back bench.

"We need a 999 plan." "Oh, hold on let me grab a pizza menu."

California conservatives exemplify the Id of the Republican Party. They've never governed and as such have never been held accountable by the public for their intransigence in the face of much needed reform. The desire of the national GOP to endlessly obstruct any kind of congressional progress at the federal level directly lends its inspiration to California. The revenue component of last spring's "Cut, Cap, and Balance", is essentially in effect in California, and has been for years. If congress determines that no revenue increases should occur unless a 66% supermajority approves you'll find a country that can only deficit spend and never pay for its programs, effectively castrating government as a tool for social progress. Those roads, those public universities, those teachers, that public infrastructure that made this country an economic powerhouse after the war, all defunded because the government couldn't approve revenue measures. It happened in California, it will happen on a national level if those types of revenue restrictions are put in place.

California once had the strongest infrastructure that supported the strongest economy in the country. Once Proposition 13 passed in 1978, all that changed. California's schools have fallen to the bottom, we have entire cities that are going bankrupt and cannot even afford a fire or police department (see: Vallejo, San Jose). There are sections of the San Francisco Bay Area that are starting to look like the third world (see: Richmond). Let me repeat, not the Inland Empire, not the Central Valley, the Bay Area. Help for the middle class can't even come to a region with a booming tech sector. If the California fad of civic disfunction spreads to the federal government, look forward to the abandonment of investment in our future.