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Monday, May 25, 2009

Krugman on California

It's incredible, but I have long suspected that the only way ignorant Californians will grasp the reality of their state's situation and begin to grasp what they must do as citizens to address that reality is for non-Californians to write about our crisis in a way that reaches a national audience that incidentally also includes Californians.

Few Californians, even generally progressive and politically informed Californians, seem to be as interested in the actual details of their own state's current distress (in anything more than single-issue sorts of ways) or their power and their duty as citizens of this state to change it as they are interested in National politics -- even though the circumstances that beset our State have unprecedented National consequences due to the size and indispensability of our economy and the planetary influence of our culture industries. As I said, it is completely incredible, and frankly disastrous for California and for the United States.

Rachel Maddow has mentioned this a bit, and I sincerely hope she'll take up the rightwing manufactured crisis in California as an incessant theme in coming months. Atrios occasionally mentions it as well -- possibly because he lived for a time in Irvine, ground zero for no small amount of libertopian insanity, California style. But this crisis needs to suffuse the progressive Netroots, TPM, dKos, and so on, the new Democratic organizational archipelago, the Center for American Progress, Media Matters, and so on, and our scattered voices in mainstream media, Maddow, Olbermann, and so on. Maybe the always indispensable Calitics will even attract an audience commensurate with its worth (that's probably too much to ask).

Anyway, Krugman's latest NYT column might be the beginning of this urgently necessary wake-up call across the Netroots. My fingers are crossed, my megaphone is being raised to my parched lips. Here's hoping the progressive left is about to make some real noise to break through the crust of Villager conventional wisdom and creepy inertia. Read the whole thing, here's a taste:.
California, it has long been claimed, is where the future happens first. But is that still true? If it is, God help America…. What’s really alarming about California, however, is the political system’s inability to rise to the occasion....

California has immense human and financial resources. It should not be in fiscal crisis; it should not be on the verge of cutting essential public services and denying health coverage to almost a million children....

The seeds of California’s current crisis were planted more than 30 years ago, when voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 13, a ballot measure that placed the state’s budget in a straitjacket. Property tax rates were capped, and homeowners were shielded from increases in their tax assessments even as the value of their homes rose.

The result was a tax system that is both inequitable and unstable…. unstable because limits on property taxation have forced California to rely more heavily than other states on income taxes, which fall steeply during recessions. Even more important, however, Proposition 13 made it extremely hard to raise taxes, even in emergencies: no state tax rate may be increased without a two-thirds majority in both houses of the State Legislature. And this provision has interacted disastrously with state political trends.

For California, where the Republicans began their transformation from the party of Eisenhower to the party of Reagan, is also the place where they began their next transformation, into the party of Rush Limbaugh.... And while the party’s growing extremism condemns it to seemingly permanent minority status… the Republican rump retains enough seats in the Legislature to block any responsible action in the face of the fiscal crisis. Will the same thing happen to the nation as a whole?

Exactly right, vitally important, read and then forward Krugman's clear explanation and warning as widely as you can. Maybe the message will break through our National consciousness and so even a few otherwise informed progressive Californians will accidentally trip over it and realize the actual mess they are in themselves.

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