Pasadena Chamber of Commerce

Ouch. Joel Kotkin in Newsweek trashes the governor, legislature, and I suppose all of us Californians, since we elected them.

Sadly, Kotkin’s right.

For decades, California has epitomized America’s economic strengths: technological excellence, artistic creativity, agricultural fecundity and an intrepid entrepreneurial spirit. Yet lately California has projected a grimmer vision of a politically divided, economically stagnant state. Last week its legislature cut a deal to close its $42 billion budget deficit, but its larger problems remain.

California has returned from the dead before, most recently in the mid-1990s. But the odds that the Golden State can reinvent itself again seem long. The buffoonish current governor and a legislature divided between hysterical greens, public-employee lackeys and Neanderthal Republicans have turned the state into a fiscal laughingstock. Meanwhile, more of its middle class migrates out while a large and undereducated underclass (much of it Latino) faces dim prospects. It sometimes seems the people running the state have little feel for the very things that constitute its essence—and could allow California to reinvent itself, and the American future, once again.

Ouch!

It almost seems like a satire, except it’s all true. (Though I’m not completely sure about the ‘hysterical greens’ which may really be a case of herd-following legislators incapable of carefully analyzing the impacts of legislation before voting on it. Oh! We’re California! I forget, that’s the normal operation of our state government.)

Paul