As California collapses, Obama follows

[_Brackite]

Brown: California budget deficit rises to $16 billion:
http://www.sacbee.com/2012/05/13/448611 ... ficit.html

California Workers Get Pay Bump Even as Brown Seeks Cuts:
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-0 ... seeks-cuts



The Following information is from Wikipedia:

On January 28, 2010, the White House announced that California would receive $2.35 billion of its request, of which $2.25 billion was allocated specifically for California High Speed Rail, while the rest was designated for conventional rail improvements.[29]

On October 28, 2010, the federal government awarded the CHSRA a further $900 million for passenger rail improvements, including $715 million specifically for the high speed rail project, but with the requirement that it be used for the Central Valley segments from Merced to Fresno, or Fresno-to-Bakersfield.[30] While the CHSRA recognizes the federal government's desire for the initial segment to be built in the Central Valley, the CHSRA states that it will evaluate the starting segment according to its own criteria. This announcement brings the federal government's funding commitment to high-speed rail projects in California to $4.3 billion.

On December 10, 2010, the Department of Transportation reallocated $1.2 billion in federal high speed rail funding from states that had rejected the stimulus funds, including Wisconsin and Ohio. Nearly half of this funding, $624 million, was redirected to the CHSRA for use on the initial Central Valley leg of the project.[31]

On May 9, 2011, the DOT reallocated $2 billion in federal high speed rail funding from Florida, which had rejected the funding. The DOT awarded $300 million to the CHSRA for a 20-mile extension along the Central Valley Corridor. The work funded in this round will extend the track and civil work from Fresno to the Chowchilla Wye, which will provide a connection to San Jose to the West and Merced to the North.[32] The California High Speed Rail Authority issued a draft Business Plan on November 1, 2011, for public review and comment.[33] The Business Plan will shape the financial and operational implementation of the HSR project, and must be adopted and submitted to the Legislature by January 1, 2012 and every two years thereafter.[34]

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail

U.S. Department of Transportation Redirects $1.195 Billion in High-Speed Rail Funds:
http://www.dot.gov/affairs/2010/dot20810.html

U.S. Transportation Secretary LaHood Announces $2 Billion for High-Speed Intercity Rail Projects to Grow Jobs, Boost U.S. Manufacturing and Transform Travel in America:
http://www.dot.gov/affairs/2011/dot5711.html

California high-speed rail to nowhere?:
http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/30/c ... o-nowhere/


All that stimulus money from the Obama Administration to help pay for the California high-speed rail is seemingly now not going that well to help build that project. The Unemployment rate for California is still above 10.5%. The State of California now has a budget deficit of about 16 billion dollars. California could maybe well end up indeed financially collapsing.

[_Kevin Graham]

Brackite still doesn't understand that you can't take a raw unemployment number and simply attribute that to the government in charge. The cause and effect relationship isn't that simple. It's not even approximately valid.

It's also profoundly unconservative to think a state governor's influence over the economy is so extensive that current employment rate is a direct consequence of him or her. Most of what happens in the economy does so for cyclical reasons that are simply out of the hands of the government's ability to appreciably impact without massive, structural intervention. Odd that none of this board's supposed conservatives ever feel the need to point this out when Brackite is trying to bash Democrats with it.

Yep, he still doesn't get it. Or, I think is most likely the case, he simply doesn't want to.

[_Buffalo]

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls ... -1171.html

[_Brackite]

...

Obama regularly asserts that green jobs will play a crucial role in the future of the American economy, but California, a trend-setter in the field, has yet to reap such benefits. Green jobs, broadly defined, make up only about 2 percent of jobs in the state—about the same proportion as in Texas. In Silicon Valley, the number of green jobs actually declined between 2003 and 2010. Meanwhile, California’s unemployment rate of 10.9 percent is the nation’s third highest, behind only Nevada and Rhode Island.

When Governor Jerry Brown predicted a half-million green jobs by the end of the decade, even The New York Times deemed it “a pipe dream.”

...

It is Time to Bump up this Thread again.

The Following Article is From The San Diego Union-Tribune:

Heed air board, throw away the green Kool-Aid

In 2008, Barack Obama vowed that once he was president a wave of well-paying “green” jobs would lift the woeful U.S. economy. In 2010, Jerry Brown vowed that once he was governor, a wave of well-paying “green” jobs would lift the rotten California economy. But as has been documented in the news pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post, the green-jobs tidal wave proved to be a huge myth.

Now it’s time to retire another green myth: the notion frequently voiced by California Democrats that not only is there little or no downside to complex environmental regulations, sometimes they even help the economy. This claim has been made most prominently about AB 32, the ballyhooed 2006 state law forcing utilities to use cleaner but much costlier forms of energy to reduce the emissions that are believed to cause global warming.

Once again, we won’t cite ideologues to show this to be a myth. We’ll cite what those who work for Brown and Obama have to say, starting with the California Air Resources Board. Last week, board officials held a workshop in Sacramento about their plan to implement AB 32, specifically a cap-and-trade program in which industries buy and sell pollution credits to try to create market pressure to reduce pollution. Air board officials are considering giving away millions of dollars in pollution credits in the hope it would stop companies in key industries from fleeing California over its energy costs. They’re doing so even though giving away pollution credits undercuts the central goal of AB 32, and even though the state government is counting on proceeds from the auction of credits to help balance the budget.

Oil refining, cement production and food processing – all areas in which energy costs are paramount – were offered as examples of industries that would head for cheaper states.

So much for the depiction of AB 32 as benign.

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu saw this coming years ago. In 2009, Chu said it was crucial for major world economies to work in sync in shifting to cleaner-but-costlier energy. If the U.S. went it alone, Chu warned, it would face serious competitive disadvantages. How serious? So serious that he said the U.S. should consider imposing trade sanctions on nations that didn’t use costlier energy “in order to protect the American industries.”

This is the devastating disadvantage that California will soon face with its key economic rivals – both other states and other nations. The air board knows it exists. The U.S. energy secretary chosen by a Democratic president knows it exists.

When will Jerry Brown and the Democrats who control Sacramento admit it exists? When unemployment hits 15 percent? Twenty percent?

If state leaders think it’s OK to martyrize our economy so Golden State environmentalists can feel good about setting an energy example for the world, they should say so. But they must stop pretending there is no downside to their go-it-alone approach. When the air board is holding hearings on ways to stem a jobs exodus from California because of high energy costs, it’s time to stop serving the green Kool-Aid.

Link: http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/aug ... -kool-aid/

[_bcspace]

California school district spends $1 billion to borrow $100 million.

[_MeDotOrg]

As a California resident for most of my life, I have witnessed the long slow decline of my state.

Back in the bad old Stalinist days of Earl Warren (a RINO, the John Birch Society called for his impeachment from the Supreme Court) and Pat Brown, California had the finest University system in the country. If you went to Junior College, you could be a full-time student (18 Units) for $7.95 cents a semester. Education was seen as an investment. Today Junior College is over $45 per UNIT, and still the Junior College system, as well as the rest of the University System, is crumbling for lack of funding.

One of the things that has really hurt California is the initiative process. Californians can bypass their elected legislators and directly enact legislation by collecting enough signatures to put initiatives on the state ballot. It was a noble idea: conceived so that the citizens would have a way of enacting legislation in their own interests, bypassing special interests that were preventing the legislature from acting on them.

Unfortunately it has enabled the people to pass many ill-considered pieces of legislation. If you want to track the slow arc of California's fall, a great place to start is with Proposition 13. Conceived by Howard Jarvis, the spiritual Godfather of Grover Norquist, Prop 13 not only slashed the property tax rates in California, it required of 2/3rds majority of the legislature to pass any new taxes (Not unlike the defacto 60 vote requirement to pass bills in the Senate without threat of filibuster.)

Prop 13 is certainly not the only reason for California's decline. It's merely the biggest.