By now almost every living American, other than public employees and their union officials, is aware that state governments across the nation are on the verge of fiscal collapse.\u00a0<\/p>\n
According to a February 2010 Washington Post<\/em> report, \u201cEven before financial markets crashed in fall 2008, state governments nationwide had promised to deliver $1 trillion more in retirement benefits than they had in their pension investment funds.\u201d\u00a0 In addition to a $587 billion shortfall in retiree healthcare costs, the states owed an additional $452 billion in retiree pension payments.<\/p>\n A study published by the Pew Center on the States raises questions about the \u201crosy assumptions\u201d state pension fund administrators make in predicting how much their investments will earn.\u00a0 While the S&P 500 index fell by 20% over the previous decade, states continue to predict a grossly unrealistic 8% annual return on their investments.<\/p>\n Writing in his Market Watch<\/em> newsletter, Robert Powell warns that, \u201cState policy makers who ignore the current shortfall do so at their own peril.\u00a0 Indeed, states that fail to address under-funded retirement systems face the very real possibility of raising taxes or taking taxpayer money that could be used for education, public safety, and other necessary services just to pay public sector retirement benefit obligations.\u201d<\/p>\n Try telling that to newly-elected California Governor Jerry Brown, the man Californians might see as the personification of the old adage, \u201cBe careful what you wish for\u2026 you just might get it.\u201d\u00a0 After serving one term as California Secretary of State, 1971-75; two terms as Governor, 1975-83; two terms as Mayor of Oakland, 1999-07; and one term as California Attorney General, 2007-11, one might think that somewhere along the way Brown might have concluded that his approach to government regularly produces nothing but unpleasant results.<\/p>\n Now he returns to the governor\u2019s mansion at a time when, as historian Victor Davis Hansen describes it, California has \u201cthe highest sales and income taxes, the most lavish entitlements, the near-worst public schools, and the largest number of illegal aliens in the nation, along with an over-regulated private sector, a stagnant and shrinking manufacturing base, and an elite environmental ethos that restricts commerce and productivity without curbing consumption.\u201d<\/p>\n The most telling picture of where California is today, and where it is headed tomorrow, comes from a series of 20-mile bicycle excursions that Hansen took through the cities and towns of the Central Valley\u2026 an effort to witness, \u201ceven superficially,\u201d what is happening to the region of California that he has called home.\u00a0<\/p>\n On the western side of the Central Valley, which formerly produced a quarter of the nation\u2019s fruits and vegetables, some 100,000 acres went unplanted in 2008.\u00a0 That number was expected to grow to 750,000 acres by the end of 2009.\u00a0 The drop in food production was a direct result of a drought, accompanied by the cutoff of irrigation water by a federal court order favoring a tiny fish, the delta smelt, which is protected by the federal Endangered Species Act.\u00a0 Economists estimate that the shortage of irrigation water will mean $1.5 billion in lost income and the elimination of 40,000 jobs.<\/p>\n The impression that most non-Californians have of the Golden State is one of movie studios, movie stars, beautiful sandy beaches, palm trees, orange groves, and vineyards.\u00a0 But that\u2019s not what Hansen found as he made his three-times-a-week bicycle tours of the once-lush Central Valley.\u00a0 He says, \u201cMany of the rural trailer-house compounds I saw appear to the naked eye no different from what I have seen in the Third World.\u00a0 There is a Caribbean look to the junked cars, electric wires crisscrossing between various outbuildings, plastic tarps substituting for replacement shingles, lean-tos cobbled together as auxiliary housing, pit bulls unleashed, and geese, goats, and chickens roaming the yards.\u201d<\/p>\n As a state with a reputation for heavy-handed business regulation, tough zoning laws, and strict building codes, Hansen was forced to conclude that none of that reputation was earned outside the coastal megalopolis from San Diego to San Francisco.\u00a0 He was appalled at the number of rented-out rural shacks and stationary Winnebagos parked on what once were small farms\u2026 the vineyards overgrown with weeds, or torn out with the ground lying fallow\u2026 Apparently it is not worth the gamble of investing $7,000 to $10,000 an acre in a new orchard or vineyard\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n Hansen\u2019s visit to two supermarkets, 50 miles apart, was most instructive.\u00a0 In both instances, he found that he was the only customer in line who did not pay for groceries with a social-service plastic card\u2026 the electronic cards that have replaced the paper \u201cfood stamps,\u201d the use of which proved to be so embarrassing for the poor and \u201cdisadvantaged.\u201d\u00a0 Of particular note to Hansen was the disparity between the implied poverty of the card users and their automobiles and electronic gadgetry.\u00a0 While most card users purchased groceries with public assistance credit cards, they carried iPhones, Bluetooths, and Blackberries and loaded their groceries into late-model Accords, Camrys, and Tauruses.<\/p>\n The closest that the rich and famous of Palm Beach, Beverly Hills, and Carmel will ever get to any of this politically self-imposed squalor is what they might see from the windows of their private jets as they head for their condos in New York or their estates in the Hamptons.\u00a0 But if they really wanted to see what is in store for California, after generations of Democrat control of state and local government, they can get a pretty accurate picture by arranging a brief stopover in Detroit.\u00a0 Like California in the years ahead, Detroit is a showcase of what liberal social policies and uninterrupted Democratic political control can do to a city or a state.<\/p>\n In a recent article by journalist Frosty Wooldridge, he describes Detroit, the city he called home for fifteen years, from the mid-1970s until 1990.\u00a0 He writes, \u201cI watched it descend into the abyss of crime, debauchery, gun play, drugs, school truancy, car-jacking, gangs, and human depravity.\u00a0 I watched entire city blocks burned out.\u00a0 I watched graffiti explode on buildings, cars, trucks, buses, and school yards.\u00a0 Trash everywhere!\u201d<\/p>\n Wooldridge tells us, \u201cDetroiters walked through it, tossed more onto it, and ignored it.\u00a0 Tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands today, exist on federal welfare, free housing, and food stamps.\u00a0 With Aid to Dependent Children, minority women birthed eight to ten, and in one case reported by the Detroit Free Press<\/em>, one woman birthed 24 children… all on American taxpayer dollars.\u00a0 A new child meant a new car payment, new TV, and whatever mom wanted.\u00a0 I saw Lyndon Baines Johnson\u2019s \u2018Great Society\u2019 flourish in Detroit.\u00a0 If you give money for doing nothing, you will get more hands out, taking money for doing nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n Wooldridge points out that Detroit\u2019s population has declined by 50%, from 1.8 million to 912,000, while legal and illegal immigrants flock to the city, attracting more than 300,000 Muslims and 400,000 Mexicans. \u00a0The crime rate soars and 7 out of 10 murders go unsolved.<\/p>\n According to Wooldridge, Detroit is now a city on \u201clife support.\u201d\u00a0 As the once-great automobile industry hurtled toward bankruptcy, the steadily worsening unemployment rate hit 28.9 percent in 2009 and the city finds itself $300 million short of what is needed to provide even the most basic municipal services.\u00a0 The school system, with a dropout rate of 76%, is now in receivership.\u00a0 Yet, just six years ago, the politically powerful teachers union forced school administrators to reject a philanthropist\u2019s offer of $200 million to build fifteen independent charter schools.\u00a0<\/p>\n What is important for the American people to understand is that what has happened to Detroit is happening in all of our major cities and in all of our most populous states… California, Illinois, and New York… where Democratic political machines are in control.\u00a0 But none of this was unpredicted.\u00a0 Conservatives and Republicans have been warning for generations of what happens when an unprincipled political party, with access to large voting blocs who want something from government at the expense of everyone else, gains control of government.\u00a0 What is Detroit today is Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco of tomorrow.<\/p>\n To return California government to the hands of a free-spending, union-friendly Democrat like Jerry Brown, at a time when the only useful prescription for California\u2019s future is strict austerity, makes no more sense than to put Dr. Jack Kevorkian in charge of the \u201csuicide watch\u201d unit at the local psychiatric hospital.\u00a0 But that\u2019s exactly what California voters did on November 2.\u00a0 They had a chance to elect a successful businesswoman, Meg Whitman, who could have put their state on a path to economic salvation, but they chose to do otherwise.\u00a0 They chose, instead, a course that will ultimately result in bankruptcy and the abrogation of public employee union contracts.\u00a0<\/p>\n When that happens, the public employee unions and their Democrat enablers will expect the American taxpayer to come to their rescue, but that\u2019s not going to happen.\u00a0 To suggest that the American people will increase their indebtedness by another trillion dollars, just to save the states and their public employee unions from decades of bad decisions, is foolhardy at best.\u00a0<\/p>\n Yes, Dr. Jack Kevorkian lives\u2026 and he resides in Sacramento, in Chicago, in Detroit, in New York, and in every city and state in America where Democrats promise something for nothing, if only the uneducated masses will continue to pull the Democrat lever on Election Day.\u00a0 How long will it take for the great cities of California to become just like Detroit?\u00a0 It\u2019s hard to say, but their fate is certain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By now almost every living American, other than public employees and their union officials, is aware that state governments across the nation are on the verge of fiscal collapse.\u00a0 According to a February 2010 Washington Post report, \u201cEven before financial … Continue reading