Is It About To Happen To All America?
California is a mess. The state is riddled with debt because of terrible mismanagement. They had illegal immigrants all over the state and instead of curtailing their numbers, they decided to take them in, care for them at taxpayer expense, and provide health care, food stamps, welfare, and educational benefits – for them again at taxpayer’s expense. They even established so-called sanctuary cites to protect these illegals. So loosely governed are they, that San Francisco is no longer resembles an American city with drug use and other aberrant behavior on display daily.
And who pays for all this excess? Well who else but the taxpayer. You take the people who work and earn money and tax them at higher and higher rates to pay for the people who don’t work or who have no money. This is not a trickle down theory, this is a redistribution of wealth program. So how’s it working? California is nearly bankrupt. It’s school a disaster. That’s how it’s working.
The California government is so broke it is now eleven BILLION dollars in debt for 2008. With a declining economy, they will get even less revenue this year and so the debt will grow larger next year. By the end of 2009, it will be 22 BILLION dollars. Who in the world is going to pay for that? And even if someone did, what happens in 2010? If they continue the same fool government, why would you expect different results?
At this writing, February 2009, California has announced it cannot send 2008 tax refunds to those who are supposed to get them. They don’t have any money. So they will have to send IOU’s instead. Oh good. And what happens at the end of 2009 when they owe another eleven billion and can’t pay that? What happens to those two yeas of refund checks? I’ll tell you, they will cancel that obligation. The will pass a law rescinding the refunds. Call it just another tax. And not for just the rich, on no, this time everyone get to chip in. The whole thing makes no sense whatsoever.
Take your own family for example. If you earned say $60,000.00 in 2008 but you spent $120,000.00, by the end of the year you would owe someone $60,000.00, right? As you are wondering how to deal with this problem, if you continuing earning $60,000 and you continue spending $120,000.00, at the end of 2009, you will own not $60,000 but $120,000.00. Bad habits are hard to break.
But let’s say after 2008, you went to a favorite relative and she agreed to lend you the $60,000 you needed to pay forr your credit cards. So you now you owe Aunt Marie the $60,000. You continue to spend money at the same rate throughout 2009 and by the end of 2009, you owe those credit cards another $60,000. So you go back to Aunt Marie.
You already owe Aunt Marie (the California taxpayers) $60,000.00 but now you want to borrow another $60,000 because you have continued to live over your head. Aunt Marie knows this. So she asks herself this question: if they can’t pay their current bills, where will they find extra money to pay me back the $60,000 they owe me from last year let alone another $60,000 for this year? They need to cut back spending or increase income to ever hope to pay me back anything and so far, IU haven’t seen any sign of either. They are simply irresponsible.
So she says “no”. It’s not complicated. Aunt Marie has to turn them down because there is no hope in the world that this couple is ever going to pay her back anything. In fact, it’s only a matter of time until they go “belly up” taking her money with them. Bad habits bring bad luck.
It’s no different with the state. The California government is being run by liberals who have no idea what they are doing. They interfere with businesses, over-tax the producers while giving away far too much to the non-producers and spend money like a proverbial drunken sailor. Where did they the idea this will work? Is this some new economic theory that the rest of us don’t know about? Is this what they mean when they talk about “spending your way out of a recession?” Are liberals really this far out of touch with reality?
Liberalism lives on the backs of hard working, well-educated and successful conservative business people and professionals because they are the only ones with any money and so that’s where the State is going to go to get its money. They worked hard for it. They accumulated it. But that’s no matter. The taxpayers are the government’s Aunt Marie.
Certainly, those illegals don’t have any money. Neither do the unemployed. Even the working class poor doesn’t have much extra. So the only place they can turn is to Aunt Marie. She who worked so hard to become successful and accumulate some wealth is now a victim of government liberalism.
But here’s the problem There just aren’t that many Aunt Marie’s out there, not nearly enough to make up for a shortfall of eleven billion-dollars. One billion is a lot of money. Eleven BILLION is a lot more. Governor Shwartzenegger and his pea-brained liberal government have destroyed California’s budget. Look at what they have done already and tell me how much more can they do to the few people at the top to compensate for all those many people they brought into the state at the very bottom. California is in big trouble. Their educational system has dropped from the very best twenty years ago, to next to the worst today. That’s because they have been careless and foolish beyond worlds. Sadly the rest of this country is following in their path. Lots of luck, America.
Now for some random comments from a Californian who moved away.
1. California passed a 50% tax on "corporate bonuses". That included workers who had bonuses under $10,000.00. I earned $60,000.00 a year yet I lost 50% of my monthly sales commissions and half of my Christmas bonus. That’s not taxing the rich, because I am not rich. That’s taxing me, an ordinary working man.
2. When I lived in California two years ago, I paid an 8% sales tax. (In Los Angeles, the sale tax was 9%).
3. In California, thanks to all kinds of environmental added costs, I paid a .20 per gallon state tax on gasoline, higher prices for all goods and services because of higher taxes on business and transportation, taxes on traditionally non-taxable foods and necessities (like clothing), higher state taxes, higher vehicle registration fees, higher rent due to inflated property values because the higher cost of living, etc. etc.
4. "Tax the rich" is rhetoric, not reality. Sooner or later, if you continue to spend, you have to get the money from wherever you can and that includes everyone. It happened to me in California and now it is coming to America via the liberal government of Barack Obama. Jeremiah Wright said it wasn’t, “God Bless America, but God Damn America.”. I don’t know about then, but I know he is wrong today. Today it’s not so much “God Bless America” or “God Damn America,” as it is “God Help America.”
5. And what’s so wrong about our health care system anyway that we have to replace it with socialized medicine? Only 10% of the American population are currently uninsured and many of them are not even citizens. Yet, they have free access to emergency rooms. Having doctors answering to the federal government (as required in the stimulus bill) effects the level of care in ways we're totally unfamiliar with. The possibility of salary caps on doctors (as other countries with nationalized health have) also takes us into brand new territory. The British are losing their teeth because their system has caps on the number of patients they're allowed to see. They have a backlog of people waiting to see dentists and the dentists are not allowed to see them. You heard the horror stories about patients in Canada, being diagnosed with some form of cancer and then having surgery scheduled 8, 10 or 12 months later... because the doctors are only allowed to see a certain number of patients as determined by a government budget office.
6. Oregon has a form of socialized medicine. Cancer patients are being refused pain medicine, but the state plan will cover the cost of having a doctor end your life. Under Oregon's plan, your treatment is determined by the government based on whatever formula they decide to use when diagnosing your ailments. Not you and not you doctor but your government will decide whether or not you get treatment. (How many of you think anything the government does is better than what is done in the private sector?) There are no guarantees that any one of us will get any specific treatment at any time. It is all determined by the government using cost effectiveness when considering your life prognosis that determines who will get what and when, if ever.
7. America has the best, most accessible health care system in the world (even for illegals!). I had a child when I was uninsured. My wife was diagnosed and treated for MS without insurance. She had a basil cell removed from her forehead without insurance. I collapsed a lung without insurance. Now I pay $500 a month to insure my family. So we pay higher rates to ensure that the uninsured aren't dying in the streets. The bottom line is, they don't, and they haven't been. Others have gotten part time jobs to gain insurance. Our free market seems to work pretty well to me, certainly better than any other health care system on the face of the planet. We won't realize how good we've had it until we’ve lost it. And sadly, we are now on our way. To think the American public asked for this.
Those comments were from him. The rest of this article is from me.
I close with this reminder: running a government is almost the same as running a small business or even a family. No matter what, you cannot afford what you cannot afford. If you continue to spend more than you earn, the result can only be ruin. You can only control what you can control and that is almost always your spending.
If government tells you anything else, they are lying to you.
Finally, there is this: California has 50 BILLION dollars in oil and natural gas deposits right off its coastline. They could pick up five BILLION this year alone by letting out some oil leases. Then they could pay their own bills.
But they'd rather come to us for the money. Well I for one don't want to give them a cent. Do you know of any other country in the world that has oil and gas deposits that aren't drilling for them? No, of course not. Neither do I. It's ridiculous. So a handful of people in the land management office decide for 32 million people that they can't get their tax refunds, that they must face bankruptcy and curtailment of civil services and even lose their jobs because they aren't allowed to use one of their greatest natural resources – offshore oil and gas deposits.
That's environmental demagoguery at its worst.
Joey
