Cassandra, thy time is nigh ...........

I decided to take a break today from commenting directly on Obama and chose instead to take a look at the state that was my home for so many years.

Not long after I arrived in California a measure known as Proposition 13 was added to an off-year election cycle. It was an attempt to rein in the counties voracious and insatiable addiction to more and more tax revenue. Well, this week something similar happened and this time around it was even more one-sided than in 1978.

One of the ancillary reasons I moved to Arizona was because I was so thoroughly appalled by the senseless waste of resources by the politicians in Sacramento who are liberal to the point of insanity. Both the Assembly and the Senate are dominated by Democrats and even “the Governator” is nothing more than a “RINO”, Republican in Name Only. The state as a whole is massively in debt and yet the spendthrifts in Sacramento keep coming up with one entitlement program after the other. The fiscal situation is so bad that if you were due to receive a refund from the previous year’s tax payment well, tough, because you are not going to get it. Instead you’ll get an IOU which puts you in a similar position to an IRA owner at Enron.

Anyway, in an attempt to rectify this mess, there were five ballot measures on the slate that called for tax increases from one source or another and one proposition to limit legislative pay. Every measure to increase taxes went down to defeat in spite of, or maybe because of, the fact that Arnold lobbied hard for their passage. But what was even more stunning was the extent of the defeat. Proposition 1A was defeated in every single county in the state. The closest it came to passage was in San Francisco County, Nancy Pelosi’s home turf and even in that leftist bastion it only managed to struggle to 46%. The right-hand maidens of liberals everywhere, the media, labeled the voters “selfish” while totally ignoring the reality that California is one of the highest taxed states in the Union.

Nevertheless, the message sent by the voters could not have been clearer. Cut spending or else! But the politicians including the Governor didn’t react that way at all. Their response was that as we can’t raise money via taxes and as we are prohibited from printing it, well then we’ll borrow it. Even the ostriches in Sacramento know that their bond rating is so bad that their chances of raising money in the capital markets is nil so who else is left? Why, the Feds of course and so it seems likely that Washington DC will bail out the Golden State which means in turn that the other 49 states will be on the hook. Too big to fail. Does that ring any bells?

While I am not a Pollyanna by nature, I do see a glimmer of promise here. It’s been said many times about many different topics. “As goes California, so goes the Nation”. I suspect and certainly pray that between now and 2010 we’ll start to see a reaction build against Obama and his ever-bigger government mantra. Let’s first cut Pelosi and Reed down to size and then two years later consign Obama to the trash heap of failed doctrines.