Saturday, December 18, 2010

A Golden Mess

Well, it seems as though California Governor Jerry Brown has some surprises planned for the first proposed budget of his third term as governor of California. It also seems that for the numerous people that got him elected, they are not nice surprises. 
Brown has mentioned that, considering the situation, he is going to have to result to what people in Europe have begun euphemistically referring to as “austerity measures” in order to balance the budget. Meaning he is going to have to make cuts to such things as education and transportation. Pay cuts, furloughs and lay offs for state workers and all those other things that people used to whip Arnold over. It seems almost as though all that money the unions spent to elect him seems to have gone to waste.
California has been having problems for a long time. None of this started with Arnold as much as the hardcore liberals would like to believe that to be so. The man in my opinion tried to make things better and attacked the problems of California in a fair and honest matter. The sad thing is however he tried to fight the public employee unions who have kept insisting on keeping their benefits and pensions in that face of a perpetually dire budget situation, probably hoping that his status as a celebrity would see him through. He ended up getting creamed. Plus that fact that he actually was willing to take such things as climate change seriously and make a definitive stance for marriage equality meant that his own party deserted him as well. Long story short Schwarzenegger was too far to the left of his own party and too far to the right of the democrats to be acceptable to either.
The unions want to hold on to their pay, benefits, and pensions, the far right would rather drink raw sewage than raise taxes, and compromise is an almost unspeakable heresy to both sides. This simple statement gets to heart of the matter of why California is such a mess.  Sadly, this malady is spreading to the rest of the country. It seems that the idea of governing for the good of the country is becoming some barely recalled memory and politics has become nothing more than a game to be played and won. I spoke earlier about the seeming outrage over Obama’s the tax cut and how ridiculous it was. Sorry but compromise is an essential component of democracy. The fact that we seem to have so little of that these days makes me worry about my country these days.

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