The State of California – Following The Dodo Bird
The state of California is edging closer to financial ruin by the second and it is now projected that the state’s budget gap will reach $41.8 billion through the 2009 – 2010 fiscal years. The current rate of the golden state’s financial hemorrhaging has been established at $470 per second, $28,000 per hour or $40 million dollars per day depending on how you want to express it, or how long you can keep your eyes locked on the unfolding drama. At the currently established rate of spending, the state of California will completely bleed out before the end of February.
According to the state legislators sitting on the Democratic side of the aisle the entire problem is the result of the inflexible position that has been adopted by the state’s Republican legislators, primarily, their stubborn refusal to raise taxes on the already over-burdened population. Furthermore, the Republican’s proposal to reduce the state budget, a proposal that itemized more than $15.6 billion in spending cuts while diverting $6.5 billion in existing tax revenue, was attacked and killed by the Democratic representatives before it even got onto the launch pad. On the other hand, the Republican legislators are making the case that the state’s financial meltdown is the result of the Democrat’s insatiable love for spending huge sums of tax payer money on pointless and often redundant social programs that are heavily laden with fraud and lack even the most minimal degree of accountability.
As the formerly “most prosperous state in the union” spins it’s way down the financial drain toward ruin, it’s crumbling infrastructure begins to collapse, it’s services are gradually curtailed and our police officers and fire fighters begin making their way toward the “Closed” sign at the end of the quickly growing unemployment line, the legal citizens of this state might want to begin reassessing the political philosophy that motivates them to habitually elect the same sorry collection of liberal hacks year after bleeding year. In fact, the pain of our current disease might even prompt California’s overwhelming population of liberal citizens to reconsider the value of leaving their heads buried in the sand while the corrupt politicians we have put into office slide their needle into our wallets for a few more gallons of our rapidly dwindling blood supply.
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is spending $46,000 per year per inmate and yet they provide no treatment, no rehabilitation and no vocational training to the 150,000 inmates incarcerated in a system designed to hold 100,000 inmates, and not only is there no accountability for the $10 billion dollars this agency spends every year, they somehow manage to escape every attempt to make them account for their spending. The recidivism rate in California is over 70% which puts the state squarely among the highest in the nation, and according to the U.S. Justice Department, 66.3% of the admissions to California’s prison system are for parole violations which is twice the national average. One of the main reasons why the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation can get away with their outrageous spending practices is the politically powerful prison guards union. It was the California prison guards union that shelled out $3.5 million dollars for the misleading ad campaign that resulted in the defeat of Proposition 5 on last November’s ballot. Proposition 5 would have reduced the population of the California state prison system by as much as 40,000 inmates by paroling many of the state’s nonviolent offenders and saving the state nearly $2.5 billion dollars per year. The prison guards union realize that a reduction in the state’s prison population would mean a reduction in the number of prison guards required, and more importantly (to them) a reduction in the amount of union dues and pension money collected by the union leaders. Inasmuch as approximately 80 to 85% of the dues money collected by the leaders of the prison guards union is directly funneled into the campaign coffers and back pockets of the state’s Democratic legislators it is easy to understand why the liberal politicians are so quick to please the unionized employees of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
California is spending more than $1 billion a year for the care and feeding of illegal alien criminals incarcerated in the state prison system and more than 65% of the state’s estimated 500,000 members of the violent street gangs infesting our neighborhoods are illegal aliens. The amount of tax payer money spent processing, housing and basically having to deal with the huge population of illegal alien prison inmates is staggering but it is nothing in comparison to the cost of investigating the multitude of crimes they routinely commit, or the expense of having the police hunt them down, apprehend them and keep them locked up while they go to trial at an even greater expense of the state’s tax paying citizens.
On January 9th, 2008, I posted an article about information disclosed by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services to the effect that illegal aliens in Los Angeles County collected more than $37 million dollars in welfare and food stamp allocations during the month of November, that this represented an increase of $3 million dollars in a period of two months, and that Los Angeles County projected the annual cost of supplying their illegal aliens with welfare assistance and food stamp allocations at $444 million dollars annually. At the time, County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich called the figures “an alarming increase in the devastating impact illegal immigration continues to have on Los Angeles County taxpayers.”
On May 7th, 2008, I posted yet another revelation when the Los Angeles Department of Public Social Services publically indicated that more than 25% of Los Angeles County’s welfare and food stamp benefits are going directly to the children of illegal aliens, and it is costing the L.A. County taxpayers $36 million a month.
My December 5th, 2008 posting revealed that a report by Jack O’Connell, the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, indicated that more than half of California’s approximate 6 million public school children are enrolled in the state and federally subsidized meal program that provides the children of poor families with free or reduced cost meals.
Los Angeles alone is spending $79 million in tax payer dollars every year to provide health care to illegal aliens and another $400 million in tax payer dollars to provide illegal aliens with welfare assistance and food stamps, however, the state’s liberal legislators can’t fathom the connection between having nearly 30 major California cities openly advertise their illegal alien sanctuary policies, the state’s estimated illegal alien population of anywhere between 6 and 8 million extremely low to no income residents, and even the most marginal affect these illegal aliens might be having on the state’s financial situation. Not only can they not see any connection, they refuse to even consider it because it would be patently racist and xenophobic thing to do so.
It is estimated that 15 to 20 percent of the K-12 students in public schools are known to be illegal aliens and there are another 18,000 illegal aliens attending the overcrowded state universities that the children of California’s legal citizens can’t get into because they don’t qualify for the same level of state subsidized financial assistance provided solely to illegal aliens. While the majority of California’s state budget goes to education, the amount that is actually spent educating the children of this state’s legal citizens is questionable. By the time we have paid out all of the bonuses to teachers who can conduct their lessons in Spanish and laid out enough to cover the six figure salaries of the school administrators, there is barely enough left over to pay for the textbooks in a half dozen different languages to say nothing of the “Spanish Immersion” pilot programs aimed at forcing the children of the state’s legal citizens to learn how to speak Spanish.
All things considered, the amount of tax money pouring every year into state and local programs directed toward the extremely low or no income individuals that have entered this nation without the proper legal authorization (aka illegal aliens) is mind boggling, and not only that, it is increasing without control, without accountability, without oversight, and with no accurate public disclosure. Furthermore, while a variety of high placed state officials are willing to admit that the figure is in the billions of dollars annually, they are unwilling to say how many billions and they are even less willing to admit that this out of control spending has had any impact whatsoever on the state’s growing budget deficit.
Admittedly, illegal aliens are not the sole cause of California’s budget deficit. The state of California is second to none when it comes to redundant social programs, fraud, mismanagement and outright theft, and the golden state’s political representatives are every bit as greedy and corrupt as their third-world counterparts. Politically powerful labor unions have played a major part in bleeding the state dry and there is no compelling reason to believe that any of them will voluntarily stop at any point in the near future. Ironically, in the state’s effort to staunch the currently uncontrolled flow of tax money out of the state’s treasury, none of these three factors are being given much consideration, and the main focus appears to be on how to implement new taxes and higher fees on the state’s working residents and businesses. In simple terms, while the tax money squirts wildly out through a multitude of cracks and holes at the bottom of this bucket, the state legislators in California are looking for ways to pump more in at the top.
California does not need or deserve federal assistance. It is in its currently deplorable financial situation because of its own dysfunctional mismanagement, stupidity and greed and it should be left to suffer the consequences of its own irresponsible actions least it drags down the rest of the nation even further. The state of California should be allowed to bleed out and die, it has worked long and hard to get to achieve this end and nobody should deny it the death it deserves. The carcass could be sold to the highest bidder, the Japanese, China, Mexico, some unknown Arab sheik looking for a new hobby, it really doesn’t matter.
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