California has been run by the Democrats for a decade now. Gerrymandering has virtually guaranteed election of the legislators. The only contested elections anymore are the primaries and, even here, there is a “gentleman’s agreement” about who will run. California has a huge budget deficit and, before the national financial meltdown, Governor Schwartzenegger (a Democrat with a Republican label) was trying to get a bailout from the feds. Well. it turns out that California is not the only Democrat dominated state to have run off the rails.
New York is looking at a deficit of over 40 billion dollars!
Gov. Paterson grimly declared yesterday that New York faces a historically unprecedented four-year, $47 billion budget deficit, $20 billion higher than projected just three months ago – and will need some form of federal bailout.
It seems that Democrats can’t run a state without running it into the ground. I wonder how they will do with the federal government ? This is not reassuring.
With the state’s finances souring, Gov. David A. Paterson in July took an important step to control the spiraling costs of government: a hiring freeze for state agencies.
But since the July 30 freeze was declared, 31,684 people have been hired by agencies, according to a Buffalo News analysis of payroll records provided by the state comptroller’s office.
The records do not include hiring at hundreds of state authorities whose payrolls are not maintained by the comptroller.
Another Democrat hiring freeze. There was a time when the Democratic Party was a responsible political party with the ability to manage the government. The Second World War was managed by a government controlled by Democrats. There was even a committee, called the Truman Committee, that was a watchdog over waste and incompetence in government. The days when the Democrats could be trusted with government are over. They can still win elections, and appear to be doing so with the Obama campaign, but the governance is another matter.
California once had a Republican governor named George Deukmejian who insisted that the state not spend every penny of income during good economic times. The next Republican governor, Pete Wilson, raised taxes during the California recession in 1991 and managed to prolong the recession in California after the rest of the country recovered. Another lesson that will be forgotten if Obama is elected. Now we have Schwartzenegger, a movie actor whose politics seem to be a mixture of strong talk and weak action. At least he seems to be keeping out of trouble as compared to New York governors. Spitzer resigned in disgrace after a scandal about a hooker. His successor, David Patterson, has his own tax scandal. Patterson, himself, has a sex scandal. No wonder their finances are screwed up.
Casey Stengle used to say, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”
Tags: California, Democrats, New York
Mike, where did all the comments go????
They went off to see the wizard…
Too bad. I usually go back through them several times. Good to reconsider and mull over…
I don’t know. I delete spam comments and maybe they got taken with them.
It looks to me like some comments are gone from other posts. I often delete comments in moderation en masse. I may have to do it individually to see if that avoids deleting others.