Tessian wrote:Didn't schwartzeneger give free health care, licenses, and homes to illegals or something? And I may be totally wrong on this one, but doesn't CA have the largest prison population too? I always hear about them running out of room.
No, actually, Schwarzenegger is heavily anti-illegal-immigration and actually praised border vigilantes like the Minutemen.
(Which is a really bad idea, but you can't put any of the blame for runaway spending on social services for illegals on him.)
Seriously, Tess, free
homes? You have to realize that whereever you heard that from, it's a smear of the worst order.
I wasn't a fan of Arnie at first, but I'm really coming to believe he's done his best trying to cut the budget in this state. The worst of the partisan Democrats here - and they are really a really bad, viciously partisan, stupidly and blindly idealistic lot, who start lots of social programs and spending without ever looking at whether or not they're working - have smeared Arnold over and over to the point where he's never been able to get anything on his agenda passed.
And that's measured against his record in the end - it is a politician's job to rally his base enough to get his legislation passed, and Arnie never managed to get the moviegoing segment that put "the Governator" in office to actually show up to any of the votes on his propositions. But it still makes me furious with the Democrats, who have been just as pissy and obstructionist as possible on all of this.
Of course, our Republicans, whose biggest hot-button issue is illegal immigration, have done just a stellar job of things too on that one, by threatening ordinary people who disagree with them with pepper spray and lies and proposing mass deportations without actually checking anyone's paperwork and generally being so hostile and nasty and violent over the whole thing that nobody else wants to take part in
actual immigration reform with a ten-foot pole. Seriously, Tess, whatever you think about illegal immigration, these people are beyond the pale. I went up to some conservative protest and disagreed with some sign that said "Day Labor Sites Are Law Violation Incubators" and one of the women there covered my face with her flag and threatened me with pepper spray with a vicious smile on her face when I pulled it off, later claiming on the Internet for about a month that I'd "tried to steal her flag". (I obviously can bring my own goddamned American regalia if I ever - God Forbid - felt like using it as a weapon for lies in that way.) One of the men there, a lawyer and professor as I found out later, came up to me on the street while I was walking away and claimed in a voice very deliberately designed for others to hear that I'd threatened him with a revolver, including the sheriff watching. They have some lovely footage of me looking incredibly harassed going "I don't own a revolver!" up on some anti-immigration site that's designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The attitudes of the Republican politicians aren't really any different, except that instead of being threatening on the street they're passing bills where they deport adults without warning and
literally leave children abandoned with nobody to care for them except any friends of the family or nearby churches who feel like saving a poor child.
Yes, Sine, taxing marijuana would do a lot, though "economy fixed" is a massive exaggeration and you need to know that. Marijuana is about a $35B cash crop countrywide, and I believe California's share of that market is $10B. They're talking about taxing it at about ten percent ($35 an ounce), so that would probably be an addition of a billion dollars a year to the state budget. That's nowhere near the $20B shortfall we've got going on, but it would help.
Truthfully, as a state, we deserve this. The Democrats I've known have voted for idiotic budget-busting shit because it "sounds cool" or whatnot, assuming that we have some Infinite Bag Of Money holding somewhere that pipes gold pieces from another dimension into our social projects. The Republicans have, as everywhere, gotten so violent and nasty that they'd literally be beating and torturing and killing liberals if only the damned laws permitted - the people who lied about me on the street would easily have lied to put me away forever if they could have managed it, just trust me on that, I've kept half an eye on their website ever since.
And even the social services that are going to get cut have their own share of pride and hubris and poor service that prevent things from going well. The teachers' unions repeatedly defend ridiculously poor teaching and block any attempt to institute performance-based pay, and scream bloody murder anytime they don't get their way. The police screw with people all over the place and many of them think they're above the law. Our state hospitals are filled with inept, lazy orderlies and doctors who take kickbacks from the pharmaceutical industry. And the fire department charges such high rates for something like an ambulance ride that anyone making less than fifty grand a year or so will be more or less impoverished with one call to 911. So as bad as I feel about all these cuts, some of these people have repeatedly been so selfish about the system that they've brought it on themselves.
But it's not everyone, and it just infuriates me that the people who tried hard and did a good job and really tried their best to do right by their state are going to be collateral damage along with the selfish, self-centered, and lazy ones who only gave a shit about themselves. I'm just tired of it.
