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Federal district of California? By Michael C. Guilmette Jr. Originally published on June 12, 2009, in the Connersville News-Examiner. California is a beautiful state.
The military, seemingly in its wisdom, chose to establish its most mentally challenging school in one of the most beautiful places in the country — the Pacific coast. While our days were spent learning how to conjugate verbs in an unfamiliar tongue, we would look forward to enjoying our off duty hours taking in the. The state had a lot to offer — the ancient forests of the northern part of the state, whale watching along the rocky beaches, sightseeing in historic San Francisco and even star watching in Los Angeles. It has been almost 20 years since I visited the Golden State, but I’m sure the sights and scenery are just as beautiful as I remember. With as much as the state has going for it, however, it has one particular problem going against it — its government cannot seem to afford all it is trying to do. A state budget shortfall is hardly a problem unique to California, since many states and the federal government are regularly in the same predicament. In California’s case, the lawmakers in Sacramento have tallied up a whopping $24.3 billion deficit — for 2009 alone. This unfortunate circumstance has left Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s administration scrambling for solutions to the problem. First was a batch of ballot measures that would have significantly raised state taxes, but the California voters rejected that plan, much to the dismay of lawmakers and pundits alike. Being denied at the ballot box, the state’s administration turned to proposing draconian cuts to the budget, targeting schools, state parks, police, prisons and the state’s welfare assistance program, CalWORKS. The cuts predictably drew an immediate backlash from the public, but they also left pundits wondering if some of the cuts to allegedly vital programs were being proposed in order to make the public more open to a federal bailout of the state. A May 22 Rasmussen poll found that a quarter of the state’s population — 24 percent — supports a federal bailout. Whether a bailout comes along or not, it could mean a loss of freedom for Californians. We have already seen that federal bailouts of the banks, the automakers and financial giants like AIG have resulted in executive pay caps, bonus caps, majority government ownership and near dictatorial mandates of the kinds of cars that can be built, as in the case of the automakers. It is unlikely the federal government would dissolve the state government and create a federally-administered district like Washington, but there would certainly be strings attached to federal monies. California, a state that revels in not only setting but also bucking the trends of the rest of the country could find itself towing Washington’s line. • Guilmette is managing editor of the News-Examiner. He may be contacted at mguilmette@newsexaminer.com. |
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Copyright © 2009, Michael C. Guilmette Jr. |
I had the opportunity to live there back in the early 1990s, spending a year in Monterey attending language school while I was in the U.S. Air Force. The school was tough; spending a year learning a foreign language that few had any sort of background — in my case, Korean — was very taxing.
