Such A Winter's Day
by Dick Polman
JULY 16, 2009 TAGS:
Has there ever been a place more romanced in song than California?
Back in the halcyon ’60s, when the California dream was the cutting edge of the American dream, as opposed to its seemingly terminal condition of the moment, the state was a veritable character on AM radio. With a spin of the dial, you’d hear the Mamas and the Papas’ California dreaming, on such a winter’s day, Joni Mitchell likening California to a rock band and I’m your biggest fan, the Beach Boys pining only for girls of California pedigree, and if you saw British bluesman John Mayall in concert, you’d hear him warble, California, so many good things around / California, I’ll be back there before long.
This was back when the state was still a magnet for rootless Americans everywhere, a state of mind, actually:
Follow the sun and buy a slice of the dream at a bargain price in a burgeoning suburb. Cruise the newly constructed web of freeways and play beach blanket bingo before hanging ten on a big wave. Grab a MacDonald’s burger (the first eatery was in California, the birthplace of trends) and head off to class at a quality public school that was unrivaled anywhere else. Punch a clock at one of the high-paying defense plants, with no fear that the federal spigot would ever run dry. Phone your friends back East and routinely ask, So when you coming out? To live, of course.
So many good things around, sang Mayall. But now it’s like the dream is on the deathbed.
California -- by itself, the eighth largest economy in the world; home to one in eight Americans; a state that normally comprises 14 percent of the U.S. economy -- can’t even pay its bills. If you’re a California taxpayer awaiting a refund, or a state vendor awaiting payment, you’ll be getting an IOU instead. The state budget deficit is $27 billion and rising, and the politicians are too dysfunctional to forge a new budget deal that would balance revenue and spending.
State workers have been furloughed, parks have been closed, the jobless rate will soon hit 12 percent, and even the swanky library in Beverly Hills now closes early three nights a week. But those are only manifestations of the current crisis. It’s the ongoing decay that matters most; California scholar Peter Schrag has called it “the Mississippification of public services.” The once-vaunted road system is now rated as one of the worst nationwide; the college graduation rates are among the worst in the country, and, as a percentage of personal income, the per-pupil financing of K-to-12 education now ranks 47th in the land.
So what’s killing the dream?
Short answer: Selfish stupidity. Long answer: A governmental process that resembles a Rube Goldberg cartoon contraption, plus selfish stupidity.
Californians want all kinds of great services, but they don’t want to pay for them -- and they have the clout to mess themselves up. This they have achieved, thanks to the wonders of ballot-box budgeting. Under California rules, it’s easy to put an issue on the ballot via referendum. Lately, voters have approved all sorts of new public spending -- for stem cell research, children’s hospitals, high speed rail, more aid to localities, you name it.
But they don’t want to pay for these services. And, by law, they can’t pay even if they want to, thanks to the infamous 1978 ballot measure known as Proposition 13, which capped property and income taxes, inflexibly so. Ever since, Californians have basically left it to their elected lawmakers to clean up the mess and square the books.
The problem is, the lawmakers can’t seem to do that either, largely because California’s rules of governance seem to have been written by that famed chronicler of stagnant bureaucracy, Franz Kafka.
Most states require only a simple majority to pass a budget; even the perpetually feuding New York lawmakers in Albany have managed to pass a budget this year. But California requires that two-thirds of the Sacramento lawmakers agree on a budget, which means that a tiny minority can veto almost any deal. And this summer, sure enough, a small band of anti-tax, anti-government Republican ideologues have gummed up the machinery. (Their perspective is notably short-sighted, given the fact that when their icon, Ronald Reagan, served as governor, he engineered the heftiest tax hike in state history, to pay for the services that Californians were demanding.)
It gets weirder. Lawmakers aren’t allowed to amend any of the spending or tax-cutting measures that the voters enact on election day. Nor can the lawmakers give these measures an expiration date. Only the voters can do that, by passing new referenda, but that virtually never happens. And even though the inflexible Prop 13 has hampered the state’s efforts to raise sufficient revenue, the current Wall Street crash has further foiled the tax collectors; according to the Los Angeles Business Journal, in 2008 the 50 richest Los Angeles citizens lost $32 billion.
So is the dream dying for good, or just taking a breather? It’s worth noting that California has been unable to pay its bills twice before -- in 1933, during the Great Depression, and in 1992, during a severe economic downturn that was compounded by deep federal cuts in California’s defense industry.
I was a roving national reporter that year, and sent several dispatches from California. I quoted the vice president of a Laguna Beach real estate firm who got laid off after first taking a 25 percent pay cut. I spoke with a small businessman from Newport Beach who complained (this will sound familiar): “Our sales dropped 40 percent in 1990, and I had to lay off 30 percent of my people. Some of ’em are still looking for work. Our sales have dropped because a lot of our retailers have been going out of business.”
And then California bounced back. So maybe this stuff is cyclical – as Steely Dan sings of California, Here come those Santa Ana winds again – and the dynamism that has powered the state in the past will resuscitate its fortunes. Infused with the energies of new immigrants – as many as 70 languages, according to experts – maybe it’s only a matter of time before California gains new life and writes a new chapter in the American experiment. Given the Golden State’s outsize impact, we better hope so.
Back in the halcyon ’60s, when the California dream was the cutting edge of the American dream, as opposed to its seemingly terminal condition of the moment, the state was a veritable character on AM radio. With a spin of the dial, you’d hear the Mamas and the Papas’ California dreaming, on such a winter’s day, Joni Mitchell likening California to a rock band and I’m your biggest fan, the Beach Boys pining only for girls of California pedigree, and if you saw British bluesman John Mayall in concert, you’d hear him warble, California, so many good things around / California, I’ll be back there before long.This was back when the state was still a magnet for rootless Americans everywhere, a state of mind, actually:
Follow the sun and buy a slice of the dream at a bargain price in a burgeoning suburb. Cruise the newly constructed web of freeways and play beach blanket bingo before hanging ten on a big wave. Grab a MacDonald’s burger (the first eatery was in California, the birthplace of trends) and head off to class at a quality public school that was unrivaled anywhere else. Punch a clock at one of the high-paying defense plants, with no fear that the federal spigot would ever run dry. Phone your friends back East and routinely ask, So when you coming out? To live, of course.
So many good things around, sang Mayall. But now it’s like the dream is on the deathbed.
California -- by itself, the eighth largest economy in the world; home to one in eight Americans; a state that normally comprises 14 percent of the U.S. economy -- can’t even pay its bills. If you’re a California taxpayer awaiting a refund, or a state vendor awaiting payment, you’ll be getting an IOU instead. The state budget deficit is $27 billion and rising, and the politicians are too dysfunctional to forge a new budget deal that would balance revenue and spending.
State workers have been furloughed, parks have been closed, the jobless rate will soon hit 12 percent, and even the swanky library in Beverly Hills now closes early three nights a week. But those are only manifestations of the current crisis. It’s the ongoing decay that matters most; California scholar Peter Schrag has called it “the Mississippification of public services.” The once-vaunted road system is now rated as one of the worst nationwide; the college graduation rates are among the worst in the country, and, as a percentage of personal income, the per-pupil financing of K-to-12 education now ranks 47th in the land.
So what’s killing the dream?Short answer: Selfish stupidity. Long answer: A governmental process that resembles a Rube Goldberg cartoon contraption, plus selfish stupidity.
Californians want all kinds of great services, but they don’t want to pay for them -- and they have the clout to mess themselves up. This they have achieved, thanks to the wonders of ballot-box budgeting. Under California rules, it’s easy to put an issue on the ballot via referendum. Lately, voters have approved all sorts of new public spending -- for stem cell research, children’s hospitals, high speed rail, more aid to localities, you name it.
But they don’t want to pay for these services. And, by law, they can’t pay even if they want to, thanks to the infamous 1978 ballot measure known as Proposition 13, which capped property and income taxes, inflexibly so. Ever since, Californians have basically left it to their elected lawmakers to clean up the mess and square the books.
The problem is, the lawmakers can’t seem to do that either, largely because California’s rules of governance seem to have been written by that famed chronicler of stagnant bureaucracy, Franz Kafka.
Most states require only a simple majority to pass a budget; even the perpetually feuding New York lawmakers in Albany have managed to pass a budget this year. But California requires that two-thirds of the Sacramento lawmakers agree on a budget, which means that a tiny minority can veto almost any deal. And this summer, sure enough, a small band of anti-tax, anti-government Republican ideologues have gummed up the machinery. (Their perspective is notably short-sighted, given the fact that when their icon, Ronald Reagan, served as governor, he engineered the heftiest tax hike in state history, to pay for the services that Californians were demanding.)
It gets weirder. Lawmakers aren’t allowed to amend any of the spending or tax-cutting measures that the voters enact on election day. Nor can the lawmakers give these measures an expiration date. Only the voters can do that, by passing new referenda, but that virtually never happens. And even though the inflexible Prop 13 has hampered the state’s efforts to raise sufficient revenue, the current Wall Street crash has further foiled the tax collectors; according to the Los Angeles Business Journal, in 2008 the 50 richest Los Angeles citizens lost $32 billion.
So is the dream dying for good, or just taking a breather? It’s worth noting that California has been unable to pay its bills twice before -- in 1933, during the Great Depression, and in 1992, during a severe economic downturn that was compounded by deep federal cuts in California’s defense industry.I was a roving national reporter that year, and sent several dispatches from California. I quoted the vice president of a Laguna Beach real estate firm who got laid off after first taking a 25 percent pay cut. I spoke with a small businessman from Newport Beach who complained (this will sound familiar): “Our sales dropped 40 percent in 1990, and I had to lay off 30 percent of my people. Some of ’em are still looking for work. Our sales have dropped because a lot of our retailers have been going out of business.”
And then California bounced back. So maybe this stuff is cyclical – as Steely Dan sings of California, Here come those Santa Ana winds again – and the dynamism that has powered the state in the past will resuscitate its fortunes. Infused with the energies of new immigrants – as many as 70 languages, according to experts – maybe it’s only a matter of time before California gains new life and writes a new chapter in the American experiment. Given the Golden State’s outsize impact, we better hope so.
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