YESTERDAY I BEGAN A RESPONSE to a conservative from the east coast, who lectured me about our economic crisis on "the left coast", and how it was an object lesson to the nation—a warning of the dangers of the "tax and spend" left wing.
I pointed out that my experience, as someone who lived here since the sixties, was the exact opposite.
I told how Reagan and proposition 13 began the decline of what had once been a truly golden era, when California had flourished, and attracted businesses, with the best infrastructure in the country.
Since then, one conservative after another has found ways to give away any reserves the state might have put aside—leaving us, at the moment of this crisis, without adequate savings to deal with an economic turndown.
Pete Wilson returned a rare budget surplus to the taxpayers, instead of saving it for a rainy day (like this one).
Arnold Schwarzenegger rolled back the vehicle tax shortly after being elected, in spite of the fact that there was no sign how the programs it funded could be supported. And he has consistently opposed any move to increase other taxes to take its place.
On the national level, the Bush administration's reduction of the estate tax—a tax which shared revenues with the states—cost California dearly. If the conservatives in the Bush administration had managed to completely eliminate the tax, it would have cost the California budget over two and a half billion per year by 2012.
As a result of one "principled" (and selfish) conservative measure after another, our golden state has been driven to the brink of disaster, and the drama continues along the same themes.
If it had not been for the two-thirds majority requirement, the Republican stonewall, and Arnold's veto threats, we would not be in our present straits. The Democrats had a solution months ago. The people of the state endorse a series of solutions that involve mild tax increases on corporations and on the wealthy—and would work.
But at this juncture, in the middle of a serious recession, the state is paying with IOUs, laying workers off, cutting back on services, and, in short, doing everything it can to make matters worse.
Meanwhile, Arnold lectures the State as though it was a naughty child for not simply following daddy's orders and sucking it up.
Every single conservative tax move in the last fifty years has undermined the health of the state as a whole in order to feather the nests of the wealthy.
This is happening over the will of the people, and over the will of their elected majority in the state legislature.
In the end I guess my east coast friend was right—we are an object lesson to the nation.
California is, in microcosm, the tragedy that occurs when conservatives get to put their theories about taxation and government services into action.
At least, that's what I think today.
