...a certain threshold, that is...
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The day of reckoning that California has been warned about for years has arrived. The longest recession in generations and the defeat this week of a package of budget-balancing ballot measures are expected to lead to state spending cuts so deep and so painful that they could rewrite the social contract between California and its citizens. They could also force a fundamental rethinking of the proper role of government in the Golden State.
"The voters are getting what they asked for, but I'm not sure at the end of the day they're going to like what they asked for," said Jim Earp, executive director of the California Alliance for Jobs, which represents the hard-hit construction industry. "I think we've crossed a threshold in many ways."
Sooner or later, though, it was going to happen. And I really don't see what's so wrong with the voters not wanting the California state government to "balance budgets with higher taxes, complicated transfer schemes or borrowing that pushes California's financial problems off into the distant future." And I think it's worth asking how many of those prisoners they speak of releasing were nonviolent drug offenders. Seriously, after how the Willie Horton fiasco bit Michael Dukakis in the ass when he was running for president just over 20 years ago, are people really so gullible as to think somebody as dangerous would be let out again? And it's also worth asking how all that government spending got to be justified in the first place...and why it costs almost four times as much to rent a U-Haul truck to move your stuff from L.A. to Houston as it does to move your stuff from Houston to L.A....and why the California media had to be such assholes to the California voters the morning after the vote.
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