Last year the (formerly great) state of California ran out of money because the freakin' idiots running the place up in Sacremento couldn't pass a budget that spent less the taxes received. The state started issuing IOUs instead of checks, and apparently even the Democrats got the message that they actually needed to DO something about this.
But what they did was a liberal political masterpiece: they used all sorts of one-time-only accounting tricks to magically plug the holes in the budget. They did absolutely nothing to address the actual problem (to wit, they're spending more than they're making).
So, completely predictably, we're running out of money again.
It's difficult for me to imagine what sort of tricks they're going to pull out of their butts this year – but I've little doubt that foul-smelling tricks are what we're going to get, and not any kind of the structural reform we so desperately need at the state level.
The Scott Brown phenomenon gives me some hope about politics at the national level. Unfortunately I don't see any sign of such things at the California level...
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