California, most of all states, tends to wax grandiloquent of its own glories. For generations, California has been the end of a long journey, a destination, a dream — and there has been much to glorify.
But as a long piece in the United Kingdom’s The Guardian newspaper recently observed, California’s dream is dissipating. Headlined “Will California become America’s first failed state?” the article bemoaned the plight of the state that once was golden.
But while Paul Harris’s Guardian piece eloquently chronicles the tarnishing of California, it does not correctly diagnose the cause, and its promised solutions, while hopeful, are not solutions at all.
They are, in fact, strangely symptomatic of the wishful exercises that have turned the California Dream, horribly, into a nightmare.
California, as historian and Hoover Institution fellow Victor Davis Hanson points out, is located in perhaps the richest natural region in the world. It is home to agriculture that feeds a nation, an enviable climate and culture that entertains the world. It will never lack for resources, tourists or potential.
Yet California was recently reduced to handing out IOUs to state workers and those owed tax refunds, while its action-hero governor mused about ways to solve the budget crisis while brandishing a hunting knife on YouTube. The Legislature finally agreed on a budget compromise, but it is widely viewed as a stopgap solution that will pass the buck to future legislatures.
California’s $26 billion budget deficit (note well, Arizona) was the result of massive social and political expenditures that were paid for, if at all, on the speculation of a limitless future.
The fault is not all with the politicians, though they are as bad in California as they are nearly anywhere. California is certainly poorly governed.
But as the Economist recently reported, California is also almost ungovernable.
A constitutional system that relies on citizen initiatives has devolved, as California’s special interests and unions have discovered the blissful ability to vote themselves money. This has led to a state that, in Hanson’s phrasing, has achieved “all at once the nation’s highest sales and income tax rates — and yet also the largest annual state deficit.”
A Reason Foundation study found that, while California’s revenues increased by 167 percent since 1990, state spending far outpaced even that growth.
All of this has particular relevance for Arizona. As in California, this state’s population has grown immensely. As in California, budget wrangling and partisan bickering has become a constant part of Arizona’s politics. As in California, state spending has outpaced state growth, to the point where the government recently considered selling the Capitol building and renting it back.
To Harris and many in California, the way out is simple: green jobs, cutting down on sprawl, spending on solar energy and combating climate change — these are the upsides of a downturn. But, as with any government program, the problem is that someone has to pay for it.
And if corporations and wealthy individuals continue to flee the state, in a reverse of the pattern of the last 150 years, there won’t be anyone left to foot the bill.
In Arizona, we have no Hollywood to dramatize our stories and to mythologize our struggles. California’s collapse has something of the silver screen, some mythical quality. Arizona’s similar fiscal woes will have no tragic allure.
But the lessons are the same. We cannot have what we cannot pay for and we are foolish to believe that we can. It’s an age-old California mistake, one that we should not repeat.
