California dreamin'

I've never considered myself the smartest guy in the world. But I've always tried to emulate what successful people do.

Here's a couple of examples. I've nevered whored around and created a child support nightmare. I went to school and received an education. I've always worked and never left a job without another in place.

In fact, if you do only those three things in life, statistically your odds of ever living in poverty are minute.

Liberals have always cracked me up with their lack of introspection. Case in point. Your city budgets are always strained and residents are leaving your city for the suburbs where the tax base is about one half of yours. What is your first instinct? Instead of reforming your city and making your community more like a successful suburb, you raise taxes which does nothing more than chase more people away.

Here's a good post over at NRO on the introspection of California liberals.

One of the strangest things about the current California meltdown is how no one in state government here ever pauses to ask simple questions like: Why do we have the largest annual deficit with one of the highest sales tax and income tax rates in the country?

Anyone who charted the annual state budget increases over the last 10 years and adjusted for population and inflation rises would conclude that the state has decided to take over all sorts of previously private responsibilities and to ensure state employees and various dependents a level of compensation that is not sustainable.

It is not as if California decided about 10 years ago to invest to ensure we had state of the art freeways, university campuses, ports, airports, dams, canals, and power infrastructure. Instead, it was too often redistribution rather than investment. It is not like we can get out of the mess by simply stopping all construction when a vast public work force with pension and salary claims, along with entitlements and welfare, take the lion's share of the budget.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands whom we used to count on to pay our nearly 10% state income rates continue to flee the state. All the past sleight-of-hand borrowing, reliance on inflated real estate, lotteries, bonds, etc. have already been tried. Now we hit the wall of reality, whose iron-clad law — when you have no money, you really have no money — cannot be so easily demagogued away.

I guess what Ronald Reagan said 40 years ago still holds true today. "Liberals know so much, they just no so much that isn't so."