Is about to go bust. The notion that CA is doing better than Texas would be hilarious if it weren’t such an infuriating lie.
Reminder: When the state asks for a federal bailout, it should be only on the condition that it become a territory, and not be allowed back in as a single state.
[Update a while later]
I wish that this didn’t seem related: Printing money in Venezuela didn’t work out all that well. Of course, California can’t print money, fortunately.
Your territory solution is great except for one teeny weeny problem.
What do you see as being the *one* problem with that?
Is a solution a solution if it will never happen?
CA will not give up its political power. Can it be forced to? I don’t see the backbone required to make that happen.
So, much of the budget recovery is based on asset inflation? Could that be because of the Obama/Bernanke printing machine that has created the Keynsian nightmare we now live in? Once again, thanks to government intervention, the rich are richer and the middle class is toast. But hey, who cares? Facebook and Apple shares are soaring!
Printing money and giving it to the banks and keeping the interests rates low so that people have no choice but to park their money in stocks worked pretty good for pumping up the stock market. It should be interesting, in a Chinese proverb sort of way, to see what happens when the FED raises rates.
Since stocks go down whenever raising rates is even mentioned, they probably wont be raised before November. Whether or not they get raised after that depends on who becomes President.
Why can’t California print money? Because the constitution says so? That is not such a great barrier these days. The courts routinely rule that the constitution means things that it plainly does not say. Why should it be impossible to get them to rule that the prohibition against states declaring anything but gold and silver coin to be money doesn’t really mean that. I can think of several arguments to justify it.
Airline miles, iTunes, Amazon gift cards….
There are plenty of things that aren’t money … that are pretty darn close in some respects. Heck, lottery tickets.
The problem they’d have is in establishing any value in the item itself, which is essential if you’re trying to scam people into accepting them as any part of their contracts/pay/benefits. Although I could see offering ‘tax discounts’ on waterfront property as a quick way to make certain segments value California Citizenship Credits. This would be followed by handing them out to allies/friends and the entire Banana Republic insanity. No, it’s be like the hairdressers declaring leaves to be money.
CA has already ‘printed money.’ My ex-wife works for the state. A few years ago CA could not pay its employees so they gave them something (I don’t know exactly what, but it wasn’t a paycheck) and banks cashed them. Apparently the state promised the banks they would redeem these ‘notes’ if they went along.
“California can’t print money”
Yet.
Of course, it’s not necessary when they’ve got their fellow travelers in D.C. to do it.
I wonder what the tipping point will be? For Detroit, it took a large scale riot to change attitudes overnight and drive their city to bankruptcy and widespread abandonment. Will it be a large scale destruction of property? Will it be just some idiotic law? What will the last straw be?
The roads and highways will supply the tipping point.
When they built all of those “freeways” and Interstate highways in California, if you had a car, you had freedom. Now you are gridlocked in traffic all hours of the day and the roads are pot-holed ruins? I haven’t driven in California in 30 years, so someone can either corroborate or correct my impression.
For a while, there was an “out” — if you drove a Prius or had someone else in the car, you got to use the Special Lanes? That will change if it already hasn’t. Will be required to ride the bus or train.
I suppose the deterioration of the transportation system is a “boiling a frog by gradually heating the water” matter. And I guess people don’t draw the connection between the One-Party Enviro State and the policies that regard cars as evil and that no transportation infrastructure gets built unless it is multi-occupant lanes or trains.
You all heard the Heinleinism that the normal state of human affairs is to be stuck in traffic? But every once in a while comes a guy like Edmund G “Pat” Brown (Sr.), an exceptional person who gets new roads built and people and come and go as they please. But that person will be replaced by his son Edmund G “Jerry” Brown, Jr., who venerates Mother Gaia, the people will revert to being stuck in traffic at all hours, but this reversion to the normal state of affairs will be attributed to cell phones and the poor driving skills attributed by stereotyping bigotry to Asian immigrants?
But do you suppose people will make this inference?