This deal held until about thirty years ago, when for a variety of reasons, California voters realized that while they had done very well from the existing contract, they could do even better by walking away from their obligations and spending what they had inherited on themselves. “My kids are finished with school; why should I pay taxes for someone else’s? Posterity never did anything for me!” An army of fake ‘leaders’ sprang up to pull the moral and fiscal wool over their eyes, and again and again, your parents and their parents lashed out at government (as though there were something else that could replace it) with tax limits, term limits, safe districts, throw-away-the-key imprisonment no matter the cost, smoke-and-mirrors budgeting, and a rule never to use the words taxes and services in the same paragraph.
Now, your infrastructure is falling to pieces under your feet, and as citizens you are responsible for crudities like closing parks, and inhumanities like closing battered women’s shelters. It’s outrageous, inexcusable....Of course we can afford a government that actually works: the fact is that your parents have simply chosen not to have it.
PLEASE go read the whole thing.
Again, since there is no such thing as a horse too dead to beat, I must return to my theme of For. The. Children. If we really took their well-being to heart, rather than merely paying lip service to that concept when it's convenient to do so, this situation would never have occurred.
See my For. The. Children posts here, here, here, here, and here. Do you catch my drift?
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