Californication

Honestly, is there anything more degrading than being compared to Lindsey Lohan? Allysia Finley goes there:

California: The Lindsay Lohan of States
Listen up, California. The other 48 states—your cousin New York excluded—are sick of your bratty arrogance. You're the Lindsay Lohan of states: a prima donna who once showed some talent but is now too wasted to do anything with it.

After enjoying ephemeral highs and spending binges, you suffer crashes that culminate in brief, unsuccessful stints in rehab. This cycle repeats itself every five to 10 years, as the rest of the country looks on with a mixture of horror and amusement. We'd feel sorry for you if you didn't constantly flip us the bird.

Instead, we're making bets on how long it will be before your next meltdown. Oh, wait—you're already melting down.

Here’s the deal-California deserves its very own category at the Darwin Awards. The state has become too useless to survive and astonishingly, it is proud of its idiocy. One can imagine the meetings that take place in the various government halls throughout the state: “We simply must have a Commission for the Study and Improvement of the Eleven Known Auras. We’ll fund it a special tax on Happy Meals.” “But we’ve outlawed Happy Meals.” “Then we’ll increase the taxes on energy consumption.” “All agreed. Motion passed!”

Meep @ POWIP:

California, living up to its reputation as the land of fruits and nuts, has re-elected two retreads, and neither is going to be able to save California from its self-inflicted issues.

Could California pensions implode? You betcha. They are not in the death spiral that Illinois is. Yet. But there has been bad behavior for the past decades, in terms of goosing the benefits at the pinnacle of the market, right before it collapsed.

Even if California as a state can weather it’s bad decisions with respect to retroactive benefit increases and contribution holidays, the municipalities might not do so well. And while there’s no official way a state can go bankrupt and drop its liabilities (though they can definitely default on bonds), municipalities can definitely go bankrupt. And stop paying all sorts of bills. Here’s a separate projection of when the money runs out.

California has been a joke for years. It was a joke back in 1980 and ’81 when I lived there. But now the state has gone from being a joke to being a parody of its stereotypical self. California will survive. What’s the alternative? But once the bottom falls out and there is no bailout to prop up an utterly unprepared citizenry, what will they do? Will they adjust or worse, go East? I say we act pre-emptively and build a border fence between them and the rest of us.

A Picture Speaks a Thousands Words

From the City Journal:

Those Crazy Kids in California Strike Again

Is California the easiest punchline in the world, or what?  Even in the throes of a financial crisis our brethren in Cali make no effort to curb their craziness.  Don Surber has a great post on the abject silliness on the State of Insanity, (or is it inanity?) known as California.  This pretty much sums it up:

LOS ANGELES (AP) – When the city’s Department of Water and Power spent $50,000 on lactation consultants two years ago to assist breast-feeding employees, the utility said it was a humanitarian move aimed at cutting absenteeism.

Okay. 

As a mother who breast fed both of her children, I freely admit that it does not come as easily or naturally as one might think.  However, it also would not have occurred to me that my employer owed me a lactation  consultant.  In the case of the Water and Power Department in LA, the taxpayers are the one's providing the consultants.  This in a city, within a state, who can't pay its bills now.

But why stop there?  Why not provide "diaper changing consultants"?  Not for the newborns, but for the adult children of California who somehow believe that the Government should take care of all their basic and most personal needs. 

Read the entire post.

California: From the land of fruits and nuts to the land of greed and corruption

From the LA Times:

Like many other state employees, prison nurse Nellie Larot was hit last year with furloughs that cut her salary: It dropped $10,000, to $92,000.

But she more than made up for it by working extra shifts, raking in $177,512 in overtime, according to state records. Her total $270,000 in earnings last year eclipsed the $225,000 paid to Matthew Cate, head of the entire state prison system.
 
Despite Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's decision to furlough workers three days a month to save money, many employees are taking home paychecks fattened by overtime -- more than $1 billion of it last year.

Later in the article Jon Coupal, president of the anti-tax Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. says, "It just shows the extraordinary disconnect between the public sector and the real world. No business would operate this way."
 
No kidding.
 
As a supervisor I am responsible for my employees' schedules.  I have to sign off on any overtime and believe me, there is no overtime.  So who is in charge in California? 
 
California is broke yet the state employees, with their unions' backing, are determined to "get theirs" even if it means that their state falls into the abyss.  If the various supervisors can't figure out how to cover the necessary shifts and get the state's work done without the employees pulling down 6 figures in overtime pay the state needs to find itself some new supervisors.  And if the state workers think that the taxpayers in the rest of the country are going to reach in to their own pockets to bailout a state mired in greed and corruption they can think again. 

Related from Doug Ross:

Pass the popcorn, Nahanni: California organizes circular firing squad to determine who will make up its 50% shortfall in revenues

It's another Blue State miracle! The Gaia-friendly Democrat Utopia has hit a budgetary wall, unable to raise taxes and unwilling to cut spending to come anywhere close to meeting its obligations.

Federal judges have ordered California to thin its immense prison population by 40,000 inmates or 24% out of a total of 168,830. There are currently 22,173 illegal immigrants housed in state prisons at an annual cost of at least $32,500 each; the yearly tab for housing illegals comes to nearly three quarters of a billion dollars.

But California's powerful prison guard union wants a large prison population because it drives higher employment for guards, a profession in which annual wages for union members can easily exceed $100K. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has gone so far as to publicly pillory California's "Three Strikes" sentencing policy, stating, "The three-strikes law sponsor is the correctional officers’ union and that is sick!”

Maybe if California didn't offer amnesty to illegal aliens and deported them instead, the state wouldn't end up with so many of them in prison.  Just a thought.

The definition of insanity: California

What do you do when you are dead broke and can't afford to pay for what you've got?  If you are California you create a new program that will billions of dollars (emphasis added):

A key legislative committee in California revived a bill Thursday to create a government-run health care system in the nation's most populous state, two days after Massachusetts elected a senator who opposes the president's national health care plan.

The Senate Appropriations Committee released the bill for a vote by the full Senate next week. The legislation had been held over from last year because of the state's ongoing budget crisis.

Creating a single-payer system would cost California an estimated $210 billion in its first year. That's roughly double the size of the total state budget, but about what the state and federal government and residents cumulatively spend now on California health care, said Sen. Mark Leno.

Insert forehead slap here. 

If you believe that any government appointed committee has ever gotten any cost estimate right then we are talking about a cost of $5,700 for every man, woman and child legally living in California each year.  How much do you have to raise taxes on families and businesses to cover that?  California is already broke.  They can not pay for their schools, roads and existing programs yet the want to burden the taxpayers with a new program?

Insanity.