California in the Balance.We calibrate CaliforniaÂ’s decline by its myriad of paradoxes. The nationÂ’s highest bundle of gas, sales, and income taxes cannot close the nationÂ’s largest annual deficit at $25 billion. Test scores are at the countryÂ’s near bottom; teachersÂ’ salaries at the very top. Scores of the affluent are leaving each week; scores of the indigent are arriving. The nationÂ’s most richly endowed state is also the most regulated; the most liberal of our residents are also the most ready to practice apartheid in their Bel Air or Palo Alto enclaves.
We now see highway patrolmen and city police, in the manner of South American law enforcement, out in force. Everywhere they are monitoring, watching, ticketing — no warnings, no margins of error — desperate to earn traffic fines that might feed the state that feeds them. I could go on. But you get the picture that we are living on the fumes of a rich state that our forefathers brilliantly exploited, and now there is not much energy left in the fading exhaust to keep us going.