Indebted and Unrepentant | Hacker News Reader

Indebted and Unrepentant

city-journal.org

6 pointshga11 comments

I can't speak for New York but the irony in California is that Political patisanship, almost universally considered a bad thing, is now our only hope. Because right now the Dems have all the power. The Republicans literally have no say now. So if California falls it will be the biggest repudiation of liberal ideas probably ever.

So without the rest of the countries help our only hope lies in the Democratic legislature being dedicated to their philosophy enough to make it succeed at all cost.

Some people may dislike partisanship, but do you really think most partisanship-haters despise 'majority-rules' voting? I mean, most elected governing bodies operate under majority-rules and it seems to work pretty well. Giving the CA legislature the ability to pass a budget without a supermajority doesn't seem related to partisanship at all: its about a fixing an institutional rules defect.

I think this conservative journal is trying to make a lot of something out of nothing and attacking areas (large coastal cities) that simply have always tended to go more Democrat.

I think this article (probably intentionally) misses the simple point that there's a lot of "get rid of the old" going on everywhere. This has everything to do with the economy (unemployment) and little to do with actual actions by the ousted politicians. Dissatisfaction with life leads to voting out incumbents, and the economy has been particularly terrible for particularly long now.

Federally (House, especially) that's meant a lot of Democrats have been voted out, because the Democrats have been in power.

In California, the combination of an ineffective Republican governor, 2/3rds requirement to pass a budget, and a block of hard-liner Republicans has been crippling California (with an overly polarized legislature), and that's what I think California voters were voting out. Absolute stupidity about implementing some of the emergency budget measures (so they cost instead of saved) really didn't help. In particular, Whitman sounded an awful lot like Schwarzenegger: conservative talking about running things like a business, but with no political experience, leading to making promises they have no idea how to keep. And, of course, voting for lowering the budget passing requirement to simple majority.

(To be fair, prop 25 was very astutely designed to pass, with the simple majority budget on one hand and not paying legislators when the budget is late on the other hand.)

> To be fair, prop 25 was very astutely designed, with the simple majority budget on one hand and not paying legislators when the budget is late on the other hand.

What makes you think that legislators care about their pay? (Note that salaries are a small part of their govt income.)

Note that CA's balanced budget reqt doesn't mean that income equals outgo, that is, what the rest of us think that "balanced" means. CA's balanced budget reqt means that a model, which isn't tweaked when it fails to match reality, has equal income and outgo. It's accounting theater.

I didn't say anything about legislators caring about their pay.

I think the pay thing in prop 25 was a smart way to write a proposition to get it passed, because many people were expressing unhappiness that legislators were getting paid while there was no budget, especially when many of the legislators were doing nothing about it.

In other words: if you'd split that proposition into the two different main things, it's likely neither would have passed.

> if you'd split that proposition into the two different main things, it's likely neither would have passed.

I disagree. Pretty much anything "punishing" CA legislators would have passed.

It's unclear whether replacing the 2/3rds reqt with a majority vote would have passed on its own.

the split between, on one side, California and New York—two states, deeply in debt, whose wealthy are beneficiaries of the global economy—and, on the other, the solvent states of the American interior that will be asked to bail them out.

I am in awe of the ignorance on display here. This sort of analysis ignores the fact that NY/CA pay much more than they get back to the federal government while the "solvent" states of the American interior get much more than they pay from the federal government. It is easy to be solvent when you're living off of welfare. And it is easy to go into debt during a global economic crisis when you're committed to paying large sums of money to support others your economically unproductive brethren.

See http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/04/the_red_... for more information.

Let's assume I accept your premise.

What does that say the state governments of NY and California should do? If the Federal government is subjecting them to an unfair transfer payment burden to the interior states, well, that's just a "cost of doing business in the US". There are, after all, precious few people out there who pay their taxes with a song in their heart and a spring in their step.

I.e. on an imaginary balance sheet for the states' budgets, it's a single line item in the liability section. Given that, it's still the responsibility of the state governments to manage their finances.

For better or worse, these states have to live within their means. Putative exploitation by the rest of the country does not absolve them of that responsibility.

What does that say the state governments of NY and California should do?

Practically speaking, they should do what they're doing now: work to get their budgets in order. What do you think the alternative is?

But it would be more equitable for states like NY and CA to break into several smaller states. After all, the reason underpopulated and economically underperforming states in the middle of the US get so much cash from the federal government is that they get extra representation in the Senate. Breaking CA and NY into a bunch of small states each with its own pair of Senators would allow them to establish a much more equitable distribution of federal resources, which would in turn dramatically improve their long term budgets.

Putative exploitation by the rest of the country does not absolve them of that responsibility.

Given that I supplied data, there is nothing putative about it.

What exactly do you think that NY/CA will do instead of "live within their means"? Do you think they'll just start printing money? Launch a war of aggression against NJ or OR to seize assets? What?

It should be noted that a conspiracy of the upper and lower classes against the middle is an old historical pattern.

But has it ever been tried when there was so little friction hindering the middle from leaving? Especially in the case of small business owners; several that I've been dealing with for many years have moved out of California over those years. If you don't depend on unique resources/ecosystems like Silicon Valley and Hollywood, if, to take one example from my experience, you just manufacture and sell vitamins and other supplements, what's keeping you in California?

  Proposition 25, drafted by one of the state’s premier
  pressure groups, the California Federation of Teachers,
  sought to allow the legislature to pass a budget with
  simple majorities instead of the current two-thirds
  supermajority, which requires a degree of GOP support.
  Naturally, it passed.

Well, that's not quite fair. I voted for it, if only for the belief that one party rule is much better than no party rule.

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