Tuesday, December 2, 2008

California: Still Not Solvent, Still No Budget. EVERYBODY PANIC!

It's officially an emergency, according to Gov. Schwarzenegger. It must be due to a balanced budget requirement in their constitution or they would just start selling bonds or something. At least we got a little dose of honest goodness from the governator:

"We are right now spending money we don't have," Schwarzenegger said. "The federal government shouldn't give us a penny until we straighten out our mess and we can live within our means."


I don't think he was speaking for every citizen, corporation, and governmental agency in the entire nation, but I wish he were. The California legislators are looking at a special legislative session that has a hard deadline for coming up with a budget, and nothing else is on the table but the budget.

Hold on there.

They just did this set of negotiations, with basically the same set of jokers in the state house. They came up with a complete impasse the last time. What will happen when California goes into the next year without a budget? The same things that happened when the Federal government went without a budget (basically transparent to most citizens), or worse?

One could wish a balanced budget requirement were written into the US constitution, but the current situation is something you would have been laughed at for describing 200 years ago. I'm pretty sure the founding fathers' head asplode if somebody told them it would come to handing out trillions of "pennies from heaven" in an attempt to fix something by doing the thing that made the problem.

What a mess. Vote for me!

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