California Dreamin’

Jerry Brown, the once hip now aged Governor of California, earned the charming and ever so appropriate moniker, Governor Moonbeam, during the eight years in which he first held the office, 1975 to 1983. The “moonbeam” sobriquet was laid on him by the late journalist Mike Royko who said Brown attracted the moonbeam vote from the flighty and the flaky inhabitants of the Left Coast’s largest state. Royko later called California “the world’s largest outdoor mental asylum.”

Almost at the outset of his first term, Governor Moonbeam began running as the Democrat candidate for President in the 1976 campaign. He entered the race about a year after most candidates had begun campaigning. Maybe it took a year to get the mansion furniture arranged to his liking, but His Moonbeam-ness gave this reason for forsaking the office he’d just won for a presidential bid: “The country is rich, but not so rich as we have been led to believe. The choice to do one thing may preclude another. In short, we are entering an era of limits." Oooooo-kay, Jerry. That’s the way it is with choices – make one and it precludes others … it has nothing to do with limits or richness.

Jimmy Carter won the 1976 election and the American people lost. After four years, Carter was safely in possession of the Worst President Since Millard Fillmore award, although he may lose it to the current White House incumbent. The weak Carter sought a second term, which attracted a competitive challenge from Senator Ted Kennedy, renowned for his ability to escape from submerged automobiles, and none other than Governor Moonbeam again whose reason for leaving his second win as Governor for a second run for President was to “protect the earth, serve the people, and explore the universe." Oooooo-kay, Jerry. Sounds a bit like a Star Trek mission to me but whatever gets you going. Carter won re-nomination but thankfully lost the White House to Ronald Reagan.

Brown chose not to run for a third term as governor, and therefore lost his platform to run for other offices. After bouncing around for a couple of years, as moonbeams are wont to do, he decided to run for the senatorial seat being vacated by Republican Senator S.I. Hayakawa. No, this Hayakawa was not the actor who played the Japanese camp commander in The Bridge on the River Kwai. Lacking another mind-expanding rationale for running for this office, San Diego Republican Mayor Pete Wilson handed Moonie’s back porch to him in a landslide victory, winning Hayakawa’s senate seat.

Since there were no offices to run for at the moment, ex-Governor Moonbeam left for Japan to study Zen Buddhism. Later asked why he was studying Zen, Moonbeam said, “Since politics is based on illusions, zazen definitely provides new insights for a politician. I then come back into the world of California and politics, with critical distance from some of my more comfortable assumptions." O-oooookay, Jerry. Wish I’d said that but you beat me to it.

After “gaining sufficient distance from some of his more comfortable assumptions,” Moonbeam was in the political arena once again in 1992, this time seeking to deny George H.W. Bush a second presidential term. His rationale for running this time was to "take back America from the confederacy of corruption, careerism, and campaign consulting in Washington" promising to stop Congress from being a "Stop-and-Shop for the moneyed special interests". Wow, Jerry, you’re just full of these moonbeamisms … and some other stuff too, I think.

Limiting his individual campaign contributions to $100, Moonie was overwhelmed by Bill Clinton who was handing handfuls of the C-notes to poll watchers as “walkin’ around money.”

Several more years of moonbeam bouncing followed because all of the state-level positions were occupied by long-termers and His Moonbeamship was allergic to real work in the private sector. He thus decided to advance his political career at a municipal level, and when the opportunity to run for Mayor of Oakland opened, Moonbeam ran as an Independent, leaving the Democrat party after blasting what he called the “deeply corrupted” two-party system – not quite the zinger rationale he had used to justify running in past elections. But he won the race and true to his idiosyncratic moonbeamness, he bought an industrial warehouse in a rundown area of Oakland and refurbished it as his home where he slept on a futon with his companion, a Labrador named Dharma. Mayor Moonbeam held the position for two terms before the “deeply corrupted” two-party system no longer bothered him, whereupon he rejoined the Democrat party to run for California Attorney General, the usual launching pad in most states for a gubernatorial run.

It was no surprise, then, that Brown squared off against Meg Whitman in perhaps the most important California governor’s race in modern times, if not the most important gubernatorial race in the country. California’s economy makes the economy of Greece look well-managed, and whoever won would have to straighten out the mess past administrations had made of the state’s affairs. Those troubles really began during the first Brown administration when, as one of the inmates of the world’s largest outdoor mental asylum, Moonbeam had given public employee unions collective bargaining “rights.” For those living in Palm Beach County Florida, that means regardless of who is elected to represent the people’s interests, the unelected unions have the final say if it affects their interests.

Meg Whitman, an incorruptible billionaire and a woman of great talent in business and management, who took a venture concept called eBay and grew it into a multi-billion dollar enterprise, was the ideal person to take over from an Austrian former Mr. Universe with a penchant for creating little extra-marital earthlings despite his 25-year marriage to a member of the Kennedy clan.

However, in further proof of H.L. Menken’s observation that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public, the voters of California turned again to the clueless74-year old former Governor whose first terms had made a fiscal train wreck of the state’s economy, later helped by the ineptitude of Ahhh-nold, the RINO. Whitman went on to become President/CEO of Hewlett Packard, much to its shareholder’s good fortune, where she immediately began turning the company around, shutting down losing operations and shedding 27,000 jobs.

In January 2012 Governor Moonbeam announced that the state would suffer a $9 billion budget deficit this year. Unfortunately, this past Monday he had to tell Californians that his budget assumptions were slightly off. In a mere four months since the original announcement, the deficit had ballooned to $15.7 billion because overtaxed Californians produced 20% less tax revenue than expected. In fact, the original deficit estimate was based on budget assumptions as ephemeral as California dreamin’ and critics had said as much. Governor Moonbeam’s rationale for missing the numbers? “The capitalist system is not coincident with your expectations of exactitude.” By golly, I believe he’s got his groove back!

Speaking of a lawyer whose name is lost in history, Abraham Lincoln once said, “"He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met." I believe Brown, also a lawyer, must be a descendant of that man.

The road to fiscal hell is paved with liberal ideas of government. Governor Moonbeam’s plan calls for spending cuts and tax increases. Spending cuts? What spending can he cut that doesn’t impact public employees? He’s only the Governor, after all. The public employee unions will have the final say about spending cuts.

Moonbeam is calling for an increase in the sales tax from 7.25% – high already when you think about how much it adds to big ticket items – to 7.5%. But more importantly, he’s calling for a millionaire’s tax. Ahhh … there’s that favorite of all liberal politicians. Those making over a million would see their state income taxes rise from 10.3% to 13.3% making it the highest in the nation. But – here’s the fun part – the millionaire’s tax increase starts at $250,000. Huh? How can someone making $250,000 be a millionaire? Uncle Moonbeam has the answer: "Anybody who makes $250,000 becomes a millionaire very quickly, if you save" Geez! Why didn’t I think of that? We’re all millionaires if we just start saving instead of spending. If that’s the answer, why don’t politicians practice it – start saving instead of spending? It’s so obvious! We could solve our deficit and pay off the national debt “very quickly.” Jerry says so.

California is an equal-opportunity plunderer. Not only does it overtax the rich, but also people who make between $37,005 and $46,766 pay a whopping 8% state income tax. Only six states and the District of Columbia have a higher rate in that income range. From $46,766 up to $1,000,000 of income, the California state tax rate is 9.3%, and only two states, Hawaii and Oregon, have higher tax rates.

If Moonie can’t intimidate the voters to approve his taxpayer hostage-taking, he is going to pull the pin on a $5.5 billion grenade that will cut public schools and higher education spending. Make the voters feel a lot of pain, that’s his plan. A third-rate education system will certainly attract new residents to the Golden state.

Like Greece, California has a spending problem, not a revenue problem. One-eighth of the nation lives in California but so do one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients. How can that be? Because, according to Business Week, "[California] is one of the few states that continue to provide welfare checks for children once their parents are no longer eligible."

Teachers in the state are the highest paid in the nation, making an average salary of $68,000. Their retirement plans allow them to hang it up after 30 years and draw 75% of their salary for life, sticking taxpayers with a $65 billion unfunded liability in the teacher’s retirement system.

California’s cap and trade law has raised energy prices in California making them 50% higher than the national average. That and real estate prices make California living the most expensive of the lower 48 states. Unemployment in California is 11% – virtually tied with Rhode Island for second place. Only Nevada, which reelected Harry Reid, that paragon of fiscal restraint, is higher at 12%. While only New York has a higher cost of doing business, in the annual survey for the Best and Worst States for Business, CEOs ranked California dead last.

Austerity must mean something different in California than is does anywhere else, because for all of his talk about it, Governor Moonbeam is as committed as ever to build a “bullet train to nowhere” – a high speed line from San Francisco to Los Angeles – which has been his dream since he earned the Moonbeam handle. Its cost to taxpayers is estimated at $68 billion, but those not drinking Kool-Aid say it will exceed $100 billion. The 300-mile distance can be covered by plane in an hour and by car is seven hours, but the Moontrain will cover it two and a half hours and cost $123 one way. A recent poll showed 70% would never or rarely use it and 60% of the taxpayers are opposed to a California version of Amtrak. But it most surely will pass in the Democrat-controlled legislature, which must vote August 1 to authorize $6 billion to build the first 130-mile section of track from nowhere to nowhere in the middle of California's Central Valley near Merced, a town of 80,000 people known for having one of the highest home foreclosure rates in America. That section won’t be complete until 2028 and the project won’t be complete until 2033 – if ever.

Taxpayers are revolting by leaving California where one-tenth of the taxpayers pay most of the taxes – similar to the progressivity of the federal tax system. It’s hard to escape federal taxes, but state residents vote against state taxes by leaving or establishing residencies in other states. Moreover, as the loony tunes in Washington have discovered, increasing tax rates and increasing tax receipts aren’t the same thing. Most highly paid people can choose when they want to be paid, how much they want to be paid, and where they want to be paid, which makes tax receipts highly volatile in states where taxes are too high.

When I was a small child, my grandmother told me an apocryphal morality tale about the town drunk in a country village who’d passed out and was lying in a muddy gutter next to a pig. “You can always tell a person by the company he keeps,” one priggish grand dame sniffed to another as they passed the pair, whereupon the pig got up and left.

The pigs are leaving the tax drunks in California. A recent Wall Street editorial piece described the California exodus: "Nearly four million more people have left the Golden State in the last two decades than have come from other states. This is a sharp reversal from the 1980s, when 100,000 more Americans were settling in California each year than were leaving…. [M]ost of those leaving are between the ages of 5 and 14 or 34 to 45" – the current workforce in the latter group and the future workforce in the former. Immigrants and births have accounted for virtually all of California's population growth over the last two decades.

This was a good week for common sense. The recall election of Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker belly-flopped, vaporizing $36 million from union coffers, and in San Diego and San Jose, over two-thirds of the votes cast were in favor of cutting retirement benefits for city workers – something Governor Moonbeam is either unwilling or incapable of doing at the state level. With all of its earmarks and creative accounting, he blames his fiscal impotence on a state budget that is a "pretzel palace of incredible complexity."

O-oooookay. I think I’ll end on that note.