Government by the credit card generation

Friday, May 29, 2009

The reporter on KCBS asked the woman what she thought of the California budget crisis.

"They spend too much! Just stop spending so much money!" she insisted.

There's little more irritating these days than know-nothing know-it-alls who proclaim that the bureaucrats are to blame for the huge California budget problems. I can't help but wonder how many initiatives this woman has voted for that added to that spending, while voting down any initiatives designed to pay for them.

It's very simple, and yet people don't ever point the finger at themselves, where the blame belongs. California is ruled by voter initiatives. Any moron can get anything on the ballot with enough signatures, and every moron's opinion is shared with enough other morons to assure those signatures. Case in point: Proposition 8.

There's little discretion among elected officials. The people vote themselves a big, expensive initiative that'll cost a huge amount of money — take, for example, Proposition 13 in the 70s, which froze property tax rates for homeowners when it was passed, thereby shifting the tax burden to those of us who bought a house after that... and also requires many tax hikes to pass a voter referendum. So, once people vote for an expensive project, they'll be asked to approve a new tax to pay for it... and of course, no one votes for a tax hike.

This is how you get insane deficits.

"They should just spend less!"

Moron.

---