Get Ready To Follow California Into The Ocean!
Matt Welch writes in reason about what's to come for the rest of you, thanks to our union-luvvin' president and Congress:

California is the Ghost of Federal Government Future.

During the last two decades, the Golden State has been transformed from what was once known as the nation's most anti-labor outpost to a state essentially run by public-sector unions. Nearly three in five public sector workers are unionized, compared to less than two in five public employees in other states. The Democratic Party, which is fully in hock to unions, has controlled the legislature and most statewide posts, with the notable exception of the governor's mansion, for more than a decade. That means more government workers, higher salaries, and drastically higher pension costs.

According to Adam Summers--a policy analyst at the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this magazine--the state's annual pension fund contribution vaulted from $321 million in 2000-01 to $7.3 billion last year. According to public databases, more than 5,000 people are drawing pensions in excess of $100,000 from the state of California each year.

So pervasive is the union influence that big labor doesn't even try to defend its deleterious effects on California's finances. Just before the special election, a member of the Los Angeles Times editorial board asked Service Employees International Union chief Andy Stern to respond to charges that unions are the 21st-century equivalent of the railroads that were once all-powerful in California. Stern verbally shrugged: "I think democracy is an ugly thing at times."

That ugliness has made the California budget, like those in most of the other 49 states, less efficient and more bloated. Government spending, unlike spending in the private economy, is a zero-sum game--especially on the state level, since governors can't print money. Every dollar spent gilding a pension is a dollar not spent funding an orphanage. Naturally, the same elite outlets that were busy blaming voters after the election spent even more time detailing the horrors of the "annihilating cuts," as the Los Angeles Times called them in a news article, that were coming down the pike. (In early June, the paper invited readers to be shocked that a high school with 3,200 students would have to make do with just three guidance counselors.) Bloated pension costs and the increasingly inefficient provision of state services received a fraction of the coverage.

The federal government is now run by a president and Congress more responsive to union concerns than any in at least two decades. The same bloat currently bogging down statehouses and city halls is being duplicated in boomtown Washington, D.C. President Barack Obama even brought Andy Stern in to help warn Schwarzenegger that federal stimulus money would not be disbursed to California unless the governor rescinded some proposed state job cuts. Though that threat was later withdrawn, Schwarzenegger at press time was pushing for a measly work force reduction of 2 percent.

Matt does find a little hope in how so many of us voted against all the ballot measures this last time around.

Faced with a political class that ignored bureaucratic inefficiency, that demanded higher taxes, that filled the newspapers with scare stories about people who will literally die as a result of budget cuts, the citizens of one of the bluest states in the nation collectively said we just don't believe you anymore. If even California's famous fruits and nuts can call the statists' bluff, there may be hope for the rest of the country.

On a somewhat related note, I'd like to point out that G.M. has gone bankrupt and the country has not disintegrated into a small pile of ash.