California has been called the Lindsey Lohan of states for good reason. It has lost sight of its potential and now, after living so long on a taxpayer funded binge, its about to crash and burn. The future does not look good, to say the least. When you are surrounded by enablers, and you refuse to take advice from those who could help you and so in effect refuse to help yourself, you can't expect for others to continually rush to your aid. They might want to, but after so long, even the most sympathetic to your cause will either run out of patience, or resources.
Obama himself got taken to the cleaners, but the taxpayers got the bill for 535 million dollars worth of stimulus funds granted to a solar panel manufacturer. They built a new plant but closed their old one and canceled their employees contracts after laying off a large part of their workforce. In other words, this was just another day in sunny California.
In the meantime, the public employees unions, state legislators, and environmentalists who helped all this and more like it to happen keep soaking the state of California to the tune of billions of dollars. The place is in debt for more than twenty billion dollars. Private employers are packing up and leaving in droves, in search of less green pastures in the form of states with friendlier tax and regulatory climates.
Yet, California just doesn't get it. The whole state is screwed up. After all, you can't say much about the politicians when the people keep returning them to office demanding more of the same. It's a basket case. It's so damn bad, if an earthquake sent it into the ocean, that might well be a best case scenario.
Look for California to ask for a bailout in time for the 2012 election, if not this year. In fact, I look for it to become one of the defining issues of the next election.
