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There’s an election tomorrow in California. If several initiatives pass, the state budget deficit will be $15.4 billion. If they fail, it will be $21.3 billion.

The state is royally screwed. It’s not economics, it’s the state’s political culture.

Between democracy, immigration and big government, you can choose any two. You can't have all three.

The Economist reports:

The broken budget mechanism and the twin failures in California’s representative and direct democracy are enough to guarantee dysfunction. The sheer complexity of the state exacerbates it. Peter Schrag, the author of “California: America’s High-Stakes Experiment”, has counted about 7,000 overlapping jurisdictions, from counties and cities to school and water districts, fire and park commissions, utility and mosquito-abatement boards, many with their own elected officials. The surprise is that anything works at all.

As a result, there is now a consensus among the political elite that California’s governance is “fundamentally broken” and that the state is “ungovernable, unless we make tough choices”, as Antonio Villaraigosa, the mayor of Los Angeles and a likely candidate for governor next year, puts it.

Notice that what needs to be done is perfectly clear. We all know the answer. Like any tragedy, the problem is simply a lack of will.

Posted by edelfenbein at May 18, 2009 10:37 PM