The "progressive" Utopia of California

They called it paradise
I don't know why
Somebody laid the mountains low
While the town got high


From the Golden State..............

California has exerted a weird, hypnotic pull lately, as Americans have watched the Golden State roll toward what might just be financial Armageddon. The state government is facing a $24 billion deficit, but Democrats and Republicans in Sacramento are showing very little ability to get the problem solved.

As a result, California is “less than 50 days away from a meltdown of state government,” the state controller said last week.

It’s hard to know whether to stare in horror or avert your eyes.

Our advice: Stare. Because in California’s example, there are lessons for Minnesotans and North Dakotans to learn.

One such lesson has to do with public-employee pensions and a state’s fiscal health. California faces unfunded public employee retirement benefits of somewhere between $300 billion and $1 trillion, a panel discussion at the Milken Institute’s State of the State Conference concluded in May.

Joel Kotkin, presidential fellow at Chapman University in Orange County, Calif., and a popular writer on public policy, agrees. “The item that is most killing the state budget is the huge pensions for public employees,” he said in a recent CNBC interview.

“We have to figure out what we’re spending, how we’re spending, and to begin to make the public employees live by something close to the rules that the rest of society does.”

Basically, California governments let many workers retire early and collect generous pension and benefits for life. In Vallejo, Calif., for example, “base pay for firefighters is more than $80,000 per year, and employees can retire at age 50 with a pension equal to 90 percent of their salary,” Governing magazine reported last year.

Vallejo declared bankruptcy in 2008, citing pension benefits it no longer could afford.

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